Heavens

Fish consumption advisories are used to inform citizens about fish with potentially hazardous levels of toxins such as methyl mercury. When investigators examined five states that set their own recommendations regarding screening values for methyl mercury, the team found that the states issued fish consumption advisories for fewer than half of the water bodies that would have advisories if recommendations by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were followed.

Scientists have detected a burst of radio waves from six billion light years away, one of a handful they've discovered in the past decade -- and this time they have clues about its source.

Astronomers have tied the origin of a Fast Radio Burst to a highly magnetized, gas-filled region of space, providing a new hint in the decade-long quest to explain the mysterious radio pulses.

"We now know that the energy from this particular burst passed through a dense magnetized field shortly after it formed," says Kiyoshi Masui, an astronomer with the University of British Columbia in Canada and lead author of the new findings published today in Nature.

Matter known as ordinary, which makes up everything we know, corresponds to only 5% of the Universe. Approximately half of this percentage still eluded detection. Numerical simulations made it possible to predict that the rest of this ordinary matter should be located in the large-scale structures that form the 'cosmic web' at temperatures between 100,000 and 10 million degrees. A team led by a researcher from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, observed this phenomenon directly.

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), brief yet brilliant eruptions of cosmic radio waves, have baffled astronomers since they were first reported nearly a decade ago. Though they appear to come from the distant Universe, none of these enigmatic events has revealed more than the slimmest details about how and where it formed, until now.

PITTSBURGH--Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), brief yet brilliant eruptions of cosmic radio waves from the distant universe, have baffled astronomers since they were first reported nearly a decade ago. Though they appear to come from the distant universe, none of these enigmatic events have revealed more than the slimmest details about how and where it formed, until now.

This news release is available in Portuguese.

The Ophel excavations at the foot of the southern wall of the Temple Mount, conducted by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Institute of Archaeology under the direction of Dr. Eilat Mazar, have unearthed an impression of the royal seal of King Hezekiah (727-698 BCE).

Measuring 9.7 X 8.6 mm, the oval impression was imprinted on a 3 mm thick soft bulla (piece of inscribed clay) measuring 13 X 12 mm. Around the impression is the depression left by the frame of the ring in which the seal was set.

A planet discovered last year sitting at an unusually large distance from its star - 16 times farther than Pluto is from the sun - may have been kicked out of its birthplace close to the star in a process similar to what may have happened early in our own solar system's history.

MIT researchers have shown that by exploiting the polarization of light -- the physical phenomenon behind polarized sunglasses and most 3-D movie systems -- they can increase the resolution of conventional 3-D imaging devices as much as 1,000 times.

The technique could lead to high-quality 3-D cameras built into cellphones, and perhaps to the ability to snap a photo of an object and then use a 3-D printer to produce a replica.

Further out, the work could also abet the development of driverless cars.

Hurricane Sandra fizzled in the southern Gulf of California before moving ashore but on its journey north it was close enough to drop more than 2 feet of rainfall along part of the coast of western Mexico. Data from NASA's Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) were used to estimate the amount of rainfall that hurricane Sandra produced during the period from November 23-29, 2015.

What is the climate waiting for Russia and Europe in 15-20 years? Will be there weather abnormalities in the coming decades? Will some areas experience more severe winter, while the others will have hot summer? It all depends on how much the climate will be affected by the dynamics of the possible onset of minimum solar magnetic activity. The Sun's behaviour in future cycles is the main theme of a publication on the forecast and explanation of the minima of solar activity.

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CHICAGO - Research presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) tackles one of life's great mysteries: what causes a knuckle to "crack" out loud?

"It's extremely common for joints to crack, pop and snap," said Robert D. Boutin, M.D., professor of radiology at University of California, Davis (UC Davis) Health System. "We were interested in pursuing this study because there's a raging debate about whether the knuckle-cracking sound results from a bubble popping in the joint or from a bubble being created in the joint."

Science has a new weapon in the global war against parasitic worms that kill hundreds of thousands or people annually: xWORM.

While testing various drugs, parasitologists spend interminable hours staring down microscopes, checking whether the worms are dead or alive after being exposed to the drug.

xWORM is the result of collaboration between researchers at James Cook University (JCU) in Australia, ACEA Biosciences and George Washington University.