Heavens

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new national study provides surprising evidence of how cohabitation contributes to the number of long-term relationships lasting eight years or longer.

It is well-known that couples who live together are much more likely to end their relationships within a short-term period than are married couples.

Texting on your phone while walking alters posture and balance according to a study published in PLOS ONE on January 22, 2014 by Siobhan Schabrun and colleagues from the University of Queensland.

Sometimes solving a problem doesn't require a high-tech solution. Sometimes, you have to look no farther than your desktop.

Three students from Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering — an undergraduate, a master's student, and their teaching assistant — have proven that pencils and regular office paper can be used to create functional devices that can measure strain and detect hazardous chemical vapors.

For decades, astrophysicists have encountered a puzzling contradiction: although many galactic-wind models—simulations of how matter is distributed in our universe—predict that the majority of the "normal" matter exists in stars at the center of galaxies, in actuality these stars account for less than 10 percent of the matter in the universe. A new set of simulations offer insight into this mismatch between the models and reality: the energy released by individual stars within galaxies can have a substantial effect on where matter is located in the universe.

A team of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists are using mini-satellites that work as "space cops" to help control traffic in space.

The scientists used a series of six images over a 60-hour period taken from a ground-based satellite to prove that it is possible to refine the orbit of another satellite in low earth orbit.

Regular exposure to mild cold may be a healthy and sustainable way to help people lose weight, according to researchers writing in the Cell Press publication Trends in Endocrinology & Metabolism on January 22nd. On the flip side, that means our warm and cozy homes and offices might be partly responsible for our expanding waistlines.

In the U.S., someone suffers a heart attack every 34 seconds — their heart is starved of oxygen and suffers irreparable damage. Engineering new heart tissue in the laboratory that could eventually be implanted into patients could help, and scientists are reporting a promising approach tested with rat cells. They published their results on growing cardiac muscle using a scaffold containing carbon nanofibers in the ACS journal Biomacromolecules.

By studying the star around which the planet revolves, they found that the star's rotation appears to be well-aligned with the planetary movement. The object can be well-studied because the star is relatively bright, it can be seen if strong binoculars are used. The planet orbits one star of what appears to be a binary star, and the orbit is not circular but slightly eccentric. The planet is a bit larger than our Earth, with a radius of about 2.8 times that of our planet.

The tropical low pressure area known as System 94S continues to soak Australia and NASA satellites continue to track its movements. NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites captured visible and infrared data on the stubborn storm as warnings for heavy rainfall remain in effect for parts of Western Australia.

After dropping rainfall that brought a number of casualties to the central and southern Philippines, the tropical cyclone known as Lingling, and locally as Agaton in the Philippines has finally wound down.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- Transparent displays have a variety of potential applications — such as the ability to see navigation or dashboard information while looking through the windshield of a car or plane, or to project video onto a window or a pair of eyeglasses. A number of technologies have been developed for such displays, but all have limitations.

The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile has captured this richly detailed new image of the Lagoon Nebula. This giant cloud of gas and dust is creating intensely bright young stars, and is home to young stellar clusters. This image is a tiny part of just one of eleven public surveys of the sky now in progress using ESO telescopes. Together these are providing a vast legacy of publicly available data for the global astronomical community.

Until recently measuring a 27-dimensional quantum state would have been a time-consuming, multistage process using a technique called quantum tomography, which is similar to creating a 3D image from many 2D ones. Researchers at the University of Rochester have been able to apply a recently developed, alternative method called direct measurement to do this in a single experiment with no post-processing.

Renewable tidal energy sufficient to power about half of Scotland could be harnessed from a single stretch of water off the north coast of the country, engineers say.

Researchers have completed the most detailed study yet of how much tidal power could be generated by turbines placed in the Pentland Firth, between mainland Scotland and Orkney, and estimate 1.9 gigawatts (GW) could be available.

The in-depth assessment by engineers at the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh offers valuable insights into how to develop and regulate this clean energy resource effectively.

A breakthrough using data from the Gaia-ESO project has provided evidence backing up theoretically predicted divisions in the chemical composition of the stars that make up the Milky Way's disc – the vast collection of giant gas clouds and billions of stars that give our Galaxy its 'flying saucer' shape.