Heavens

Eta Carinae, the most luminous and massive stellar system within 10,000 light-years, is best known for an enormous eruption seen in the mid-19th century that hurled at least 10 times the sun's mass into space. This expanding veil of gas and dust, which still shrouds Eta Carinae, makes it the only object of its kind known in our galaxy. Now a study using archival data from NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes has found five objects with similar properties in other galaxies for the first time.

In a new study, Stanford University School of Medicine researchers report finding an easy method to cure laboratory mice of a common, life-threatening skin disease: A pedicure.

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.

Drought and extreme heat events slashed cereal harvests in recent decades by 9% to 10% on average in affected countries - and the impact of these weather disasters was greatest in the developed nations of North America, Europe and Australasia, according to a new study led by researchers from McGill University and the University of British Columbia.

Tropical Cyclone Ula continued to move west, passing south of Fiji when NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead and captured an image of the weakening storm.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible image of Tropical Cyclone Ula on Jan. 5, 2015 as it continued to move west, past Fiji in the South Pacific Ocean. The image showed bands of thunderstorms wrapping into the low-level center from the northeast and around the southern quadrant of the storm.

Globular star clusters are extraordinary in almost every way. They're densely packed, holding a million stars in a ball only about 100 light-years across on average. They're old, dating back almost to the birth of the Milky Way. And according to new research, they also could be extraordinarily good places to look for space-faring civilizations.

"A globular cluster might be the first place in which intelligent life is identified in our galaxy," says lead author Rosanne DiStefano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

People have evolved to have subconscious urges to over-eat, and limited ability to avoid becoming obese, especially in winter, a University of Exeter study has found.

There is not yet an evolutionary mechanism to help us overcome the lure of sweet, fatty and unhealthy food and avoid becoming overweight for understandable and sensible reasons, according to researchers.

(San Antonio, Jan. 6, 2016) -- A team of researchers led by Eric Schlegel, Vaughn Family Endowed Professor in Physics at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), has discovered a powerful galactic blast produced by a giant black hole about 26 million light years from Earth. The black hole is the nearest supermassive black hole to Earth that is currently undergoing such violent outbursts.

Mercury pollution is a global problem with local consequences: Emissions from coal-fired power plants and other sources travel around the world through the atmosphere, eventually settling in oceans and waterways, where the pollutant gradually accumulates in fish. Consumption of mercury-contaminated seafood leads to increased risk for cardiovascular disease and cognitive impairments.

In the past several years, a global treaty and a domestic policy have been put in place to curb mercury emissions. But how will such policies directly benefit the U.S.?

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have produced self-consistent computer simulations that capture the evolution of an electric current inside fusion plasma without using a central electromagnet, or solenoid. The simulations of the process, known as non-inductive current ramp-up, were performed using TRANSP, the gold-standard code developed at PPPL. The results were published in October 2015 in Nuclear Fusion. The research was supported by the DOE Office of Science.

Real world data: a gain for benefit assessments? This question was the focus of the Autumn Symposium of the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG), which was held in Cologne at the end of November 2015. Speakers from Germany and abroad presented their different points of view on this topic. The presentations are now available on iqwig.de as multimedia presentations or PDF documents for downloading.

Where's the beef?

Injury and degeneration of fibro-cartilaginous tissues, such as the knee meniscus and the intervertebral disc, have significant socioeconomic and quality-of-life costs. But the development of effective treatment strategies to address pathologies in these load-bearing tissues has been hindered by a lack of understanding of the relationships between their structure and their function.

BINGHAMTON, NY - Thousands bound together are still thinner than a single strand of human hair, but with research from Binghamton University, boron nitride nanotubes may help build better fighter planes and space shuttles.

A team of scientists led by Changhong Ke, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Binghamton University's Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science, and researcher Xiaoming Chen were the first to determine the interface strength between boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs) and epoxy and other polymers.

Trainers of dogs, horses, and other animal performers take note: a bacterium named Moorella thermoacetica has been induced to perform only a single trick, but it's a doozy. Berkeley Lab researchers are using M. thermoacetica to perform photosynthesis - despite being non-photosynthetic - and also to synthesize semiconductor nanoparticles in a hybrid artificial photosynthesis system for converting sunlight into valuable chemical products.

Using a recently developed technique to detect magnetic fields inside stars, a group of astronomers -- including Matteo Cantiello and Lars Bildsten from UC Santa Barbara's Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) -- has discovered that strong magnetic fields are very common in stars. The group's findings appear in the journal Nature.

"We have applied a novel theoretical idea that we developed just a few months ago to thousands of stars and the results are just extraordinary," said Cantiello, a specialist in stellar astrophysics at KITP.