Heavens

An estimated quarter of a million 11-17 year olds in England are being put at increased risk of developing malignant melanoma by using sunbeds, warn researchers in a letter to this week's BMJ.

Catherine Thomson from Cancer Research UK and Professor Chris Twelves from Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine & St James's University Hospital in Leeds, say that sunbeds raise serious issues, and they call for urgent legislation to stop children in England using sunbeds, as is already in place in Scotland and proposed for Wales.

Troy, N.Y. – Novel nanomaterials developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are scheduled to blast off into orbit on November 16 aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis.

The project, funded by the U.S. Air Force Multi University Research Initiative (MURI), seeks to test the performance of the new nanocomposites in orbit. Space Shuttle Atlantis will carry the samples to the International Space Station (ISS). The materials will then be mounted to the station's outer hull in a Passive Experiment Carrier (PEC), and exposed to the rigors of space.

Astrophysicists at the University of Warwick and Kiel University have discovered two earth sized bodies with oxygen rich atmospheres – however there is a bit of a disappointing snag for anyone looking for a potential home for alien life, or even a future home for ourselves, as they are not planets but are actually two unusual white dwarf stars.

Boston, MA— Schepens Eye Research Institute scientists have found that--when tested in a driving simulator--patients with hemianopia (blindness in one half of the visual field in both eyes) have significantly more difficulty detecting pedestrians (on their blind side) than normally sighted people. These results, published in the November 2009 issue of Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, fly in the face of some recent on-road studies that have found most people with hemianopia safe to drive.

When Europe's comet chaser Rosetta swings by Earth tomorrow for a critical gravity assist, tracking data will be collected to precisely measure the satellite's change in orbital energy. The results could help unravel a cosmic mystery that has stumped scientists for two decades.

"For almost 10 years we have tried to find out what distinguishes stars with planetary systems from their barren cousins," says Garik Israelian, lead author of a paper appearing this week in the journal Nature. "We have now found that the amount of lithium in Sun-like stars depends on whether or not they have planets."

Sunspots, which rotate around the sun's surface, tell us a great deal about our own planet. Scientists rely on them, for instance, to measure the sun's rotation or to prepare long-range forecasts of the Earth's health.

But there are some years, like this one, where it's not possible to see sunspots clearly. When we're at this "solar minimum," very few, if any, sunspots are visible from Earth. That poses a problem for scientists in a new scientific field called "Space Weather," which studies the interaction between the sun and the Earth's environment.

The observation conditions in this layer of the atmosphere, known as the stratosphere, are similar to those in outer space: for one thing, the images are no longer affected by air turbulence; and for another, the camera can also zoom in on the Sun in ultraviolet light, which would otherwise be absorbed by the ozone layer.

The Universe's infant galaxies enjoyed rapid growth spurts forming stars like our sun at a rate of up to 50 stars a year, according to scientists at Durham University.

The findings show that "stellar nurseries" within the first galaxies gave birth to stars at a much more rapid rate than previously expected, the researchers from Durham's Institute for Computational Cosmology revealed.

The research looked back 12.5 billion years to one of the most distant known galaxies, about one billion years after the Big Bang.

Use of the cholesterol-lowering drugs statins for more than a year is associated with a reduced risk of having gallstones requiring surgery, according to a study in the November 11 issue of JAMA.

Tropical Cyclone 4A formed yesterday, November 10 off the western coast of India in the Arabian Sea, and NASA's infrared imagery captured some high, powerful thunderstorms developing in the storm's center.

When NASA's space shuttle Atlantis launches for the International Space Station on Nov. 16 it will carry a University of Colorado at Boulder butterfly experiment that will be monitored by thousands of K-12 students across the nation.

GREENBELT, Md. -- While astronomers have studied lightweight and heavyweight black holes for decades, the evidence for black holes with intermediate masses has been much harder to come by. Now, astronomers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., find that an X-ray source in galaxy NGC 5408 represents one of the best cases for a middleweight black hole to date.

NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites are keeping a close eye on Tropical Storm Ida, and both have instruments aboard that show her clouds and rains are already widespread inland over the U.S. Gulf coast states. Infrared NASA satellite imagery revealed that Ida lost the "signature shape" of a tropical cyclone, and that the storm's clouds have already spread far to the north (over land) of its center of circulation.

Hurricanes develop far from land in wide areas of the sub-tropical Atlantic and Pacific oceans, where only satellites can provide up-to-date weather data. NASA's GOES Project has created a method to animate satellite imagery on a true-color map over that large area to watch the early development of hurricanes.