PARMA, ID – 'Fuji' apples have become increasingly popular among consumers, but the apple variety faces some challenges on its path to full consumer appreciation. Research has determined that "consumer acceptance" of apples depends largely on fruit color, size, eating quality, and texture. Consumers are very discerning: poor color can drastically reduce the value of red apples, even if their size is acceptable. The poor and inconsistent peel color of 'Fuji' apple strains has limited the apple's marketability.
Heavens
The Skunk Fire continues to burn on the San Carlos Apache Reservation in southeastern Arizona and NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of the smoke on May 17 at 20:15 UTC (4:15 p.m. EDT/1:15 p.m. MST). A Fire Weather Watch has been posted for the region for May 20.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured this photograph of the smoke. The extent of the fire (the heat) is outlined in red in this image).
Seven fires are still burning in San Diego County, California. Arson is suspected as the origin of these fires. Two teens have been arrested on suspicion of setting the fire that spread so ferociously across the county. All of California is experiencing exceptional, extreme or severe drought conditions. The wildfire area is in the second-most dangerous category--extreme drought conditions. California's governor has cited climate change as a factor in the fires, noting the last three years have been the driest in recorded history.
The San Diego County fires that began on Wednesday May 14 as a single fire that erupted into nine fires that burned out of control for days. According to News Channel 8, the ABC affiliate in San Diego, the following summarizes what the current conditions are for the fires still left burning:
"Cocos Fire - San Marcos: This fire has burned 1,995 acres and is 87 percent contained Monday morning. All evacuation orders and road closures were lifted as of 11 a.m. Sunday, according to the City of San Marcos.
University of Leicester researchers have captured stunning images of Saturn's auroras as the planet's magnetic field is battered by charged particles from the Sun.
The team's findings provide a "smoking gun" for the theory that Saturn's auroral displays are often caused by the dramatic collapse of its "magnetic tail".
Just like comets, planets such as Saturn and the Earth have a "tail" – known as the magnetotail – that is made up of electrified gas from the Sun and flows out in the planet's wake.
FREMONT, CA (May 19, 2014): Newly published research demonstrates the ability of BioMAP® Systems, a unique set of primary human cell and co-culture assays that model human disease and pathway biology, to identify important safety aspects of drugs and chemicals more efficiently and accurately than can be achieved by animal testing.
Irvine, Calif. – Greenland's icy reaches are far more vulnerable to warm ocean waters from climate change than had been thought, according to new research by UC Irvine and NASA glaciologists. The work, published today in Nature Geoscience, shows previously uncharted deep valleys stretching for dozens of miles under the Greenland Ice Sheet.
The bedrock canyons sit well below sea level, meaning that as subtropical Atlantic waters hit the fronts of hundreds of glaciers, those edges will erode much further than had been assumed and release far greater amounts of water.
Seven fires are still burning in San Diego County, California. Arson is suspected as the origin of these fires. Two teens have been arrested on suspicion of setting the fire that spread so ferociously across the county. All of California is experiencing exceptional, extreme or severe drought conditions. The wildfire area is in the second-most dangerous category--extreme drought conditions. California's governor has cited climate change as a factor in the fires, noting the last three years have been the driest in recorded history.
The Skunk Fire in Arizona started with a lightning strike on Saturday, April 19. Currently over 10,000 acres have been affected. It is located in the San Carlos Apache Reservation. The terrain in the area is very steep with boulders making it difficult for firefighters to traverse the area to fight the fire. The fire continues to grow to the north, but fire activity in the south has been stopped. The fire is currently 20% contained.
CORVALLIS, Ore. – The quality of early child care and education programs is influenced both by funding and by the characteristics of the communities in which the programs operate, new research from Oregon State University shows.
The findings indicate that law- and policy-makers may need to consider the demographics of communities when making funding decisions about early childhood programs, said Bridget Hatfield, an assistant professor in OSU's College of Public Health and Human Sciences.
The single fire that ignited and split into nine separate fires still blazes in Southern California today. Firefighters are hoping for a break today (Thursday, May 15, 2014) but it doesn't look like luck may be on their side. Conditions continue to be bone dry with unseasonal heat (98-106 degrees) and the Santa Ana winds are kicking up and allowing these fires to easy jump fire lines. This particular fire started on Wednesday as a single fire and within a day is now nine separate fires which have burned close to 10,000 acres.
Using one of the world's largest telescopes, a Lawrence Livermore team and international collaborators have tracked the orbit of a planet at least four times the size of Jupiter.
The scientists were able to identify the orbit of the exoplanet, Beta Pictoris b, which sits 63 light years from our solar system, by using the Gemini Planet Imager's (GPI) next-generation, high-contrast adaptive optics (AO) system. This approach is sometimes referred to as extreme AO.
Scientists have recognized since the 1960s that ancient supercontinents split apart and their remnants drifted to the current positions of today's continents over the course of millions of years. One of the results was the creation of vast new oceans. Little is known of the vertebrate life that lived during that time along the eastern and western margins of the emerging South Atlantic Ocean.
Jupiter's trademark Great Red Spot — a swirling storm feature larger than Earth — is shrinking. This downsizing, which is changing the shape of the spot from an oval into a circle, has been known about since the 1930s, but now these striking new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope images capture the spot at a smaller size than ever before.
Exploding supernovae are a phenomenon that is still not fully understood. The trouble is that the state of nuclear matter in stars cannot be reproduced on Earth. In a recent paper published in EPJ E, Yves Pomeau from the University of Arizona, USA, and his French colleagues from the CNRS provide a new model of supernovae represented as dynamical systems subject to a loss of stability, just before they explode. Because similar stability losses also occur in dynamical systems in nature, this model could be used to predict natural catastrophes before they happen.