Heavens

At 3 p.m. EDT on May 18, NASA's Aqua satellite swept over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill from its vantage point in space and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instrument captured sunglints in a visible image of the spill.

In the past decade, robotic telescopes have turned astronomers' attention to scads of strange exploding stars, one-offs that may or may not point to new and unusual physics.

An international team of astronomers has uncovered a supernova whose origin cannot be explained by any previously known mechanism and which promises exciting new insights into stellar explosions.

The first scientific results from ESA's Herschel infrared space observatory are revealing previously hidden details of star formation. New images show thousands of distant galaxies furiously building stars and beautiful star-forming clouds draped across the Milky Way. One picture even catches an 'impossible' star in the act of formation.

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Astrophysicists at UC Santa Barbara are the first scientists to identify two white dwarf stars in an eclipsing binary system, allowingfor the first direct radius measurement of a rare white dwarf composed of pure helium. The results will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. These observations are the first to confirm a theory about a certain type of white dwarf star.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. ‑ Satellite systems in space keyed to detect nuclear events and environmental gasses currently face a kind of data logjam because their increasingly powerful sensors produce more information than their available bandwidth can easily transmit.

Experiments conducted by Sandia National Laboratories at the International Space Station preliminarily indicate that the problem could be remedied by orbiting more complex computer chips to pre‑reduce the large data stream.

Rogier van Doorn, Maciej Boni and colleagues analyze the initial H1N1 influenza outbreak in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, including attempts at containment, and establishment of community transmission. To reconstruct the initial outbreak the researchers used reports from the Ministry of Health and clinical and laboratory data for people who were infected with 2009 H1N1 and isolated in hospital. Between April 27 and July 24, three-quarters of a million passengers arriving in the city on international flights were screened at the airport.

The researchers of the University of Helsinki, and Oncos Therapeutics, the biotech company developing new cancer therapeutics based on the next generation oncolytic viruses, published initial results from their Advanced Therapy Access Program in Cancer Research. The therapy program is based on scientific research at the University of Helsinki and serves as the foundation for ongoing clinical development.

ARGONNE, Ill. (May 17, 2010) — A collaboration between the Advanced Photon Source and Center for Nanoscale Materials at U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has "seen" the crystallization of nanoparticles in unprecedented detail.

"Nanoscience is a hot issue right now, and people are trying to create self-assembled nanoparticle arrays for data and memory storage," Argonne assistant physicist Zhang Jiang said. "In these devices, the degree of ordering is an important factor."

ESA's Herschel infrared space telescope has made an unexpected discovery: a hole in space. The hole has provided astronomers with a surprising glimpse into the end of the star-forming process.

The 2010 Space Propulsion Congress brought together some 500 international experts in aerospace propulsion systems in the Basque city of Donostia-San Sebastián. The latest technological advances were made known, including those that will make reaching Mars possible in the future as well as other planets such as Mercury.

ARLINGTON, VA (May 13, 2010) – Novel vaccines for diseases ranging from the flu to HIV highlight a week's worth of biotechnology research at the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists' (AAPS) National Biotechnology Conference (NBC). Scientists from academia, industry, and government will gather at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square Sunday, May 16 -Thursday, May 20 to share research and advances in biotherapeutics.

New research by The University of Manchester and the Carnegie Institution of Washington is to make scientists rethink their understanding of how Earth formed.

The team have found that volatile elements - most likely to include water - were present during the violent process of the Earth's birth between 30 and 100 million years after the solar system was created - a minute period in geological terms

The findings mean that comets and asteroids were unlikely to have brought the bulk of volatile elements to Earth - as commonly thought.

Washington, D.C.—Tiny variations in the isotopic composition of silver in meteorites and Earth rocks are helping scientists put together a timetable of how our planet was assembled beginning 4.568 billion years ago. The new study, published in the journal Science, indicates that water and other key volatiles may have been present in at least some of Earth's original building blocks, rather than acquired later from comets, as some scientists have suggested.