Heavens

People may need 3-D glasses to see life-like images, but rainfall and cloud data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite gives scientists a three-dimensional look at tropical cyclones without the glasses.

TRMM passed over tropical cyclone Magda on January 21 at 1927 UTC (2:27 p.m. ET) when it was off Western Australia's northern coast and soon to make landfall TRMM captured a look at its rainfall and cloud heights. That data was used to create a 3-D image of how high Magda's clouds were, and how heavily the rain was falling within the storm.

When Cyclone Magda made landfall from Collier Bay at around 5 a.m. local time on January 22 in northern Australia, NASA's Terra satellite captured an image of the storm. Magda is now dissipating rapidly over land in northern West Australia.

Michigan State University astronomer Megan Donahue uses words such as "cool" and "interesting" to describe the two distinct "tails" found on a long tail of gas that is believed to be forming stars where few stars have been formed before.

Donahue was part of an international team of astronomers that viewed the gas tail with a very long, new observation made by the Chandra X-ray Observatory and detailed it in a paper published this month in the publication Astrophysical Journal.

Civil engineers at the University of Washington and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Seattle office have taken a first look at how dams in the Columbia River basin, the nation's largest hydropower system, could be managed for a different climate.

An area of low pressure in the Southern Indian Ocean, located close to Australia's northwestern coast was being watched for development yesterday. This morning it exploded into Tropical Storm Madga. NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, or TRMM satellite noticed that Magda's outer rainbands were already affecting land today..

The simple formula we've learned in recent years – forests remove the greenhouse gas CO2 from the atmosphere; therefore forests prevent global warming – may not be quite as simple as we thought. Forests can directly absorb and retain heat, and, in at least one type of forest, these effects may be strong enough to cancel out a good part of the benefit in lowered CO2. This is a conclusion of a paper that will be published tomorrow, Friday 22, in Science by scientists in the Weizmann Institute's Faculty of Chemistry.

Some Canadian shorebirds have had to get fit or die trying. Research published in the open access journal BMC Ecology has found that the average Pacific dunlin has lost weight and spends more time in flight as a response to the increased threat of predation from their arch-enemy, the peregrine falcon.

Tropical Depression 01W wasn't very well organized when it made landfall earlier today, and is dissipating as it now moves from Vietnam westward into Cambodia.

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite has noticed that Tropical Depression 01W's (TD01W) rainfall is now light and very widely scattered. In addition, the low level center of the storm has been dislocated to the west of the area of precipitation as a result of wind shear.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- For decades, astronomers have analyzed the impact that asteroids could have on Earth. New research by MIT Professor of Planetary Science Richard Binzel examines the opposite scenario: that Earth has considerable influence on asteroids — and from a distance much larger than previously thought. The finding helps answer an elusive, decades-long question about where most meteorites come from before they fall to Earth and also opens the door to a new field study of asteroid seismology.

Few objects in the sky have been as well named as the Cat's Paw Nebula, a glowing gas cloud resembling the gigantic pawprint of a celestial cat out on an errand across the Universe. British astronomer John Herschel first recorded NGC 6334 in 1837 during his stay in South Africa. Despite using one of the largest telescopes in the world at the time, Herschel seems to have only noted the brightest part of the cloud, seen here towards the lower left.

New York City--Athletes put less strain on their anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) while making a cut on a natural grass surface while wearing a cleat.

This is the conclusion from a study by investigators at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) that tested the strain placed on the ACL of four different shoe-surface interactions: Astroturf/turf shoe, modern playing turf/turf shoe, modern turf/cleat, and natural grass/cleat. The study appears in the January 2010 issue of the Journal of Biomechanical Engineering.

Treadmill training can be used to help people with Parkinson's disease achieve better walking movements, say researchers. In a systematic review of the evidence, Cochrane Researchers concluded treadmill training could be used to improve specific gait parameters in Parkinson's patients.

Berkeley, CA — Weak gravitational lensing is a uniquely promising way to learn how much dark matter there is in the Universe and how its distribution has evolved since the distant past. New work by a team led by a cosmologist from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has made major progress in extending the use of gravitational lensing to the study of much older and smaller structures than was previously possible.

Computer simulations for drought-prone areas reveal that when urban water planners combine three approaches of buying water -- permanent rights, options and leases -- the city avoids surplus water and high costs, and reduces shortages, according to civil engineers.

"Just like with stock portfolios, if you buy diverse stocks, you diversify your risk," said Patrick Reed, associate professor of civil engineering, Penn State. "Right now, cities don't necessarily diversify their risk through the ways in which they buy water."

Attaching cartilage to plates made of the resorbable material polydioxanone appears to facilitate corrective surgery on the nasal septum, the thin cartilage separating the two airways, according to a report in the January/February issue of Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.