Alexandria, VA – Since last July, NASA's Dawn spacecraft has been orbiting the asteroid Vesta, and capturing images and other data that are providing surprising results to the delight and amazement of researchers. Dawn's mission is to help reveal the processes and conditions that marked the first few million years — the dawn — of the solar system; and the information the spacecraft has collected about Vesta is changing the way scientists think about the formation of our early universe.
Heavens
URBANA – Canada's response to the "milk wars" in the United States in the 1970s was to establish a supply management system that both protects and restricts the income of its dairy farmers. A University of Illinois study examined how the government regulation affects farmers' perceptions and found a climate of trust despite the inefficiency in milk production it maintains.
Modeling biological systems can provide key insights for scientists and medical researchers, but periodic cycles that repeat themselves – so-called oscillatory systems – pose some key challenges. Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new method for estimating the parameters used in such models – which may advance modeling in research areas ranging from cancer to fertility.
The downturn in the housing market in the last three years has left the UK a nation of frustrated, unfulfilled house-movers, according to the latest data from Understanding Society, a study of 40,000 UK households funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.
Launch madness will hit the east coast in March as NASA launches five rockets in approximately five minutes to study the high-altitude jet stream from its Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
The Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment (ATREX) is a Heliophysics sounding rocket mission that will gather information needed to better understand the process responsible for the high-altitude jet stream located 60 to 65 miles above the surface of the Earth.
In the grand scheme of the solar system, Venus and Earth are almost the same distance from the sun. Yet the planets differ dramatically: Venus is some 100 times hotter than Earth and its days more than 200 times longer. The atmosphere on Venus is so thick that the longest any spacecraft has survived on its surface before being crushed is a little over two hours. There's another difference, too. Earth has a magnetic field and Venus does not – a crucial distinction when assessing the effects of the sun on each planet.
Two NASA satellites have been measuring rainfall and cloud top temperatures in Tropical Storm as it has been "going loopy" in the Mozambique Channel over the last couple of days. Irina is making a cyclonic loop, something that a tropical cyclone does on occasion whenever there are a couple of weather systems that push it in different directions.
Investigating the history of water on Earth is critical to understanding the planet's climate. One central question is whether Earth has always had the same amount of water on and surrounding it, the same so-called "water budget". Has Earth gained or lost water from comets and meteorites? Has water been lost into space? New research into the Earth's primordial oceans conducted by researchers at the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen and Stanford University revisits Earth's historical water budget.
Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists and an international research team have announced discovery of molecular oxygen ions (O2+) in the upper-most atmosphere of Dione, one of the 62 known moons orbiting the ringed planet. The research appeared recently in Geophysical Research Letters and was made possible via instruments aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which was launched in 1997.
Phobos is the larger and closer of the two natural satellites of Mars. Despite decades of Martian exploration, we still know very little about Phobos. Many fundamental properties of this small potato-shaped body stay vague, for example, its gravitational field. SHI Xian and coauthors from Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and Technical University Berlin recently updated working models for the gravitational field of Phobos.
The permafrost is degrading, and at the same time, the desertification is also developing at the surface of Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, under the condition of global warming. Sand layer is accelerated permafrost degradation or protecting permafrost? No significant conclusions have been drawn currently. Some studies have shown that ground temperature in regions of windblown sand within the permafrost zone of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau are higher than in regions not affected by sand, which may accelerate the degradation of permafrost.
The future of Canadian outdoor ice hockey – a sport synonymous with the country's culture – is being threatened by anthropogenic climate change, new research suggests.
As warmer winter temperatures restrict ice from freezing over, researchers believe the ice hockey stars of the future will have limited access to the frozen lakes and backyard rinks that have helped shape the careers of some of the greatest professional players, such as Wayne Gretzky; the Canadian considered to be the greatest of all time who started skating as a child on a rink in his backyard.
The AIRS instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite provided forecasters with an infrared look at what was happening "under the hood" of Tropical Storm Irina's clouds and saw two reasons why it temporarily weakened before moving into the Mozambique Channel and heading for landfall in Mozambique in a couple of days.
Tropical Cyclone 15S has had a difficult "childhood." It was born on March 1 and immediately dealt with a harsh environment. The cyclone weakened within 24 hours to a remnant low pressure area, and NASA's TRMM satellite revealed there was still some strength remaining in the storm.
Astronomers using data from NASA's Hubble Telescope have observed what appears to be a clump of dark matter left behind from a wreck between massive clusters of galaxies. The result could challenge current theories about dark matter that predict galaxies should be anchored to the invisible substance even during the shock of a collision.