PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The slopes of a giant Martian volcano, once covered in glacial ice, may have been home to one of the most recent habitable environments yet found on the Red Planet, according to new research led by Brown University geologists.
Heavens
NASA's Terra satellite passed over the central Alaska and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument that flies aboard captured an image of smoke and hot spots from the Funny River Fire in southern Alaska on May 26 at 21:45 UTC (5:45 p.m. EDT). The heat from the fire appears red in the imagery and the smoke appears light brown.
Ordinarily, deaf students are left in the dark when they visit a planetarium.
With the lights off, they can't see the ASL interpreter who narrates their tour of outer space. With the lights on, they can't see the constellations of stars projected overhead.
That's why a group at Brigham Young University launched the "Signglasses" project. Professor Mike Jones and his students have developed a system to project the sign language narration onto several types of glasses – including Google Glass.
The winds have shifted and the Slide Fire smoke that once hung heavy and gray over Flagstaff is now covering the city of Sedona in Arizona. Over 20,000 acres have burned in the Coconino Forest in Arizona. Inciweb.org reports that during Memorial Day crews completed the final perimeter burnout around the fire. This perimeter created by the fire crews is approximately 40 miles of line to form a containment perimeter around the fire. The fire is considered 35 percent contained at this point.
This news release is available in French.
Montreal, May 27, 2014 — Retail stores overflowing with merchandise can make consumers feel claustrophobic rather than ready to spend. But the recent move towards open, minimally stocked spaces can leave them feeling just as anxious.
The solution to this shopping conundrum may be smell, as new research from Concordia University shows.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- A new illustration of the seafloor, created by two of the world's leading ocean floor mapping experts that details underwater terrain where the missing Malaysia Airlines flight might be located, could shed additional light on what type of underwater vehicles might be used to find the missing airplane and where any debris from the crash might lie.
System 92B appears to have weakened in the last day as an infrared look at the tropical low pressure area's cloud temperatures have shown. NASA's AIRS instrument is an infrared "eye in the sky" that recently flew over the weaker tropical low pressure area.
The Slide Fire is located in Oak Creek Canyon just north of Slide Rock State Park and burning northward, up the canyon into places such as West Fork and Harding Point. Currently it has burned 7,500 acres and is 5% contained. The fire originated just about 4 to 5 miles north of Sedona, just north of Slide Rock State Park on May 20, and was human caused. Investigations regarding the cause are ongoing.
Like a bullet wrapped in a full metal jacket, a high-velocity hydrogen cloud hurtling toward the Milky Way appears to be encased in a shell of dark matter, according to a new analysis of data from the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT). Astronomers believe that without this protective shell, the high-velocity cloud (HVC) known as the Smith Cloud would have disintegrated long ago when it first collided with the disk of our Galaxy.
One week after the official start of hurricane season in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, the first tropical depression was born hundreds of miles southwest of Mexico. NASA's TRMM satellite and NOAA's GOES-West satellites provided looks inside and outside of the depression's clouds. Hurricane season in the Eastern Pacific began officially on May 15.
Supernovae—stellar explosions—are incredibly energetic, dynamic events. It is easy to imagine that they are uncommon, but the universe is a big place and supernovae are actually fairly routine. The problem with observing supernovae is knowing just when and where one is occurring and being able to point a world-class telescope at it in the hours immediately afterward, when precious data about the supernova's progenitor star is available. Fortunately the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) operated by Caltech scans the sky constantly in search of dramatic astrophysical events.
At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, TRMM's Precipitation Radar data were also used to construct a simulated 3-D view of 92B's rainfall structure looking toward the east from India. TRMM PR pulled away a veil of clouds and revealed that some powerful convective storm tops were reaching heights of almost 17 km (about 10.5 miles). The extreme rainfall in this area was returning radar reflectivity values of over 53.7 dBZ to the TRMM satellite.
WASHINGTON, May 22, 2014—If future generations were to live and work on the moon or on a distant asteroid, they would probably want a broadband connection to communicate with home bases back on Earth. They may even want to watch their favorite Earth-based TV show.
When a supernova – the explosion of a distant star —was discovered last year, astrophysicists, with the help of telescopes around the globe, rushed to observe the fireworks. In its dramatic dying flares, this star – a rare type over 10 times the mass of our sun – can tell us something about the life of these fascinating cosmic bodies, as well as helping paint the picture of how all the heavier elements in the universe are formed.
Our Sun may seem pretty impressive: 330,000 times as massive as Earth, it accounts for 99.86 percent of the Solar System's total mass; it generates about 400 trillion trillion watts of power per second; and it has a surface temperature of about 10,000 degrees Celsius. Yet for a star, it's a lightweight.