Heavens

A new paper in the journal npj Microgravity explores the options for astronauts who want to prevent menstrual bleeding during their space missions. The paper, written by authors at King's College London and Baylor College of Medicine, reviews contraceptive devices available including those already used by military and aviation personnel, and calls for more research into the effect of hormone treatments on bone mineral loss in space.

This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image, released to celebrate Hubble's 26th year in orbit, captures in stunning clarity what looks like a gigantic cosmic soap bubble. The object, known as the Bubble Nebula, is in fact a cloud of gas and dust illuminated by the brilliant star within it. The vivid new portrait of this dramatic scene wins the Bubble Nebula a place in the exclusive Hubble hall of fame, following an impressive lineage of Hubble anniversary images.

Once a powerful Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale, Tropical Cyclone Fantala continues to move north of Madagascar on April 21. NASA's Terra satellite and GPM satellite passed over the storm finding heavy rainfall, a clouded eye, and vertical wind shear affecting the storm as it turned in its track.

NASA's Human Research Program is releasing the first half of a video series entitled Omics: Exploring Space Through You to highlight its Twins Study, in conjunction with its National DNA Day Reddit Ask Me Anything event at 10 a.m. CDT/11 a.m. EDT, Monday, April 25, 2016. The series explores space through you by using omics to look more closely at individual health.

Bremerhaven/Germany, 21 April 2016. Sea ice physicists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), are anticipating that the sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean this summer may shrink to the record low of 2012. The scientists made this projection after evaluating current satellite data about the thickness of the ice cover. The data show that the arctic sea ice was already extraordinarily thin in the summer of 2015. Comparably little new ice formed during the past winter.

• Experts say pre-participation screening should be abandoned
• The harms outweigh any benefits
• Critical data on national screening withheld

Young athletes should not undergo screening to prevent sudden cardiac arrest because it is not proven to save lives, suggests an analysis of the available evidence published in The BMJ today.

The findings show that the harms outweigh any benefits, and no robust evidence exists to confirm it actually prevents deaths.

AURORA, Colo. (April 20, 2016) - In a discovery with implications for long-term spaceflight and future missions to Mars, a researcher at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus has found that mice flown aboard the space shuttle Atlantis returned to Earth with early signs of liver disease.

Medical interventions that work well when tested in mouse models can fail when they advance to safety and efficacy testing in humans. One reason for this, scientists propose, may be the differences between immune system development of laboratory mice and humans. Laboratory mice are raised in pathogen-free environments lacking microbial diversity that may contribute to these differences, concludes a new study funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health.

As Tropical Cyclone 20P formed in the Southern Pacific Ocean NASA's Aqua satellite analyzed storm cloud top temperatures while the RapidScat instrument looked at surface winds. The National Weather Service in Pago Pago expects the tropical storm to affect American Samoa by the weekend.

Cows in Brazil might start bellowing "leguuume" rather than "moo." That's because Jose Dubeux Jr. wants to plant more legume trees in cow pastures.

Dubeux is an assistant professor of Agronomy at North Florida Research & Education Center. Growing up, Dubeux spent a lot of time on his grandparents' farm in Brazil. There he developed a passion for livestock operations and the grasslands on which the livestock graze. That passion drew him to questions about silvopastoral systems. Silvopastoral systems combine crops and animals in the same location in a way that benefits both.

When Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, it spewed dust and sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere with a force more powerful than any eruption since. As the aerosols and particulates circulated around the globe, they cooled the planet, disrupting agriculture and leading to what became known as the "year without a summer."

Scientists can read old descriptions of eruptions like Tambora and analyze ash deposits captured in polar ice, but consistently estimating the climate impact of past eruptions has been difficult. A new technique may change that.

Tropical Cyclone Fantala continued to spin northeast of Madagascar when NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the Southern Indian Ocean on April 20.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard Aqua captured a visible image of the Category 2 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Scale on April 20 at 10:10 UTC (6:10 a.m. EDT). The storm had decreased from its Category 5 status on April 18. The MODIS image continued to show good circulation with a wide, clear eye, surrounded by powerful thunderstorms.

Solar flares are intense bursts of light from the sun. They are created when complicated magnetic fields suddenly and explosively rearrange themselves, converting magnetic energy into light through a process called magnetic reconnection - at least, that's the theory, because the signatures of this process are hard to detect. But during a December 2013 solar flare, three solar observatories captured the most comprehensive observations of an electromagnetic phenomenon called a current sheet, strengthening the evidence that this understanding of solar flares is correct.

Scientists at NJIT's Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) have captured unprecedented images of a recent solar flare, including bright flare ribbons seen crossing a sunspot followed by "coronal rain," plasma that condenses in the cooling phase shortly after the flare, showering the visible surface of the Sun where it lands in brilliant explosions.

Three NASA satellites provided data on powerful Tropical Cyclone Fantala as it lingered north of Madagascar in the Southern Indian Ocean. NASA-NOAA's Soumi NPP satellite provided a night-time and infrared view, NASA's Aqua satellite provided a look at cloud top temperatures and extent, and NASA-JAXA's Global Precipitation Measurement or GPM core satellite measured the storm's intense rainfall.