Tropical storm warnings now issued for a portion of the Southwestern coast of Mexico as Polo continues to strengthen. Infrared imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite showed powerful thunderstorms around the center of the storm.
Heavens
Although NASA's Aqua satellite showed that Hurricane Edouard is far from U.S. soil, it is powerful enough that it is creating dangerous swells along the U.S. East Coast.
On Sept. 17, the National Hurricane Center noted "Swells from Edouard will affect portions of the east coast of the United States north of Florida beginning today. These swells will likely cause life-threatening rip current conditions along most of the United States east coast for the next couple of days."
At the Intelligent Transportation Systems World Congress last week, MIT researchers received one of the best-paper awards for a new system, dubbed RoadRunner, that uses GPS-style turn-by-turn directions to route drivers around congested roadways.
In simulations using data supplied by Singapore's Land Transit Authority, the researchers compared their system to one currently in use in Singapore, which charges drivers with dashboard-mounted transponders a toll for entering congested areas.
Tropical Storm Odile continues to spread moisture and generate strong thunderstorms with heavy rainfall over northern Mexico's mainland and the Baja California as well as the southwestern U.S. NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite measured rainfall rates from space as it passed over Odile.
Furnishing a research lab can be pretty expensive. Now a team led by an engineer at Michigan Technological University has published an open-source library of designs that will let scientists slash the cost of one commonly used piece of equipment: the syringe pump.
Syringe pumps are used to dispatch precise amounts of liquid, as for drug delivery or mixing chemicals in a reaction. They can also cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have found a monster lurking in a very unlikely place. New observations of the ultracompact dwarf galaxy M60-UCD1 have revealed a supermassive black hole at its heart, making this tiny galaxy the smallest ever found to host a supermassive black hole. This suggests that there may be many more supermassive black holes that we have missed, and tells us more about the formation of these incredibly dense galaxies. The results will be published in the journal Nature on 18 September 2014.
SALT LAKE CITY, Sept. 17, 2014 – A University of Utah astronomer and his colleagues discovered that an ultracompact dwarf galaxy harbors a supermassive black hole – the smallest galaxy known to contain such a massive light-sucking object. The finding suggests huge black holes may be more common than previously believed.
Tropical Storm Kalmaegi made landfall on September 17 near the border of Vietnam and China and moved inland. Soon after the landfall as a typhoon, NASA's Terra satellite passed overhead and captured an image of the weaker tropical storm.
The MODIS instrument that flies aboard Aqua took a visible picture of Tropical Storm Kalmaegi on Sept. 17 at 03:35 UTC (Sept. 16 at 11:35 p.m. EDT). The image showed the center of the storm in northeastern Vietnam, just south of the China border. Kalmaegi's clouds extended north into southern China and west into Laos.
California's King Fire tripled in size from Monday, September 15 to Tuesday morning, September 16, and current weather conditions are doing nothing more than helping it along. The hot, drought conditions and winds have produced over 12 major fires that still burn all over California. The King Fire is just one of them. It is located east of Sacramento in the Pollock Pines community. Residents have been given mandatory evacuation orders and over 1,600 homes are currently threatened by this fire.
A new study of high school activities bears this message for incoming high school students: Play what the smart kids play.
Joining an extra-curricular team or club with members that get good grades can double a high school student's odds of going to college.
And Brigham Young University sociologist and study co-author Lance Erickson knows how to sell the study to teens.
In cosmology, cold dark matter is a form of matter the particles of which move slowly in comparison with light, and interact weakly with electromagnetic radiation. It is estimated that only a minute fraction of the matter in the Universe is baryonic matter, which forms stars, planets and living organisms. The rest, comprising over 80%, is dark matter and energy.
Smoke from the fires in the Selway Complex is wafting into the Selway River valley in this image taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Terra satellite on September 15, 2014. Actively burning areas, detected by MODIS's thermal bands, are outlined in red. All the fires began between August 10 and August 25, 2014 by lightning strikes. The following fires are part of the Selway Complex: Raven Creek, Elevator Mountain, Eagle Creek, Vance Mountain, Nick Wynn, and Jerusalem fires.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — After decades of decline, grasses have returned to some once-denuded patches of Cape Cod's saltmarshes. To the eye, the marsh in those places seems healthy again, but a new study makes clear that a key service of the marsh – coastal protection – remains diminished.
An international research group led by Junko Ueda, a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science postdoctoral fellow, has made surprising observations that most galaxy collisions in the nearby Universe — within 40 million light-years from Earth — result in so-called disc galaxies.
Manufactures of turbine engines for airplanes, automobiles and electric generation plants could expedite the development of more durable, energy-efficient turbine blades thanks to a partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, the German Aerospace Center and the universities of Central Florida and Cleveland State.