Heavens

From Earth, the Sun looks like a calm, placid body that does little more than shine brightly while marching across the sky. Images from a bit closer, of course, show it's an unruly ball of hot gas that can expel long plumes out into space – but even this isn't the whole story.

The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 gave universities significant control of the intellectual property associated with technologies that result from their federally funded research, allowing them wide latitude to license these discoveries to companies that can commercialize them.

In a "marriage" that U.S. east coast residents would object to, the remnants of Tropical Storm Nicole coupled with an upper level low pressure area have dumped record rainfall from the Carolinas to New England on Sept. 30. The GOES-13 Satellite captured that massive "union" of a system as it begins to push off the northeastern U.S. coast today, Oct. 1.

Tropical Storm Nicole was a tropical storm for around 6 hours before it weakened into a remnant low pressure area and is now off the Florida coast. NASA Satellite imagery captured different views of Nicole's clouds as the system weakened back into a low pressure area.

An astronomer in Hawaii speculates that newly discovered planet Gliese 581g could have liquid water on its surface.

The planet, about 30 percent larger than Earth, was discovered using one of the telescopes of the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea. It orbits Gliese 581, 20 light-years from Earth in the constellation Libra.