Heavens

Irvine, Calif., May 12, 2014 – A rapidly melting section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to be in irreversible decline, with nothing to stop the entire glacial basin from disappearing into the sea, according to researchers at the University of California, Irvine and NASA.

The NHC discussion on May 9 noted that the upper-level winds have become unfavorable for development and this system, so System 90E now has a very low chance, near 0 percent of becoming a tropical cyclone during the next 48 hours or over the next five days for that matter- which is good news for southwestern Mexico.

Northeastern University researchers at the Marine Science Center have shown that the behavior of the "middle child" in the predator-prey food chain plays a strong role in determining how the reef as a whole will fare. The new research from the team was published online on Tuesday in the journal Ecology Letters.

Amsterdam, 9 May. A study of healthy senior men has found that "relatively intensive" endurance exercise confers benefits on the heart irrespective of the age at which they began training.(1) The benefits were evident and comparable in those who had started training before the age of 30 or after the age of 40. As a result, said the investigators, 40 is not too old to start endurance training.

The study, which was performed in France, was reported today at the EuroPRevent congress 2014 in Amsterdam by David Matelot, from the Inserm 1099 unit in Rennes, France.

The sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 6:07 a.m. EDT on May 8, 2014, and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, captured images of it. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Looking at a smooth sheet of plastic in one University of Illinois laboratory, no one would guess that an impact had recently blasted a hole through it.

Illinois researchers have developed materials that not only heal, but regenerate. Until now, self-repairing materials could only bond tiny microscopic cracks. The new regenerating materials fill in large cracks and holes by regrowing material.

A tropical low pressure area known as System 90E is located a couple of hundred miles southwest of Zihuatenejo, Mexico today and was seen by NASA's Terra satellite on its way to a landfall.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible image of System 90E on May 7 at 18:50 UTC/ 2:50 p.m. EDT as it headed to a landfall in southwestern Mexico. The low appeared disorganized as it approached the southwestern coast of Mexico near the states of Michoacan and Guerrero.

The tropical low pressure area known as System 91B has been making a slow northerly crawl while sitting inland in southwestern India, and NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible image of the struggling storm that showed half of it is over the Northern Indian Ocean.

Almost all herbivorous insects are specialized to feed on specific host plants and have adapted to their chemical defenses. Flea beetles are important pests of cabbage and other cruciferous plants, such as mustard, horseradish and rapeseed. These plants use a sophisticated defense system, known as the mustard oil bomb, to get rid of their enemies : If plant tissues are wounded, glucosinolates and an enzyme known as myrosinase come into contact, and, as a result, toxic metabolites are formed which deter most insects.

MOSS LANDING, CA — Thousands of shipping containers are lost from cargo vessels each year. Many of these containers eventually sink to the deep seafloor. In 2004, scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) discovered a lost shipping container almost 1,300 meters (4,200 feet) below the surface of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. In the first-ever survey of its kind, researchers from MBARI and the sanctuary recently described how deep-sea animal communities on and around the container differed from those in surrounding areas.

This event was particularly exciting for the IRIS team, as this was the first X-class flare ever observed by IRIS. IRIS launched in June 2013 to zoom in on layers of the sun, called the chromosphere and transition region, through which all the energy and heat of a flare must travel as it forms. This region, overall is called the interface region, has typically been very hard to untangle – but on March 29, IRIS provided scientists with the first detailed view of what happens in this region during a flare.

There's a tropical low pressure area in the Eastern Pacific Ocean today, about 8 days before the official Eastern Pacific hurricane season begins. NOAA's National Hurricane Center is giving it a 50 percent chance of becoming a tropical depression in the next two days, and NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead to gather infrared data on it.

Move over, Matrix - astronomers have done you one better. They have created the first realistic virtual universe using a computer simulation called "Illustris." Illustris can recreate 13 billion years of cosmic evolution in a cube 350 million light-years on a side with unprecedented resolution.

The work, which has had the participation of the Ikerbasque researcher Javier Gorosabal, co-director of the Associated Unit with the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia/CSIC-UPV/EHU, has been published in the prestigious journal Nature.

There is no other event in the cosmos that can compete in terms of energy and intensity with stellar explosions on the outer reaches of the universe and which are known as LGRBs (Long Gamma-Ray Bursts): in just one second a single GRB can emit as many as hundreds of stars like the Sun during its 10,000-million-year-lifetime.

HOUSTON – (May 7, 2014) – Rice University bioengineers have created a hydrogel that instantly turns from liquid to semisolid at close to body temperature – and then degrades at precisely the right pace.

The gel shows potential as a bioscaffold to support the regrowth of bone and other three-dimensional tissues in a patient's body using the patient's own cells to seed the process.