Heavens

Tropical Storm Ula strengthened over the night-time hours of Jan. 6 to 7 and NOAA's GOES-West satellite and NASA's RapidScat instrument provided a look at the stubborn storm that is expected to continue to intensify and curve south.

The Central Pacific Ocean's out-of-season tropical depression has strengthened into a tropical storm and has been renamed Pali. NASA's RapidScat instrument and Terra satellite gathered wind and temperature data on the unusual storm far to the southwest of Hawaii.

A student-built experiment aboard NASA's Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission has been integrated onto the spacecraft.

The Regolith X-ray Imaging Spectrometer (REXIS) will determine elemental abundances on the surface of asteroid Bennu, complementing the mineral and chemical mapping capabilities provided by two other instruments on the spacecraft.

Major improvements to methods used to process observations from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have yielded an expanded, higher-quality set of data that allows astronomers to produce the most detailed census of the sky yet made at extreme energies. A new sky map reveals hundreds of these sources, including 12 that produce gamma rays with energies exceeding a trillion times the energy of visible light. The survey also discovered four dozen new sources that remain undetected at any other wavelength.

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Using fitness DVDs to work out at home may seem like a good way to get started on new exercise goals this year, but those DVDs may also include negative imagery and demotivating language.

A study of 10 popular commercial exercise DVDs showed that the imagery in the fitness videos may be perpetuating and reinforcing hyper-sexualized and unrealistic body images, said Brad Cardinal, a kinesiology professor in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences at Oregon State University.

A trio of brightly pulsating stars at the outskirts of the Milky Way is racing away from the galaxy and may confirm a method for detecting dwarf galaxies dominated by dark matter and explain ripples in the outer disk of the galaxy.

You may have wondered why some people seem to need less sleep. Is it in their genes? It turns out that it likely is. A number of so called short-sleeper genes, which are associated with little need for sleep, have recently been identified through years of arduous research and serendipity.

How many cookies fit on a baking sheet? How many oranges fit in a bag? In order to calculate how much carbon a tropical forest can store, scientists working with data from the Smithsonian's ForestGEO network came up with biologically sound explanations behind the simple mathematical rules of thumb that can be used to determine how many trees fit in a tropical forest and how big they get, essential information for calculating the ability of forests to store carbon.

Infrared data from NASA's Aqua satellite showed powerful thunderstorms persisting in the center of a newly developed out-of-season tropical depression in the Central Pacific Ocean.

The first Tropical Depression of the 2016 hurricane season formed about five months early in the 2016 hurricane season, or two months late after the 2015 Central Pacific Hurricane Season ended. NOAA's Central Pacific Hurricane Center or CPHC considers the depression the first of the 2016 season since it formed in the 2016 calendar year.

Tropical Storm Ula continued to weaken as it pulled farther away from Fiji in the Southern Pacific Ocean. NASA's RapidScat instrument found that the strongest winds in the storm were south of the center. NOAA's GOES-West satellite captured an infrared image of the storm that showed stronger thunderstorms had recently developed around its center.

A few months ago, researchers reported the surprising discovery that marine creatures living in one Arctic fjord keep busy through the permanently dark and frigid winter months. Now, a report in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on Jan. 7, 2016, extends this activity to the whole of the Arctic. They also find that, in the absence of any sunlight, it's the moon that drives the vertical migrations of tiny marine animals.

One dozen flight mirrors are now installed on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, out of the eighteen mirror segments that make up the primary mirror. The assembly of the primary mirror is an important milestone for the Webb telescope, but is just one component of this huge and complex observatory.

The early universe was a chaotic mess of gas and matter that only began to coalesce into distinct galaxies hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang. It would take several billion more years for such galaxies to assemble into massive galaxy clusters -- or so scientists had thought.

COLUMBIA, Mo. - As the number of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders continues to rise, medical professionals have emphasized early diagnosis, intervention and treatment. However, less attention has been given to children with autism once they reach their teen years and adulthood. Now, one University of Missouri researcher is working to find ways to support teens with autism and their caregivers so the teens can transition into adulthood successfully and independently.

Kyoto, Japan -- All you need is a 20 cm telescope to observe a nearby, active black hole.

An international research team reports that the activity of such phenomena can be observed by visible light during outbursts, and that flickering light emerging from gases surrounding black holes is a direct indicator of this. The team's results, published in Nature, indicate that optical rays and not just X-rays provide reliable observational data for black hole activity.