Heavens

WASHINGTON, DC, April 19, 2016 -- The number of children in foster care across the country is driven not solely by child abuse and neglect, but by states' varying politics and approaches to social problems, a new University of Washington (UW) study finds.

States with more punitive criminal justice systems tend to remove children from their homes far more frequently than those with generous welfare programs -- meaning that two states with similar rates of child abuse and neglect could have very different rates of foster care entry.

New research has measured the 'wealth effect' of upgrading the infrastructure in poorer sections of cities. Revamps, such as surfacing roads and joining them to the city grid, dramatically push up prices of the adjoining land and properties, says the study to be published in the journal, The Review of Economics and Statistics. Researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of Toronto measured how households who owned property in the upgraded roads were also allowed to spend more on credit so they could buy items for the home or cars that made them better off.

In many plumbing and pipework systems in general, there are junctions and connections to move liquids such as water in different directions, but have you ever thought about what happens to the water in those fluid intersections? A team of researchers from Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) and collaborators found an unexpected spiral vortex phenomenon that occurs in the intersections of cross-shaped devices when liquid flows through the channels in a particular way. The team has published their results in Physical Review E.

On Sept. 14, waves of energy traveling for more than a billion years gently rattled space-time in the vicinity of Earth. The disturbance, produced by a pair of merging black holes, was captured by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) facilities in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. This event marked the first-ever detection of gravitational waves and opens a new scientific window on how the universe works.

HANOVER, N.H. - Dartmouth College and Griffith University researchers have devised a new way to "sense" and control external noise in quantum computing.

Quantum computing may revolutionize information processing by providing a means to solve problems too complex for traditional computers, with applications in code breaking, materials science and physics, but figuring out how to engineer such a machine remains elusive.

Private v. public, virtual v. real have converged in a world saturated by information technology. It seems impossible to divide the public from the personal. But when and where do we choose to share information about ourselves? How do we perceive public space and virtual space? And how do these perceptions influence our practices of seeing and being seen?

The United States and Mexico constructed the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Gamma-ray Observatory to observe some of the most energetic phenomena in the known universe--the aftermath when massive stars die, glowing clouds of electrons around rapidly spinning neutron stars, and supermassive black holes devouring matter and spitting out powerful jets of particles. These violent explosions produce high-energy gamma rays and cosmic rays, which can travel large distances--making it possible to see objects and events far outside our own galaxy.

Tropical Cyclone Fantala has become a major tropical cyclone in the Southern Indian Ocean reaching Category 5 status on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. NASA's RapidScat instrument observed powerful winds wrapped tightly around the eye, and NASA's Aqua satellite saw the well-structured storm with a wide eye as it was due north of Madagascar early on April 18.

Current health system practices are not sufficient to address growing rates of obesity and diabetes, health and economic disparities and cost control. "A Design Thinking Framework for Healthcare Management and Innovation" argues that addressing these complex challenges will require leaders that can think, and act, more like designers.

Disastrous floods in the Balkans two years ago are likely linked to the temporary slowdown of giant airstreams, scientists found. These wind patterns, circling the globe in the form of huge waves between the Equator and the North Pole, normally move eastwards, but practically stopped for several days then -- at the same time, a weather system got stuck over Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia that poured out record amounts of rain. The study adds evidence that so-called planetary wave resonance is a key mechanism for causing extreme weather events in summer.

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MADISON -- Combining the best features of a lobster and an African fish, University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers have created an artificial eye that can see in the dark. And their fishy false eyes could help search-and-rescue robots or surgical scopes make dim surroundings seem bright as day.

By exploiting some peculiarities of the popular Web programming framework Ruby on Rails, MIT researchers have developed a system that can quickly comb through tens of thousands of lines of application code to find security flaws.

In tests on 50 popular Web applications written using Ruby on Rails, the system found 23 previously undiagnosed security flaws, and it took no more than 64 seconds to analyze any given program.

The researchers will present their results at the International Conference on Software Engineering, in May.

NASA's Aqua satellite spotted an eye in strengthening Tropical Cyclone Fantala while the Global Precipitation Measurement or GPM mission satellite saw heavy rainfall within the powerful hurricane.

On Friday, April 15, 2016 as Fantala became a major hurricane, regional warnings were in effect for the Republic of Mauritius. A strong wind warning is in force for Rodrigues, Mauritius, St Brandon and Agalega in the Southern Indian Ocean.

Subtle distortions hidden in ALMA's stunning image of the gravitational lens SDP.81 are telltale signs that a dwarf dark galaxy is lurking in the halo of a much larger galaxy nearly 4 billion light-years away. This discovery paves the way for ALMA to find many more such objects and could help astronomers address important questions on the nature of dark matter.

Working women who want to minimize career income losses related to motherhood should wait until they are about 30 years old to have their first children, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

The findings, published in PLOS ONE, hold true regardless of whether a woman has earned a college degree.