Heavens

Sex can be complicated at the best of times, but plants have an extra difficulty. If you're a plant who relies on insects to pollinate your flowers and reproduce, you will want your flowerstalks to be long. That way your flowers are on display to insects above the crowd. But if your stalk is too long, you'll stand out to herbivores, and you flower will end up as someone's lunch. It used to be thought that carnivorous plants like Sundews had the opposite problem. They reproduce better if they avoid eating insects that pollinate them, so a long stalk prevents an unfortunate meal.

Imagine floating 35,000 miles above the sunny side of Earth. Our home planet gleams below, a majestic whorl of color and texture. All seems calm around you. With no satellites or space debris to dodge, you can just relax and enjoy the black emptiness of space.

But looks can be deceiving.

Tropical Depression Five's remnants made a loop into southeastern Louisiana and coastal Mississippi this weekend and have again emerged in the Gulf of Mexico. Being back in the warm Gulf waters has given TD 5 a good chance for rebirth and NASA satellites are watching the storm's thunderstorms build.

The freedom of emigration at will is internationally recognized as a human right. But, in practice, emigration is often restricted, whether by policy or by poverty. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people who are told that their right to emigrate will be restricted have what could be considered a strange reaction: they respond by defending their country's system.

We all want that summer glow that comes from a day at the beach, but taking in the rays can have long-term implications for our health. Now Dr. Niva Shapira of Tel Aviv University's School of Health Professions suggests a way to make fun in the sun safer ― and it's all in our food.

Since its October 2008 launch, NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft has mapped the invisible interactions occurring at the edge of the solar system, surpassing its mission objectives with images that reveal the interactions between our home in the galaxy and interstellar space to be surprisingly structured and intense.

Less than two years later, its science program has also flourished into multiple research studies extending way beyond the original scope of the mission.

Within the human digestive tract is a teeming mass of hundreds of types of bacteria, a potpourri of microbes numbering in the trillions that help us digest food and keep bad bacteria in check.

Now scientists have found that the vitamin D receptor is a key player amid the gut bacteria – what scientists refer to matter-of-factly as the "gut flora" – helping to govern their activity, responding to their cues, and sometimes countering their presence. The work was published online recently in the American Journal of Pathology.

A surgery developed at Hospital for Special Surgery can improve patient outcomes in individuals with severe adult flat foot deformity, a problem that is increasingly being seen inhospitals across the country. Patients who undergo the new surgery have better long-term outcome and mobility than those who undergo traditional surgery. The paper will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society (AOFAS, abstract 348) in National Harbor, Md., on July 8.

System 96L looks like an oval-shaped area of clouds in a recent visible satellite image from the GOES-13 satellite. The National Hurricane Center noted that it now has a 50% chance of development into a tropical depression by sometime on Thursday.

Combining observations made with ESO's Very Large Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope, astronomers have uncovered the most powerful pair of jets ever seen from a stellar black hole. This object, also known as a microquasar, blows a huge bubble of hot gas, 1000 light-years across, twice as large and tens of times more powerful than other known microquasars. The discovery is reported this week in the journal Nature.

Obstructed defecation syndrome (ODS ) represents a widespread clinical problem which frequently affects middle-aged females. Nevertheless, many of the previously established techniques are unsuitable for patients with ODS associated with simultaneous rectocele and rectal intussusception. Notably, STARR has been proposed as an alternative operation and a relatively noninvasive surgical technique for this difficult problem. However, some serious complications were documented and there is limited evidence attest to the safety and long-term efficacy of the STARR procedure.

ESA's Planck mission has delivered its first all-sky image. It not only provides new insight into the way stars and galaxies form but also tells us how the Universe itself came to life after the Big Bang.

Tropical Depression Alex dissipated over the mountains of central Mexico, but his rainy remnants have moved into south, central and western Texas. The GOES-13 satellite is keeping an eye on Alex's remnants as they have prompted flash flood watches in those areas today.