Heavens

Another typhoon in the northern Philippines really is something to be scared about, and Mirinae is expected to make landfall there in the mid-morning hours on Halloween, October 31. Mirinae will be the fourth major storm to hit the Philippines in one month bringing more rain to an already flood-weary region.

NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite is already hard at work analyzing rainfall, to provide meteorologists with an idea of what can be expected when the storm hits.

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. – Oct. 29, 2009 – The Phoenix-based non-profit Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) announced today that, along with a business collaborator, it will submit a request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for emergency use of a new test to diagnose the 2009 H1N1 swine flu virus.

Details about TGen's test will be presented Sunday (Nov. 1) at the 47th annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), being held today through Sunday (Oct. 29-Nov. 1) in Philadelphia.

HONOLULU – October 29, 2009 – Shire plc (LSE: SHP, NASDAQ: SHPGY), the global specialty biopharmaceutical company, announced today that it will present key scientific data on its Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) treatments, INTUNIV™ (guanfacine) Extended Release Tablets, Vyvanse® (lisdexamfetamine dimesylate) Capsules CII, and Daytrana® (methylphenidate transdermal system) CII, at a national meeting of psychiatrists to be held October 27 - November 1 in Honolulu.

Many of us have been rescued from unfamiliar territory by directions from a Global Positioning System (GPS) navigator. GPS satellites send signals to a receiver in your GPS navigator, which calculates your position based on the location of the satellites and your distance from them. The distance is determined by how long it took the signals from various satellites to reach your receiver.

The system works well, and millions rely on it every day, but what tells the GPS satellites where they are in the first place?

Star clusters are among the most visually alluring and astrophysically fascinating objects in the sky. One of the most spectacular nestles deep in the southern skies near the Southern Cross in the constellation of Crux.

The Kappa Crucis Cluster, also known as NGC 4755 or simply the "Jewel Box" is just bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye. It was given its nickname by the English astronomer John Herschel in the 1830s because the striking colour contrasts of its pale blue and orange stars seen through a telescope reminded Herschel of a piece of exotic jewellery.

A recent study by Swedish researchers found that rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients did not experience an elevated cancer risk in the first 6 years after starting anti-tumor necrosis factor (TNF) therapy. The research team, led by Johan Askling, M.D., Ph.D., from Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden assessed the short-term and medium-term cancer risk for RA patients using anti-TNF therapies: infliximab, adalimumab, and etanercept.

Racing across the universe for the last 7.3 billion years, two gamma-ray photons arrived at NASA's orbiting Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope within nine-tenths of a second of one another. The dead-heat finish may stoke the fires of debate among physicists over Einstein's special theory of relativity because one of the photons possessed a million times more energy than the other.

Typhoon Mirinae is moving west and away from the Northern Marianas Islands on a track to a landfall in the Philippines by the weekend. As Mirinae has moved west, NASA's infrared and microwave satellite imagery have seen high, strong thunderstorm development, and a developing eye.

During its first year of operations, NASA's Fermi GammaRay Space Telescope mapped the extreme sky with unprecedentedresolution and sensitivity. It captured more than one thousanddiscrete sources of gamma rays -- the highest-energy form of light.Capping these achievements was a measurement that provided rareexperimental evidence about the very structure of space and time,unified as space-time in Einstein's theories.

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope have gained tantalizing insights into the nature of the most distant object ever observed in the Universe -- a gigantic stellar explosion known as a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB).

The explosion was detected on April 23 by NASA's Swift satellite, and scientists soon realized that it was more than 13 billion light-years from Earth. It represents an event that occurred 630 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was only four percent of its current age of 13.7 billion years.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — High-definition (HD) colonoscopy is much more sensitive than standard colonoscopy in finding polyps that could morph into cancer, say researchers at the Mayo Clinic campus in Florida.

(New York, N.Y. – Oct. 28, 2009) Paved parking lots and driveways make our lives easier, but they often create an easy pathway for pollutants to reach underground water sources and alter the natural flow of water back into the ground. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today announced a study that will investigate ways to reduce pollution that can run off paved surfaces and improve how water filters back into the ground. EPA is testing a variety of different permeable pavement materials and rain gardens in the parking lot at the agency's Edison, N.J.

Cobbling together 3000 individual photographs, a physicist has made a new high-resolution panoramic image of the full night sky, with the Milky Way galaxy as its centerpiece. Axel Mellinger, a professor at Central Michigan University, describes the process of making the panorama in the November issue of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. An interactive version of the picture can viewed on Mellinger's website: http://home.arcor.de/axel.mellinger/.

Microwave satellite imagery has revealed that Tropical Storm Mirinae is strengthening enough to develop an eye, and that's what it's doing. Mirinae was formerly Tropical Depression 23W, but became a tropical storm and received its name.

Two ingredients that don't mix well with tropical cyclones are waters cooler than 80 degrees Fahrenheit and wind shear. Those two ingredients were added into Tropical Depression Neki's mix late yesterday, and caused Neki to dissipate.

The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite called GOES-11 captured a look at Neki's remnants this morning, October 27 at 8 a.m. EDT. Neki appeared as an ill-defined, elongated swirl of low clouds. The Central Pacific Hurricane Center (CPHC) noted that Neki "Appears to be just a surface trough in satellite imagery."