Agricultural fires continue to burn in the Indochina region as evidenced by this Aqua image taken on March 18, 2014. This natural-color image was taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, MODIS, aboard the Aqua satellite. More fires have been set in both Burma and Laos since the last image taken by MODIS on March 07. Actively burning areas, detected by MODIS's thermal bands, are outlined in red. Fire is used in cropland areas for pest and weed control and to prepare fields for planting.
Heavens
NASA's TRMM satellite passed over the remnants of Tropical Cyclone Gillian and spotted some towering thunderstorms and areas of heavy rainfall, indicating there's still power in the former tropical storm.
It takes only a fraction of a second to hit the retweet button on Twitter. But if thousands of people all retweet at once, a piece of information 140 characters long can go viral almost instantly in today's Internet landscape.
If that information is incorrect, especially in a crisis, it's hard for the social media community to gain control and push out accurate information, new research shows.
WASHINGTON D.C., March 18, 2014 -- A powerful, new three-dimensional model provides fresh insight into the turbulent death throes of supernovas, whose final explosions outshine entire galaxies and populate the universe with elements that make life on Earth possible.
The frustrated attempts of a UCLA graduate student to quantify the amount of water draining from Greenland's melting ice sheet led him to devise a new way to measure river flows from outer space, he and his professor report in a new study.
The new approach relies exclusively on the measurements of a river's width over time, which can be obtained from freely available satellite imagery.
NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible image of Tropical Cyclone Gillian's remnants in the southern Arafura Sea today, as it passes north of Australia's "Top End."
During the week of March 10, Tropical Cyclone Gillian formed in the northern Gulf of Carpentaria and made a brief landfall on the Western Cape York Peninsula, weakening to a remnant low. After re-emerging in the Gulf, Gillian became a tropical storm again and by March 17 had again weakened to a remnant low as it exited the Gulf and moved into the Arafura Sea.
NSF-funded researchers say Antarctic telescope may have provided the first direct evidence of cosmic
Researchers with the National Science Foundation-funded BICEP2 Collaboration today announced that their telescope in Antarctica has allowed them to collect what they believe is the first direct evidence for cosmic inflation.
Inflation is the cataclysmic event in which, in a fleeting fraction of a second following the Big Bang, the infant universe expanded exponentially, stretching far beyond the view of the best telescopes.
Almost 14 billion years ago, the universe we inhabit burst into existence in an extraordinary event that initiated the Big Bang. In the first fleeting fraction of a second, the universe expanded exponentially, stretching far beyond the view of our best telescopes. All this, of course, was just theory.
In many industrialized countries, city skylines are dominated by imposing glass façades and skyscrapers made of concrete and steel. There is a drawback to these magnificent structures, though – they often get very hot in the summer, so they mostly need elaborate and costly air conditioning systems. And these already account for some 14 percent of Germany's annual energy consumption. Experts reckon that total cooling requirements in buildings will triple by 2020.
Cooling and heating using metal organic frameworks
To celebrate its 24th year in orbit, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has released a beautiful new image of part of NGC 2174, also known as the Monkey Head Nebula. This colourful region is filled with young stars embedded within bright wisps of cosmic gas and dust.
DALLAS, March 16, 2014 — Sunlight plus a common titanium pigment might be the secret recipe for ridding pharmaceuticals, pesticides and other potentially harmful pollutants from drinking water. Scientists combined several high-tech components to make an easy-to-use water purifier that couldwork with the world's most basic form of energy, sunlight, in a boon for water purification in rural areas or developing countries.
DALLAS, March 16, 2014 — Adjusting the calcium level and acidity could be the key to developing new better-tasting, more eye-appealing and creamier reduced-fat sauces, desserts and salad dressings that could be on the market soon, researchers reported here today.
New evidence gathered by NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft at Mercury indicates the planet closest to the sun has shrunk up to 7 kilometers in radius over the past 4 billion years, much more than earlier estimates.
The new finding, published in the journal Nature Geoscience Sunday, March 16, solves an apparent enigma about Mercury's evolution.
Older images of surface features indicated that, despite cooling over its lifetime, the rocky planet had barely shrunk at all. But modeling of the planet's formation and aging could not explain that finding.
Computer models indicate that Ex-Tropical Cyclone Gillian will re-intensify to at least 35 knots/40 mph/62 kph over the next 24 to 36 hours. Maximum sustained surface winds are estimated at 25 to 30 knots/ 28.7 to 34.5 mph/46.3 to 55.5 kph. Minimum sea level pressure is estimated to be near 1001 millibars.
NASA's Aqua satellite caught an infrared picture of Tropical Cyclone Lusi after it transitioned into an extra-tropical storm, north of New Zealand. Gale Warnings are in effect in Northern New Zealand.
NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Lusi on March 13 at 13:41 UTC/9:41 a.m. EDT and the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder instrument captured infrared data on the storm that revealed it had become a cold-core system. When a storm becomes extra-tropical and its core changes from warm to cold, the strongest winds spread out and the storm expands.