Heavens

Since Tropical Storm Karina weakened from hurricane status, and since then, NASA satellite data has shown that the storm has been pretty consistent with strength and thunderstorm development.

Just about every parent is familiar with the signs: the crying, the stomping feet and pouting lips, all of which are usually followed by a collapse to the floor and a wailed insistence that, "It's not fair!"

Since Tropical Storm Karina weakened from hurricane status, and since then, NASA satellite data has shown that the storm has been pretty consistent with strength and thunderstorm development.

There is nothing like a head cold to make us feel a little dazed. We get things like colds and the flu because of changes in our immune system. Researchers have a good idea what causes immune system changes on Earth—think stress, inadequate sleep and improper nutrition.

New York, NY—August 18, 2014—The web can be an opaque black box: it leverages our personal information without our knowledge or control. When, for instance, a user sees an ad about depression online, she may not realize that she is seeing it because she recently sent an email about being sad. Roxana Geambasu and Augustin Chaintreau, both assistant professors of computer science at Columbia Engineering, are seeking to change that, and in doing so bring more transparency to the web.

The universe has so many black holes that it's impossible to count them all. There may be 100 million of these intriguing astral objects in our galaxy alone. Nearly all black holes fall into one of two classes: big, and colossal. Astronomers know that black holes ranging from about 10 times to 100 times the mass of our sun are the remnants of dying stars, and that supermassive black holes, more than a million times the mass of the sun, inhabit the centers of most galaxies.

Bragging of sexual conquests, suggestive jokes and innuendo, and sexual one-upmanship can all be a part of demonstrating one's manhood, especially for young men eager to exert their masculinity.

But how does masculinity manifest itself among young men who have pledged sexual abstinence before marriage? How do they handle sexual temptation, and what sorts of challenges crop up once they're married?

We may joke about looking for a needle in a haystack, but that's nothing compared to searching for stardust in a foil! A new paper published in Science reveals that such work has led to the discovery of seven dust particles that are not only out of this world, they're out of this solar system.

NASA's Terra satellite passed over Hurricane Karina before it weakened to a tropical storm early on August 15 and imagery showed the vertical wind shear was already taking its toll.

Tropical Storm Julio doesn't have any strong thunderstorms or strong convection left in it according to infrared satellite imagery from NASA.

When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Storm Julio on August 14 at 12:23 UTC (8:23 a.m. EDT), the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder known as AIRS analyzed the clouds and temperatures of the storm. The AIRS data showed that cloud tops had warmed and dropped lower in the atmosphere. That indicates that the strength behind rising air had weakened and was not forming strong, high thunderstorms with cold cloud tops.

There has been much recent interest, especially among cosmologists, in theories known as galileons. Galileons are an interesting and novel, though still hypothetical, class of effective scalar fields which are extremely universal and have attracted much recent attention. They arise generically in describing the short distance behavior of the new degrees of freedom introduced during the process of modifying gravity, and in describing the dynamics of extra dimensional brane worlds.

Since 2006, when NASA's Stardust spacecraft delivered its aerogel and aluminum foil dust collectors to Earth, a team of scientists has combed through the collectors in search of rare, microscopic particles of interstellar dust.

The team now reports that they have found seven dust motes that probably came from outside our solar system, perhaps created in a supernova explosion millions of years ago and altered by eons of exposure to the extremes of space. They would be the first confirmed samples of contemporary interstellar dust.

The first analysis of space dust collected by a special collector onboard NASA's Stardust mission and sent back to Earth for study in 2006 suggests the tiny specks, which likely originated from beyond our solar system, are more complex in composition and structure than previously imagined.

The analysis, completed at a number of facilities including the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) opens a door to studying the origins of the solar system and possibly the origin of life itself.

An international team of sky scholars, including a key researcher from Johns Hopkins, has produced new maps of the material located between the stars in the Milky Way. The results should move astronomers closer to cracking a stardust puzzle that has vexed them for nearly a century.

Hurricane Julio moved past the Hawaiian Islands like a car on a highway in the distance, and NASA's Terra satellite captured an image of the storm, now downgraded to a tropical storm located more than 700 miles away. Julio is far enough away from Hawaii so that there are no coastal watches or warnings in effect.