Heavens

At 8:45 p.m. EDT on March 17, the MESSENGER spacecraft will execute a 15-minute maneuver that will place it into orbit around Mercury, making it the first craft ever to do so, and initiating a one-year science campaign to understand the innermost planet.

Mercury is an extreme among the rocky planets in our solar system: It is the smallest, the densest (after correcting for self-compression) and the one with the oldest surface and largest daily variations in surface temperature and the least explored.

The wispy arms of the Tarantula Nebula were originally thought to resemble spindly spider legs, giving the nebula its unusual name. The part of the nebula visible in this image from Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys is criss-crossed with tendrils of dust and gas churned up by recent supernovae. These supernova remnants include NGC 2060, visible above and to the left of the centre of this image, which contains the brightest known pulsar.

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have ruled out an alternate theory on the nature of dark energy after recalculating the expansion rate of the universe to unprecedented accuracy.

The massive rain storm that stretched from New York to Florida last week dropped some record rainfall and NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite measured that rainfall from space. Those rainfall totals were assembled in a "rain map" created at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

A new study has shown that a surgical technique called microdissection testicular sperm extraction (TESE) can effectively locate and extract viable sperm in more than one-third of adult male childhood cancer survivors who were previously considered sterile due to prior chemotherapy treatment. As a result, many of the men were subsequently able to father children with the help of in vitro fertilization. The findings offer a new option for many cancer survivors who want to have children but were thought infertile because of earlier cancer treatment.

Tiny magnets organize themselves in vortices in the researchers' mini disks. The individual magnets can twist either in a clockwise or a counterclockwise direction in the disk. These two different states can be used in data processing just like switching the electricity "on" and "off" in conventional computers. In contrast to conventional memory storage systems, these magnetic vortices can be switched by the electrons' intrinsic spin and with far less power consumption.

The GNSS Interference, Detection and Monitoring Conference 2011 follows Tuesday's Royal Academy of Engineering report that set out the risks of GPS disruption from solar storms or illegal jamming and assessed what can be done to reduce impacts on society.

Johns Hopkins Children's Center researchers have discovered that most children with severe cerebral palsy have starkly asymmetric pelvic bones. The newly identified misalignment can affect how surgeries of the pelvis, spine and surrounding structures are performed, the researchers say.

The study will be published online on March 10 in the Journal of Pediatric Orthopaedics.

A breakthrough by scientists at The University of Nottingham could provide hope for any allergy sufferers who have ever had to choose between their health and their household pet.

The team of immunologists led by Drs Ghaem-Maghami and Martinez-Pomares in the University's School of Molecular Medical Sciences, and funded by the charity Asthma UK, have identified a cell component which plays a key role in triggering allergic responses to cat dander.

Max Planck researchers Kevin Briggman, Moritz Helmstaedter and Winfried Denk have now discovered that, although the cells themselves are symmetrical, the synapses between retinal ganglion cells and starburst amacrine cells are distributed asymmetrically: seen from the ganglion cell, the starburst cell dendrites connected with it run in the direction opposite to the preferred direction of motion. "Ganglion cells prefer amacrine-cell dendrites that run along the null-direction," says Winfried Denk.

Cardiff University astronomers believe that a young star's long "napping" could trigger the formation of a second generation of smaller stars and planets orbiting around it.

It has long been suspected that the build up of material onto young stars is not continuous but happens in episodic events, resulting in short outbursts of energy from these stars.

However, this has been largely ignored in models of star formation.

The low pressure area called System 96P in the South Pacific appears to be getting organized in infrared satellite imagery from NASA. System 96P is showing signs of strong convection and that has prompted the government of Vanuatu to issue tropical cyclone warnings today.

"We have measured the distance to the most distant mature cluster of galaxies ever found", says the lead author of the study in which the observations from ESO's VLT have been used, Raphael Gobat (CEA, Paris). "The surprising thing is that when we look closely at this galaxy cluster it doesn't look young -- many of the galaxies have settled down and don't resemble the usual star-forming galaxies seen in the early Universe."

Researchers in Europe reported that treatment with modified-release sildenafil significantly reduced the frequency of attacks of Raynaud's phenomenon in patients with limited cutaneous systemic sclerosis (lcSSc), also known as scleroderma. The double-blind, placebo-controlled trial found that sildenafil was well tolerated with only some subjects experiencing minor or moderate side effects. Full findings are available in the March issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR).

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) may possess the secret to baking perfect buns every time. Its researchers have developed a production-line system that automatically inspects the quality of sandwich buns exiting the oven and adjusts oven temperatures if it detects unacceptable buns.