Heavens

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has passed a key milestone crucial to producing the high-quality images that will be the trademark of this revolutionary new tool for astronomy. A team of ALMA astronomers and engineers successfully linked three of the observatory's advanced antennas at the 16,500-foot-elevation observing site in northern Chile. Linking three antennas to work in unison for the first time allowed the ALMA team to correct errors that can arise when only two antennas are used, thus paving the way for precise, high-resolution imaging.

Spectacular satellite images suggest that Mars was warm enough to sustain lakes three billion years ago, a period that was previously thought to be too cold and arid to sustain water on the surface, according to research published today in the journal Geology.

The research, by a team from Imperial College London and University College London (UCL), suggests that during the Hesperian Epoch, approximately 3 billion years ago, Mars had lakes made of melted ice, each around 20km wide, along parts of the equator.

Tropical Cyclone Laurence dropped heavy rainfall over Northwest Australia last week, and NASA and the Japanese Space Agency's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, or TRMM satellite measured that rainfall from its orbit in space.

The TRMM-based, near-real time Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. monitors rainfall over the global Tropics. A TMPA analysis of rainfall was made during the period from December 13-23, 2009 when tropical cyclone Laurence was affecting northwest Australia.

An instrument package developed in part by the University of Colorado at Boulder for the $2.2 billion orbiting Herschel Space Observatory launched in May by the European Space Agency has provided one of the most detailed views yet of space up to 12 billion years back in time.

The video runs exactly three minutes and explains how the three detectors on the MIRI work and the tests they endure to prepare them for the Webb telescope's launch and flight in space. The video is hosted by Estacion, who interviewed Dr. Michael Ressler, the MIRI Project Scientist at NASA JPL. In the video, Ressler explains what MIRI detectors do and how the MIRI sensor works by comparing it to a chip on a camera. The video also takes the viewer behind the scenes and into a clean room to show viewers how the MIRI detectors are tested.

ST. PAUL, Minn. – People who have Alzheimer's disease may be less likely to develop cancer, and people who have cancer may be less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study published in the December 23, 2009, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

MADISON — For almost 50 years, astronomers have puzzled over the youthful appearance of stars known as blue stragglers.

Blue stragglers are the timeworn Hollywood starlets of the cosmos: They shine brightly, they are older than they appear, and they have, disconcertingly, gained mass at a late stage of life.

Stars in globular clusters [1] are generally extremely old, with ages of 12-13 billion years. However, a small fraction of them appear to be significantly younger than the average population and, because they seem to have been left behind by the stars that followed the normal path of stellar evolution and became red giants, have been dubbed blue stragglers [2]. Blue stragglers appear to regress from "old age" back to a hotter and brighter "youth", gaining a new lease on life in the process.

Members of a Syracuse University research team have shown that an obscure phenomenon called stochastic resonance (SR) can improve the clarity of signals in systems such as radar, sonar and even radiography, used in medical clinics to detect signs of breast cancer. It does this by adding carefully selected noise to the system.

Two brown dwarf-sized objects orbiting a giant old star show that planets may assemble around stars more quickly and efficiently than anyone thought possible, according to an international team of astronomers.

"We have found two brown dwarf-sized masses around an ordinary star, which is very rare," said Alex Wolszczan, Evan Pugh professor of astronomy and astrophysics, Penn State and lead scientist on the project.

Doha, December 16, 2009 – A first-of-its-kind consensus statement by 50 medical experts from around the world has pronounced surgery to be a legitimate and effective treatment for type 2 diabetes, bringing the procedure a significant step closer to wider use and acceptance.

Exposing patients with chronic sinus disease to allergens and then obtaining repeated images by X-ray or ultrasound reveals that nasal allergies may be involved in some cases of chronic sinus disease, according to a report in the December issue of Archives of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

MAYWOOD, Ill. -- The tuberculosis bacterium is an insidious germ that can lie dormant for many years, then suddenly emerge and cause potentially fatal disease.

Earlier this year, researchers in Sweden proposed a provocative explanation: TB bacteria have the ability to turn into dormant, armor-plated spores. If true, the findings would provide promising new avenues of research in the worldwide fight against TB.

PASADENA, Calif.— Saturn's largest moon, Titan, looks to be the only place in the solar system—aside from our home planet, Earth—with copious quantities of liquid (largely, liquid methane and ethane) sitting on its surface. According to planetary astronomer Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Earth and Titan share yet another feature, which is inextricably linked with that surface liquid: common fog.

In the new blockbuster Avatar, humans visit the habitable - and inhabited - alien moon called Pandora. Life-bearing moons like Pandora or the Star Wars forest moon of Endor are a staple of science fiction. With NASA's Kepler mission showing the potential to detect Earth-sized objects, habitable moons may soon become science fact. If we find them nearby, a new paper by Smithsonian astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger shows that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be able to study their atmospheres and detect key gases like carbon dioxide, oxygen, and water vapor.