Heavens

The spectacular aftermath of a 360 million year old cosmic collision is revealed in great detail in new images from ESO's Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory. Among the debris is a rare and mysterious young dwarf galaxy. This galaxy is providing astronomers with an excellent opportunity to learn more about similar galaxies that are expected to be common in the early Universe, but are normally too faint and distant to be observed by current telescopes.

Early life exposures to toxic chemicals such as PCBs and DDT dampen an infant's response to the tuberculosis vaccine, according to a new study from the University of Rochester Environmental Health Sciences Center.

FROSTBURG, MD (December 9, 2015)--Emissions controls on coal-fired power plants are making a difference in reducing exposure of mercury to people, especially in the western Maryland community. A study of air quality from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science found that levels of mercury in the air from power plant emissions dropped more than half over a 10-year period, coinciding with stricter pollution controls.

The children's flu vaccine is unlikely to trigger an allergic reaction in those with egg allergy, finds a study in The BMJ today. The vaccine is also appropriate for young people with well-controlled asthma or recurrent wheeze, the findings show.

Evidence suggests that children and young people are the main spreaders of influenza infection. In 2012, the UK Department of Health therefore recommended annual vaccination of those aged 2-16 years of age with live attenuated influenza vaccine (LAIV) as part of the NHS childhood vaccination programme.

MADISON, Wis. -- Starting around 1950, a series of advances formed a clear and accepted picture of how individual stars are born, evolve and die. As they age, the changing patterns of color, light output, size and lifespan of stars are predictable. Every star like the sun will become a red giant, a planetary nebula and finally a white dwarf.

A public health solution of treating all law-enforcement-related deaths as a notifiable condition, which would allow public health departments to report these data in real-time, could help to address the ongoing problem of police violence and police deaths in the United States according to Nancy Krieger and colleagues from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, United States, in a new Essay published this week in PLOS Medicine.

Exploding stars may seem like an unlikely yardstick for measuring the vast distances of space, but astronomers have been mapping the universe for decades using these stellar eruptions, called supernovas, with surprising accuracy.

Type Ia supernovas--exploding white dwarf stars--are considered the most reliable distance markers for objects beyond our local group of galaxies. Because all Type Ia supernovas give off about the same amount of light, their distance can be inferred by the light intensity observed from Earth.

An analysis that included more than 17,000 physicians in training finds that nearly one-third screened positive for depression or depressive symptoms during residency, according to a study in the December 8 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on medical education.

In a letter published in the prestigious journal Nature Physics, a team of scientists from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem suggests a solution to the Galactic radioactive plutonium puzzle.

All the Plutonium used on Earth is artificially produced in nuclear reactors. Still, it turns out that it is also produced in nature.

WASHINGTON - Optics researchers have discovered a new way to measure incredibly small distortions in light waves by indirectly studying the behavior of curious 'quasiparticles' - ripples in the electric field that emerge when light and solid surfaces interact. This new technique holds significant promise for applications in metrology and chemical sensing, as well as potential improvements in adaptive optics for microscopy and biomedicine.

ASTROSAT is India's first dedicated science space mission which was launched on 28 September 2015. The Large Area X-ray Propositional Counter (LAXPC), designed and developed at TIFR, Mumbai, is one of the major payloads on ASTROSAT. The LAXPC instrument became fully operational on 19 October 2015 for the first time in space. A cluster of three co-aligned identical detectors provides a large area of collection of about 8000 cm2.

Greenland's glaciers are retreating quickly, and a new study shows in historical terms just how quickly: over the past century, at least twice as fast as any other time in the past 9,500 years. The study also provides new evidence for just how sensitive glaciers are to temperature, showing that they responded to past abrupt cooling and warming periods, some of which might have lasted only decades.

Do you know how easy it is to improve the quality of the air you breathe every day? Or how much indoor air quality affects your health and productivity? If you're not sure, you're not alone. According to a recent survey by a group of Drexel University environmental and architectural engineering researchers, there is quite a bit of confusion about the costs and benefits of indoor air quality improvement -- even among building owners, designers, managers and tenants.

HANOVER, N.H. - Two studies by Dartmouth researchers and their colleagues shed new light on mercury pollution in the waters of the northeastern United States.

The studies -- here and here -- appear in the journal Marine Chemistry. PDFs are available on request.

An add-on for antivirus software that can scan across a computer network and trap malicious activity missed by the system firewall is being developed by an international team. Details are reported in the International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics. The research raises the issue that the developers of both operating systems and antivirus software must work more closely together to reduce the burden of malware on computer systems the world over.