Heavens

Tropical Depression 97W hasn't grown into a tropical storm and is now tracking through the central Philippines, far south of Manila. The storm is weakening and is dissipating, and NASA's Aqua satellite verified that the thunderstorm cloud tops are not as cold as they were yesterday, indicating a weakening storm.

At 11 a.m. local (Asia/Manila) time on November 3, TD97W had maximum sustained winds near 30 knots (34 mph) and higher gusts. It was located 160 miles east of Manila, near 14.1 North and 123.7 East. The storm is kicking up 12-foot high waves.

Typhoon Mirinae drenched the Philippines and Vietnam over the last two weeks. Typhoon Mirinae dropped heavy rain over the central Philippines after hitting as a category two typhoon with wind speeds of 85 knots (~98 mph). Mirinae weakened to a tropical storm as it moved into the South China Sea but briefly increased to typhoon strength just before hitting Vietnam on Monday, November 2 in the southern coastal province of Phu Yen.

Following the launch of ESA's SMOS satellite on 2 November, the French space agency CNES, which is responsible for operating the satellite, has confirmed that the instrument's three antenna arms have deployed as planned, and that the instrument is in good health.

COLLEGE STATION, TX—Pecan, the most valuable nut tree native to North America, is native from northern Illinois and southeastern Iowa to the Gulf Coast of the United States, where it grows abundantly along the Mississippi River, the rivers of central and eastern Oklahoma, and Texas. Popularity and consumer demand for pecans has increased the cultivation of pecan trees to other areas, while commercial production has expanded into many regions of the United States and Mexico.

PITTSBURGH, Nov. 3 – Stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS), a radiation therapy procedure pioneered at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute (UPCI) that precisely delivers a large dose of radiation to tumors, effectively controls pain in patients with cancer that has spread to the spine, according to researchers from UPCI. The results of the research will be presented this week during the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) annual meeting in Chicago.

"Matter is not distributed uniformly in the Universe," says Masayuki Tanaka from ESO, who led the new study. "In our cosmic vicinity, stars form in galaxies and galaxies usually form groups and clusters of galaxies. The most widely accepted cosmological theories predict that matter also clumps on a larger scale in the so-called 'cosmic web', in which galaxies, embedded in filaments stretching between voids, create a gigantic wispy structure."

Nearby galaxies undergoing a furious pace of star formation also emit lots of gamma rays, say astronomers using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Two so-called "starburst" galaxies, plus a satellite of our own Milky Way galaxy, represent a new category of gamma-ray-emitting objects detected both by Fermi and ground-based observatories.

When NASA's Aqua satellite flew over the Philippine Sea during the early morning hours today, November 2 infrared imagery saw another new tropical cyclone coming together.

The U.S. Navy's Joint Typhoon Warning Center, the organization that forecasts tropical cyclones in that area of the world is getting a workout. Tropical Storm Mirinae just made landfall this morning in Vietnam, and had crossed northern Luzon, the Philippines this past weekend. Now, there's another threat in the region.

Mirinae (Santi) caused 12 hours of flooding rains in the Philippines when it crossed the northern Luzon region over the weekend. On October 31 at 5 a.m. Local (Asia/Manila) Time (October 30 at 2100 UTC) Typhoon Mirinae weakened dramatically after it moved inland over central Luzon, the Philippines. By October 31 at 5 p.m. Local time, Mirinae had already reemerged into the South China Sea as a tropical storm and was headed for Vietnam, but it left behind floods, destruction and death. Mirinae made landfall in Vietnam early this morning, Eastern Time.

Nearly 100 years ago, scientists detected the first signs of cosmic rays - subatomic particles (mostly protons) that zip through space at nearly the speed of light. The most energetic cosmic rays hit with the punch of a 98-mph fastball, even though they are smaller than an atom. Astronomers questioned what natural force could accelerate particles to such a speed. New evidence from the VERITAS telescope array shows that cosmic rays likely are powered by exploding stars and stellar "winds."

AMES, Iowa - Iowa State University astrophysicists contributed to the recent discovery that a galaxy quickly creating new stars is also a source of high energy gamma rays.

An international collaboration that includes scientists from the University of Delaware's Bartol Research Institute in the Department of Physics and Astronomy has discovered very-high-energy gamma rays in the Cigar Galaxy (M82), a bright galaxy filled with exploding stars 12 million light years from Earth.

The gamma rays observed by the team have energies more than a trillion times higher than the energy of visible light and are the highest-energy photons ever detected from a galaxy undergoing large amounts of star formation.

Magnetized plasmas occupy a large fraction of our cosmic universe; they exist on our sun, in the earth's magnetosphere, and in astrophysical plasmas. They also exist in laboratory magnetic fusion grade plasmas, and in other smaller experiments as well. Energy stored in stressed magnetic fields can produce large-scale explosive events that spontaneously evolve and energize particles, owing to unsteady and impulsive local processes in small volumes of space. The abrupt onset and cessation of these events in astrophysical and laboratory plasmas is a long-standing puzzle.

HOUSTON -- (Nov. 2, 2009) – Specially developed immune system cells that target the common Epstein-Barr virus can protect immune-suppressed bone marrow transplant recipients against lymph system disease and cancers that arise from the viral infection, said a group of researchers led by those from Baylor College of Medicine, The Methodist Hospital and Texas Children's Hospital.

A detailed picture of the seeds of structures in the universe has been unveiled by an international team co-led by Sarah Church of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, jointly located at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University, and by Walter Gear, of Cardiff University in the United Kingdom.