Heavens

AMES, Iowa - Martin Thuo likes to look for new, affordable and clean ways to put science and technology to work in the world.

His lab is dedicated to an idea called frugal innovation: "How do you do very high-level science or engineering with very little?" said Thuo, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Iowa State University and an associate of the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory. "How can you solve a problem with the least amount of resources?"

EUGENE, Ore. -- April 25, 2016 -- Open the box of that new smartphone. Oops, it feels differently from expectations based on what you'd seen. Embrace it or be disappointed? Your reaction is likely tied to your perception of the brand, says Aparna Sundar of the University of Oregon.

A brand viewed as exciting has wiggle room to introduce innovations that don't match consumers' expectations, said Sundar, a professor of marketing in the Lundquist College of Business. Not so for a brand seen as sincere, she said.

Fujita Ichiro, a Professor at the Graduate School of Engineering in Kobe University, has developed a piece of software that can measure the flow rate of rivers using image analysis. The software is called KU-STIV (Kobe University Space-Time Image Velocimetry). This technology makes it easier to obtain accurate data about river flow rates that can be used in strategies for flood risk management.

As the seven islands of American Samoa were bracing for Tropical Cyclone Amos, NASA's Aqua satellite saw the storm affecting the Southwestern Pacific Islands of Wallis and Futuna. Warnings were already in effect for American Samoa on April 22 as the storm continued moving east toward the islands.

CHICAGO (April 22, 2016): At the beginning of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, less than half of the surgeons deployed for the first time had received any type of trauma-specific training beforehand. Most surgeons were within a year or two of completing their surgical residency training, and many had not yet been certified by the American Board of Surgery.

On April 21, Fantala's maximum sustained wind speeds started to decrease since making a "U-turn" and moving southeastward to a position northeast of Madagascar and the storm maintained strength on April 22. NASA's RapidScat instrument measured winds around the system while NASA-JAXA's Global Precipitation Measurement or GPM core satellite analyzed rainfall rates with the hurricane.

Researchers at Stockholm University are getting closer to corner light dark-matter particle models. Observations can rule out some axion-like particles in the quest for the content of dark matter. The article is now published in the Physical Review Letters.

PITTSBURGH, April 22, 2016 - Areas in the U.S. with the highest drug-overdose death rates are not always places with high drug trafficking, according to a new University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health analysis published in the journal Preventive Medicine.

Drug-overdose mortality rates have increased an average of 6.7 percent per year since 1979 but held relatively steady in most U.S. border counties, indicating that drugs appear to pass through these counties without affecting the death rates of their residents.

A century ago, more than 60,000 tigers roamed the wild. Today, the worldwide estimate has dwindled to around 3,200. Poaching is one of the main drivers of this precipitous drop. Whether killed for skins, medicine or trophy hunting, humans have pushed tigers to near-extinction. The same applies to other large animal species like elephants and rhinoceros that play unique and crucial roles in the ecosystems where they live.

A new study of a quarter-million Miami-Dade County Medicare beneficiaries showed that higher levels of neighborhood greenness, including trees, grass and other vegetation, were linked to a significant reduction in the rate of chronic illnesses, particularly in low-to-middle income neighborhoods.

For the 26th birthday of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers are highlighting a Hubble image of an enormous bubble being blown into space by a super-hot, massive star. The Hubble image of the Bubble Nebula, or NGC 7635, was chosen to mark the 26th anniversary of the launch of Hubble into Earth orbit by the STS-31 space shuttle crew on April 24, 1990

Most of the cosmic rays that we detect at Earth originated relatively recently in nearby clusters of massive stars, according to new results from NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft. ACE allowed the research team to determine the source of these cosmic rays by making the first observations of a very rare type of cosmic ray that acts like a tiny timer, limiting the distance the source can be from Earth.

Most of the cosmic rays arriving at Earth from our galaxy come from nearby clusters of massive stars, according to new observations from the Cosmic Ray Isotope Spectrometer (CRIS), an instrument aboard NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft.

The distance between the galactic cosmic rays' point of origin and Earth is limited by the survival of a very rare type of cosmic ray that acts like a tiny clock. The cosmic ray is a radioactive isotope of iron, 60Fe, which has a half life of 2.6 million years. In that time, half of these iron nuclei decay into other elements.

The life expectancy gap between America's rich and poor is shrinking for the young, a new study reports. In fact, life expectancy at birth has been improving for virtually all income groups born in 1990 onward. The results reveal that many of the U.S. policies directed at improving the health of the young and the poor may have been successful.

Traces of 60Fe detected in space indicate that a nearby supernova occurred within the last few million years. The iron isotope 60Fe, which is very rare, is created when a massive star collapses in the form of supernova. Walter Binns et al. detected 60Fe in cosmic rays flying through space, revealing that the contents of a nearby supernova are being sprinkled on Earth to this day. Some previous reports have found samples of the isotope that have accumulated on Earth and the Moon in the distant past, but this is the first measurement of the present-day rate.