Heavens

Three different NASA satellites caught images of the storm as it rapidly intensifies and moves west. Currently there are no threatened landmasses in its wake, but it this storm is packing quite a punch. The MODIS and AIRS instruments that fly aboard NASA's Aqua satellite provided visible and infrared data on the storm while the RapidScat instrument that flies aboard the International Space Station looked at the speeds of the surface winds.

How did the eruptions of Katmai, Taupo and Santorini grow into a massive blast that spewed fine ash, sulfur and crystal-poor magma into the atmosphere? New research from Georgia Institute of Technology and Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich (ETH) suggests they occurred due in part to how light vapor bubbles migrate and accumulate in some parts of shallow volcanic chambers. The findings are published online by Nature.

Do plants operate according to economic criteria? They do, when they are mutualized with fungal partners that demonstrate differing degrees of cooperation. "Carbs for phosphates", that's the deal between plants and mycorrhizal fungi, which can only feed themselves together with a partner: The plant supplies the fungus with carbohydrates and is 'paid back' in phosphates. Additional phosphates are extremely attractive for the plant, as they allow it to grow better.

Good partners force worse partners to improve their performance

A dying star ends its life in a cataclysmic explosion, shooting the majority of the star's material, primarily new chemical elements created during the explosion, out into space.

One or more such supernovae appear to have occurred close to our solar system approximately two million years ago. Evidence of the fact has been found on the earth in the form of increased concentrations of the iron isotope 60Fe detected in Pacific ocean deep-sea crusts and in ocean-floor sediment samples.

Space technology opportunities are to be opened up to emerging nations in a project between the UK and Mexico, led at the University of Strathclyde.

The programme will offer researchers, entrepreneurs and established space companies the prospect of gaining scientific insight or securing a new space market over short periods - of a few months or years - without the extensive investment required for a traditional space mission.

For all their anti-theft, fuel efficiency and satellite radio features, even the priciest new cars still travel on roads using decades-old traffic management technology.

Their fate relies in large part on what drivers can see through windows or in rearview mirrors.

"Drivers communicate wirelessly on smartphones with people around the globe, but their cars can't communicate with cars around the corner," said Larry Head, University of Arizona professor of systems engineering.

In this work, Dr. Diana and fellow researchers propose a low cost technique able to produce microfluidic devices for biomedical applications. The most common technique to fabricate biomedical microdevices is soft-lithography. However, it is a costly and time-consuming technique. Progress in manufacturing milling tools smaller than 100 µm, has enabled the use of micromilling machines to fabricate microfluidic devices capable of performing cell separation.

A research team led by archaeologists at the University of York used traditional techniques to create replicas of ritual headdresses made by hunter-gatherers 11,000 years ago in North Western Europe.

Flint blades, hammerstones and burning were among the tools and techniques they employed to fashion reproductions of shamanic headdresses discovered during excavations at the Early Mesolithic site at Star Carr in North Yorkshire.

Airport scanners can detect the explosive compounds that have been used in recent terrorist bombings, but these attacks didn't happen inside the protected spaces of terminals. They occurred in crowded public places where detection is a huge challenge. An article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, explores whether new portable detectors could be a solution.

Tropical Cyclone Fantala continued to strengthen in the Southern Indian Ocean and NASA/JAXA's Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite found very heavy rain in the system.

Scientists have obtained high resolution satellite images that paint a stark picture of how tropical glaciers in the Pacific have retreated over the past decade.

The images taken from the Pleaides satellites reveal that the formerly extensive Carstenz Glacier of West Papua New Guinea has almost completely disappeared, while the once continuous East North Wall Firn has split into a number of much smaller fragments.

One of the major questions today is: What are the ice sheets going to do in an ever-warming climate? Ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are major contributors to the sea level rise, which can make life difficult for many coastal nations in the near future.

Galaxies, it seems, are sociable animals and they like to gather together in large groups, known as clusters. Actually it's gravity that holds the galaxies in the cluster close together as a single entity, with the pull of gravity arising from large amounts of dark matter, as well as from the galaxies we can see. Clusters can contain anything between about 100 and 1000 galaxies and can be between about 5 and 30 million light-years across.

DURHAM, N.C. -- As energy companies decide what to do with aging coal ash disposal facilities in North Carolina and across the nation, they may be overlooking a fundamental but potentially critical variable -- oxygen.

In a new study appearing in the April issue of Applied Geochemistry, researchers from Duke University demonstrate that the level of oxygen in a coal ash disposal site can greatly affect how much toxic selenium and arsenic can be leached from the system.

A mobile-phone-based system for rabies surveillance in Tanzania is demonstrating huge potential for mobile technologies to improve public health service delivery, especially in resource-poor settings, according to a new article in PLOS Medicine by Katie Hampson from the University of Glasgow, UK, and colleagues.