Heavens

Led by San Francisco State University astronomer Stephen Kane, a team of researchers has spotted an extrasolar planet about 117 light-years from earth that boasts the most eccentric orbit yet seen.

What's more, Kane and his colleagues were able to detect a signal of reflected light from the planet known as HD 20782 -- a "flash" of starlight bouncing off the eccentric planet's atmosphere as it made its closest orbital approach to its star. The discovery was announced online Feb. 28, 2016 in The Astrophysical Journal.

Buildings with storage tanks can face increased risks from chlorine-resistant bacteria in water, according to researchers at the University of Strathclyde.

A study examining more than 50 tap water samples found water had very few bacteria in buildings without cisterns but there was noticeable contamination in buildings where storage tanks were present or plumbing had been altered or otherwise disrupted.

The problem was likely to have been caused by the plumbing changes or improperly maintained cisterns, opening the risk of bacterial resistance to disinfectants.

Heavy rainfall was occurring Tropical Cyclone Emeraude when the Global Precipitation Measurement or GPM passed over the Southern Indian Ocean and measured the rainfall rate.

Tropical Cyclone Emeraude formed on March 15, 2016 from a tropical low pressure area and intensified rapidly. By March 16 it was a tropical storm and a hurricane on March 17.

The Lomonosov Moscow State University astronomers who created a global network of robotelescopes MASTER detected that a bright star TYC 2505-672-1 has actually faded significantly. That finding induced new questions: so, the scientists assume that TYC 2505-672-1 is actually a double star system, though a nature of its companion remains unknown. The article was accepted to publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics, and is accessible as a pre-print at http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.06010

Expanding the use of recycled water would reduce water and energy use, cut greenhouse gas emissions and benefit public health in California -- which is in the midst of a severe drought -- and around the world.

A new study by the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, published online March 17 in the American Journal of Public Health, found that recycled water has great potential for more efficient use in urban settings and to improve the overall resiliency of the water supply.

Gold mining in California in the 19th century was a boon for the state's economy but not so much for the environment. Mining left a protracted legacy that impacts the natural landscape even today. Mercury, used in the gold extraction process, has been detected throughout the Lower Yuba/Feather River system in the state's Central Valley, and its presence could prove dangerous to local wildlife.

Boston, MA - Official counts of homicides by police seriously undercount incidents, according to a study from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, but a relatively new national data system, currently in use in 32 states, could be a crucial tool for gathering more comprehensive information, say the researchers.

Pluto's surface exhibits a wide variety of landscapes, results from five new studies in this special issue on the New Horizons mission report. The dwarf planet has more differences than similarities with its large moon, Charon. What's more, the studies in this package reveal, Pluto modifies its space environment - interacting with the solar wind plasma and energetic particles around it. The results pave the way for many further, in-depth studies of Pluto.

A student-built University of Colorado Boulder instrument riding on NASA's New Horizons spacecraft found only a handful of dust grains, the building blocks of planets, when it whipped by Pluto at 31,000 miles per hour last July.

Data downloaded and analyzed by the New Horizons team indicated the space environment around Pluto and its moons contained only about six dust particles per cubic mile, said CU-Boulder Professor Fran Bagenal, who leads the New Horizons Particles and Plasma Team.

Handling big data can sometimes feel like driving on an unpaved road for researchers with a need for speed and supercomputers.

"When you're in the world of data, there are rocks and bumps in the way, and a lot of things that you have to take care of," said Niall Gaffney, a former Hubble Space Telescope scientist who now heads the Data Intensive Computing group at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

(Washington, DC) - A new scientific study documenting the linguistic practices of the Northwestern Amazonian peoples uncovers an unusual method of communicating the human concept of time. The study, "Modally hybrid grammar? Celestial pointing for time-of-day reference in Nheengatú", by Simeon Floyd of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, was published in the March, 2016 issue of the scholarly journal Language.

Tropical Cyclone Emeraude continued to strengthen in the Southern Indian Ocean as NASA captured infrared temperature data of the storm's clouds and measured its surface wind speed.

Emeraude is in the southern part of the Indian Ocean over 1,000 km from the nearest land area. It is roughly south of Sri Lanka and west of Java.

An international team of scientists using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has combined images taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3 - http://www.spacetelescope.org/about/general/instruments/wfc3/) with the unprecedented ultraviolet spatial resolution of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS - http://www.spacetelescope.org/about/general/instruments/stis/) to success

Imagine a scenario where sensor-laden vehicles pass through intersections by communicating with each other, rather than grinding to a halt at traffic lights. A newly published study co-authored by MIT researchers claims this kind of traffic-light-free transportation design, if it ever arrives, could allow twice as much traffic to use the roads.

New images of a young star made with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) reveal what scientists think may be the very earliest stages in the formation of planets. The scientists used the VLA to see unprecedented detail of the inner portion of a dusty disk surrounding the star, some 450 light-years from Earth.