Heavens

The international team, led by Stephane Guilloteau at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux, France, measured the temperature of large dust grains around the young star 2MASS J16281370-2431391 in the spectacular Rho Ophiuchi star formation region, about 400 light-years from Earth.

NASA's follow-on to the successful ICESat mission will employ a never-before-flown technique for determining the topography of ice sheets and the thickness of sea ice, but that won't be the only first for this mission.

Slated for launch in 2018, NASA's Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) also will carry a 3-D printed part made of polyetherketoneketone (PEKK), a material that has never been used in 3-D manufacturing, let alone flown in space.

Chestnut Hill, MA (February 2, 2016): When it comes to making healthier food purchases in our nation's grocery stores, the simpler the nutritional packaging is, the better. In fact, if one only has to look at a single number - a score that represents the nutritional value of what's inside the packaging - a consumer is more likely to buy healthier products.

Use of the medication dupilumab resulted in improvement of nasal polyps in patients with chronic sinusitis and nasal polyposis not responsive to intranasal corticosteroids alone, according to a study in the February 2 issue of JAMA.

Recent studies purported to demonstrate such a basic 'Theory of Mind' in non-human animals like chimpanzees, monkeys, and corvids. However, these studies remain controversial because they share a common confound: the other's head orientation or line of gaze, which could serve as an associative cue.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Evidence reported in a new review by Brown University researchers suggests that Americans are not using infertility treatments and technologies as much as they could. A major reason, the authors write, is that a lack of public or private insurance coverage for reproductive medicine leaves many people unable to afford to build a family.

DURHAM, N.C. -- By examining how Earth cools itself back down after a period of natural warming, a study by scientists at Duke University and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirms that global temperature does not rise or fall chaotically in the long run. Unless pushed by outside forces, temperature should remain stable.

The new evidence may finally help put the chill on skeptics' belief that long-term global warming occurs in an unpredictable manner, independently of external drivers such as human impacts.

BELLINGHAM, Washington, USA, and CARDIFF, UK -- For more than 40 years, Landsat satellites have provided a wealth of data that has informed our understanding of Earth features, phenomena, and environments as diverse as coral reefs, urbanization, tropical deforestation, and glaciers. Now, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology have developed a way to substantially improve images derived from Landsat systems.

When the moon is high in the sky, it creates bulges in the planet's atmosphere that creates imperceptible changes in the amount of rain that falls below.

New University of Washington research to be published in Geophysical Research Letters shows that the lunar forces affect the amount of rain - though very slightly.

"As far as I know, this is the first study to convincingly connect the tidal force of the moon with rainfall," said corresponding author Tsubasa Kohyama, a UW doctoral student in atmospheric sciences.

Amsterdam, February 1, 2016 - 75% of the vaccine-related posts on Pinterest are negative towards vaccination, according to research published in Vaccine. The authors of the study, from Virginia Commonwealth University in the US, are calling for better communication about vaccination.

(Boston)--For the first time researchers have developed a process for altering the ingredients in a sunscreen that does not impact its sun protection factor (SPF), but does allow the body to produce vitamin D.The findings, published in the peer reviewed journal PLOS ONE, has led to the production of a new sunscreen called Solar D.

NASA's Terra satellite captured an image of Tropical Cyclone Stan on Jan 31 as it moved south through Western Australia and weakened to a remnant low pressure area.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology said that Tropical Cyclone Stan made landfall on Jan. 30, 2016 at noon Eastern Standard Time/U.S. (1700 UTC) on the Pilbara coast of Australia just to the east of Pardoo as a category 2 cyclone.

The end of Moore's Law -- the prediction that transistor density would double every two years -- was one of the hottest topics in electronics-related discussions in 2015. Silicon-based technologies have nearly reached the physical limits of the number and size of transistors that can be crammed into one chip, but alternative technologies are still far from mass implementation. The amount of heat generated during operation and the sizes of atoms and molecules in materials used in transistor manufacturing are some of problems that need to be solved for Moore's Law to make a comeback.

The surface of the sun writhes and dances. Far from the still, whitish-yellow disk it appears to be from the ground, the sun sports twisting, towering loops and swirling cyclones that reach into the solar upper atmosphere, the million-degree corona - but these cannot be seen in visible light. Then, in the 1950s, we got our first glimpse of this balletic solar material, which emits light only in wavelengths invisible to our eyes.

A NASA team has been tapped to build a new type of communications modem that will employ an emerging, potentially revolutionary technology that could transform everything from telecommunications, medical imaging, advanced manufacturing to national defense.