Heavens

This winter, areas across the globe experienced a shift in rain patterns due to the natural weather phenomenon known as El Niño. A new NASA visualization of rainfall data shows the various changes in the United States with wetter, wintery conditions in parts of California and across the East Coast.

A new NASA visualization shows the 2015 El Niño unfolding in the Pacific Ocean, as sea surface temperatures create different patterns than seen in the 1997-1998 El Niño. Computer models are just one tool that NASA scientists are using to study this large El Nino event, and compare it to other events in the past.

A quick, cheap and highly efficient method for producing a water-purifying chemical has been developed by researchers at Cardiff University.

The team, from the Cardiff Catalyst Institute, Lehigh University and the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the USA, have developed a new group of catalysts that can produce hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) on-demand in a simple one-step process, opening up the possibility of manufacturing the chemical in some of the poorest, remote and disaster-stricken areas of the world.

The fourteenth tropical cyclone in the Southern Pacific Ocean developed as NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead. The AIRS instrument aboard Aqua captured infrared, near-visible and microwave data on Tropical Cyclone Yalo early on Feb. 25.

How you perceive and react to stressful events is more important to your health than how frequently you encounter stress, according to health researchers from Penn State and Columbia University.

It is known that stress and negative emotions can increase the risk of heart disease, but the reasons why are not well understood. One potential pathway linking stress to future heart disease is a dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system -- a case of a person's normally self-regulated nervous system getting off track.

A team of Spanish researchers, with the participation of the University of Granada (UGR), has accurately detected a structure in the innermost region of a quasar (small, very far objects that emit huge amounts of energy, comparable to that emitted by a whole galaxy) at a distance of more than five billion light-years from Earth.

For the first time a team of scientists has tracked down the location of a fast radio burst (FRB), confirming that these short but spectacular flashes of radio waves originate in the distant universe.The breakthrough, published today in the journal Nature, was made using CSIRO radio telescopes in eastern Australia and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan's Subaru telescope in Hawaii.

"Our discovery opens the way to working out what makes these bursts," Dr Simon Johnston, Head of Astrophysics at CSIRO and a member of the research team said.

Researchers know that exercise increases a person's chances of surviving a heart attack. Now it turns out that exercise habits also affect how the body handles a heart attack's aftermaths.

Depression is three times more common among people who have experienced a heart attack compared to people who have never been afflicted by one. But the new study shows that people who exercise regularly for a long time before a heart attack occurs are far less likely to be depressed afterwards.

A new report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) describes how researchers analyzed a major 2011 Texas wildland fire using a rigorous and scientifically based post-fire data collection approach, a system they believe will lead to improved defensive measures and strategies for significantly reducing structural damage and property loss.

Three years after its explosion, a type Ia supernova continues to shine brighter than expected, new research finds. The observations, made with the Hubble Space Telescope and published today in The Astrophysical Journal, suggest that the powerful explosions produce an abundance of a heavy form of cobalt that gives the heat from nuclear decay an extra energy boost. The work could help researchers pinpoint the parents of type Ia supernovae--a type of stellar explosion that is frequently used to measure distances to faraway galaxies--and reveal the mechanics behind these explosions.

VANCOUVER, Wash. - It can take Mother Nature 1,000 years to grow a forest. But Nikolay Strigul, assistant professor of mathematics and statistics at Washington State University Vancouver, can grow one on a computer in three weeks.

Tropical Cyclone Winston has moved into an area with strong vertical wind shear in the Southern Pacific Ocean. The wind shear is battering the storm and has weakened it significantly. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Winston and infrared data showed that the northerly wind shear had pushed the bulk of strongest storms to the south of the center.

The Joint Typhoon Warning Center upper-level analysis showed Winston had moved into an unfavorable environment with strong (30 to 40 knots/34.5 to 46 mph/55.5 to 74 kph) vertical wind shear.

The shape of the two electron swarms 600 miles to more than 25,000 miles from the Earth's surface, known as the Van Allen Belts, could be quite different than has been believed for decades, according to a new study of data from NASA's Van Allen Probes that was released Friday in the Journal of Geophysical Research. (Watch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyfc2ZUwHVU)

A new storymap developed by U.S. Forest Service researchers allows users to interactively chart the ebb and flow of forest products across the southern states -- and visually tells the story of the decline of the forest products industry in the South over the last decades.

A new study in Nature Climate Change contends that traditional assessment methods overestimate the vulnerability of salt marshes to sea-level rise because they don't fully account for processes that allow the marshes to grow vertically and migrate landward as water levels increase.