Heavens

The Sun has been in the news a lot lately because it's beginning to send out more flares and solar storms. Its recent turmoil is particularly newsworthy because the Sun was very quiet for an unusually long time. Astronomers had a tough time explaining the extended solar minimum. New computer simulations imply that the Sun's long quiet spell resulted from changing flows of hot plasma within it.

The spiral galaxy NGC 247 is one of the closest spiral galaxies of the southern sky. In this new view from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope in Chile large numbers of the galaxy's component stars are clearly resolved and many glowing pink clouds of hydrogen, marking regions of active star formation, can be made out in the loose and ragged spiral arms.

Cannabis use during adolescence and young adulthood increases the risk of psychotic symptoms, while continued cannabis use may increase the risk for psychotic disorder in later life, concludes a new study published on bmj.com today.

Postmenopausal women who smoke or used to smoke have up to a 16% higher risk of developing breast cancer compared to women who have never smoked, finds research published on bmj.com today.

The study also says that women who have had extensive exposure to passive smoking, either as children or in adulthood, may also have an excess risk of developing breast cancer.

WASHINGTON -- NASA's Glory spacecraft is scheduled for launch on Friday, March 4. Technical issues with ground support equipment for the Taurus XL launch vehicle led to the scrub of the original Feb. 23 launch attempt. Those issues have been resolved.

The March 4 liftoff from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., is targeted for 5:09:43 a.m. EST, in the middle of a 48-second launch window. Spacecraft separation occurs 13 minutes after launch.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the team have created a microscope which shatters the record for the smallest object the eye can see, beating the diffraction limit of light.

Previously, the standard optical microscope can only see items around one micrometre – 0.001 millimetres – clearly.

Researchers have over time been able to show that medicine designed at nanoscale offers unprecedented opportunities for targeted treatment of serious diseases such as cancer. However, now research also shows that the body's immune system plays a significant part in the drug delivery process.

Pioneering technology by scientists at Queen's University Belfast, which is transforming the lives of millions of people in Asia, is now being used to create safer drinking water in the United States.

The award-winning system – Subterranean Arsenic Removal – removes arsenic from groundwater without using chemicals. It was developed by a team of European and Indian engineers led by Dr Bhaskar Sen Gupta in Queen's University School of Planning, Architecture and Civil Engineering.

There are already systems that detect ships at sea, but a group of engineers from the UAH, led by the researcher Raúl Vicen, has introduced a new development, involving "the use of artificial intelligence techniques and improvements in the templates used to select input data".

The team has come up with a new detection method "that outperforms the one that has generally been used until now, as well as offering the advantages of low computational costs, and which can also be used in real time".

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Fans may think of Jimmy Connors as an "old school" tennis player, but according to a new ranking system developed by a Northwestern University researcher, Connors is best player in the history of the game.

The rankings are published in PLoS ONE, a journal published by the Public Library of Science.

Male tennis players who played in at least one Association of Tennis Professionals match between 1968 and 2010 were evaluated through network analysis, said Filippo Radicchi, author of the study.

Alexandria, VA — Depression is a common problem in patients with chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS) and negatively impacts patients' symptom burden, ability to function, and quality of life (QOL), according to new research published in the March 2011 issue of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery.

DALLAS – March 1, 2011 – Will Marshall saw a physician about his blood pressure at his barber's urging.

Yes, his barber.

"The barber and beauty shops for men and women are kind of their own private escapes," Mr. Marshall said. "Every conversation you can imagine goes on in the barbershop. I wouldn't have put the barbershop and blood pressure together – but that visit to my physician for my blood pressure saved my life."

Mr. Marshall now has a healthy blood pressure thanks to lifestyle and dietary changes.

Jerusalem, February 27, 2011 -- Researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the US have discovered the mechanism whereby dangerous mercury eventually finds its way into the fish we eat from the open seas and oceans.

ARLINGTON, Va.-Successfully taking a small radio receiver intended for space applications and creating a full-featured radio frequency system, initially designed for a Marine Corps unmanned aircraft, would not have been possible without the integrated effort of three naval entities.

The Software Reprogrammable Payload (SRP), a collaborative effort between the Office of Naval Research, the Naval Research Laboratory and Marine Corps aviation, is currently targeted for the Shadow unmanned aircraft system (UAS).

Literature and films have left us with vivid images of the grasshopper plagues that devastated the Great Plains in the 1870s. Although commonly referred to as grasshoppers, the infestations were actually by Rocky Mountain locusts.