Heavens

Researchers have discovered a white dwarf star with an atmosphere dominated by oxygen, a type of white dwarf that has been theorized to exist but not identified to date. The finding could challenge the textbook wisdom of single stellar evolution, and provide a critical link to some types of supernovae discovered over the past decade. As relatively small stars (those less than ten times the mass of our sun) near the end of their lives, they throw off their outer layers and become white dwarf stars, which are very dense.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Agricultural expansion is quickly chewing up native vegetation in the vast wooded savannas of Brazil's Cerrado biome, and a new study shows that those changes in land use are altering the region's water cycle.

Peering deep into the heart of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals a rich tapestry of more than half a million stars. Apart from a few, blue, foreground stars, almost all of the stars pictured in the image are members of the Milky Way nuclear star cluster, the densest and most massive star cluster in the galaxy. Hidden in the centre of this cluster is the Milky Way's resident supermassive black hole.

The star TW Hydrae is a popular target of study for astronomers because of its proximity to Earth (only about 175 light-years away) and its status as an infant star (about 10 million years old). It also has a face-on orientation as seen from Earth. This gives astronomers a rare, undistorted view of the complete protoplanetary disc around the star.

In January 2014, a group of researchers conducted an unusual, some might say paradoxical, experiment in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard: Their goal was to encase small plants growing out on the tundra in a thick layer of ice.

While this might seem odd -- nature does a pretty good job of encasing plants in Svalbard with ice and snow--the researchers were trying to use their experiment as a kind of biological crystal ball.

EAST LANSING, Mich. -- It's not laziness or lack of initiative that's keeping African-Americans from starting their own businesses, but instead a centuries-old racial disadvantage that's not experienced by other minority groups, a Michigan State University scholar argues in a new paper.

Only 5 percent of blacks are self-employed, compared with 11 percent of whites, and black-owned companies tend to be smaller, have fewer employees and make less money than white-owned businesses.

The disks of dust and gas that surround young stars are the formation sites of planets. New images from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) reveal never-before-seen details in the planet-forming disk around a nearby Sun-like star, including a tantalizing gap at the same distance from the star as the Earth is from the Sun.

This structure may mean that an infant version of our home planet, or possibly a more massive "super-Earth," is beginning to form there.

New research has found that wind carved massive mounds of more than a mile high on Mars over billions of years. Their location helps pin down when water on the Red Planet dried up during a global climate change event.

The research was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, on March 31.

A new study from a group of researchers including San Francisco State University astronomer Stephen Kane has detailed the first-ever temperature map of a super-Earth planet -- a rocky planet outside of our solar system.

The research was published online March 30 in Nature.

The thermal map of 55 Cancri e shows that the planet is very hot but still experiences a strong temperature difference between its dayside and its nightside, suggesting that processes found in planets within our solar system, such as high winds or lava flows, are at work on distant worlds.

Tempe, Ariz. -- A lack of adequate nutrition is blamed as one of many possible causes for colony collapse disorder or CCD -- a mysterious syndrome that causes a honey bee colony to die. Parasites, pesticides, pathogens and environmental changes are also stressors believed responsible for the decline of honey bees.

Since bees are critical to the world's food supply, learning how bees cope with these stressors is critical to understanding honey bee health and performance.

Splitting water into its hydrogen and oxygen parts may sound like science fiction, but it's the end goal of chemists and chemical engineers like Christopher Murray of the University of Pennsylvania and Matteo Cargnello of Stanford University.

They work in a field called photocatalysis, which, at its most basic, uses light to speed up chemical reactions. They've come a step closer to such a feat by tailoring the structure of a material called titania, one of the best-known photocatalysts, to hasten hydrogen production from biomass-derived compounds.

Mule deer mothers are in sync with their environment, with reproduction patterns that closely match the cycles of plant growth in their habitat. And new research using NASA satellite data shows that tracking vegetation from space can help wildlife managers predict when does will give birth to fawns.

TORONTO, March 30, 2016 - Nearly 10 per cent of teens in three Canadian provinces said they had gambled online in the past three months, according to a new study by researchers from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and the University of Waterloo. It's the first Canadian-based study to find such high levels of online gambling among youth.

Large-scale disease elimination programs depend critically on the accuracy of data reported back from local implementation sites. WHO and some of its partners recently developed a data quality assessment (DQA) tool specific to efforts to combat neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). A study published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases applying the tool to the lymphatic filariasis program in Ghana finds problems with the routinely reported data and suggests ways toward improving their accuracy.

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Part of the future of solar energy, especially for residential use, may be small "community-based" systems in which neighbors join together in the construction and use of solar systems to optimize the energy produced in their neighborhood - and share in the benefits.