Wildfires in far eastern Russia dot the landscape and what isn't covered by the fires is covered by the smoke that rises from these wildfires. This image taken by the Terra satellite shows the entire area covered with a blanket of heavy smoke coming off of dozens of wildfires that have broken out in the remote areas of Russia. Usually these fires are caused by lightning strikes that then consume the dry vegetation. With nothing to stop the spread, these fires take off and cover the landscape, especially during this time of year.
Heavens
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Materials that are firmly bonded together with epoxy and other tough adhesives are ubiquitous in modern life — from crowns on teeth to modern composites used in construction. Yet it has proved remarkably difficult to study how these bonds fracture and fail, and how to make them more resistant to such failures.
During the middle of 2013, Jupiter's moon Io came alive with volcanism. Now, an image from the Gemini Observatory captures what is one of the brightest volcanoes ever seen in our solar system. The image, obtained on August 29, reveals the magnitude of the eruption that was the "grand finale" in a series of eruptions on the distant moon. Io's volcanism is caused by the tidal push-and-pull of massive Jupiter, which heats the satellite's interior – making it our Solar System's most volcanically active known body.
Three massive volcanic eruptions occurred on Jupiter's moon Io within a two-week period last August, leading astronomers to speculate that these presumed rare "outbursts," which can send material hundreds of miles above the surface, might be much more common than astronomers thought.
NASA and NOAA satellites have been supplying forecasters with data developing tropical cyclones in the Eastern and Central Pacific Ocean and over the last several days. There have been as many as five tropical systems at the same time. On Monday, August 4, there were three tropical systems stretching from west to east: Tropical Depression Genevieve in the Central Pacific, Hurricane Iselle and Tropical Storm Julio in the Eastern Pacific.
Tropical Depression Genevieve May Strengthen
The low pressure area known as System 96W struggled to organize for a week and finally became Tropical Storm Nakri on August 2 as the Suomi NPP satellite passed overhead. Nakri had a short life, however, as it dissipated the following day while approaching South Korea.
On Saturday, August 2, at 9 p.m. EDT, Nakri's maximum sustained winds were near 40 knots (46 mph/74 kph). At that time it was centered about 100 nautical miles southeast of Kunsan Air Base, near 35.0 north and 125.0 east. It was moving to the north at 14 knots (16.1 mph/21.9 kph).
As Super Typhoon Halong tracks north through the Northwestern Pacific Ocean, NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites have seen the powerful storm appear to wink at space as it developed and "opened" an eye and then close its eye as clouds moved over it. That wink appears to be a sign of eyewall replacement in the powerful storm.
DENVER (Aug. 4, 2014) – Sports stadiums in Denver suffer from excess parking, creating unattractive concrete spaces, heat islands, and missed economic opportunities, according to a new study from the University of Colorado Denver.
"We tend to think the more parking, the better," said Wesley Marshall, PhD, PE, assistant professor of civil engineering at the CU Denver College of Engineering and Applied Science. "But too much parking can be as bad as too little."
San Antonio -- Aug. 4, 2014 -- Scientists yesterday highlighted an impressive list of achievements in researching the outer heliosphere at the 40th International Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) Scientific Assembly in Moscow.
Growing consensus on climate and land use change means that it is reasonable to assume, at the very least, that flood levels in a region may change. Then why, ask Rosner et al. in a new study, do the dominant risk assessment techniques used to decide whether to build new flood protection infrastructure nearly always start with an assumption of "no trend" in flood behavior?
Last year, the Planck Telescope revealed the most detailed picture of the cosmic microwave background, the relic radiation from the Big Bang. But this map contains features that challenge the standard model of cosmology, the theory that describes our entire Universe from early on. Who is right, the map or the theory? Scientists from EPFL (Switzerland) and CEA (France) have shown that several of these enigmatic features disappear from the map by processing Planck telescope's data differently and including other effects, such as the motion of the Milky Way.
Tropical Storm Bertha took a "vacation" in the Bahamas on August 3 and NASA's Terra satellite captured an image of the storm that appeared be centered over "Crooked Island."
On August 2, before Bertha visited the Bahamas, the western half of the storm passed over Puerto Rico. A visible image captured by NASA's Terra satellite showed Bertha's clouds stretched from Puerto Rico east, over the British Virgin Islands. NOAA's National Weather Service office in San Juan, Puerto Rico reported 1.36 inches of rainfall from Bertha on August 2.
PHILADELPHIA — Consumption of a type of starch that acts like fiber may help reduce colorectal cancer risk associated with a high red meat diet, according to a study published in Cancer Prevention Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.
In addition to having a lower cost, sounding rockets offer a valuable test bed for new technology that may subsequently be flown on longer-term space missions. Another advantage of sounding rockets is that the instruments parachute back to the ground so they can be recovered and re-used. The EUNIS mission will be re-tuned to focus on a different set of solar wavelengths – ones that can also spot the extremely high temperature material representative of nanoflares -- and fly again sometime in 2016.
As a quantum state collapses from a quantum superposition to a classical state or a different superposition, it will follow a path known as a quantum trajectory. For each start and end state there is an optimal or "most likely" path, but it is not as easy to predict the path or track it experimentally as a straight-line between two points would be in our everyday, classical world.