Heavens

NASA's Aqua satellite provided a visible image of Super Typhoon Meranti as it continued to move toward Taiwan and the northern Philippines.

Collaborative consumption is an expanding economic force in our country and globally, with consumers sharing everything from cars, bicycles and even agricultural equipment. It happens quickly and efficiently, with a simple click of a button or a swipe of a finger.

Many product-sharing transactions involve renters paying a fee to product owners through an online platform, reaping several inherent benefits to this consumer-to-consumer system: profits for the product owner; lower costs for the user; benefits to the environment.

Fabrics that can generate electricity from physical movement have been in the works for a few years. Now researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology have taken the next step, developing a fabric that can simultaneously harvest energy from both sunshine and motion.

Combining two types of electricity generation into one textile paves the way for developing garments that could provide their own source of energy to power devices such as smart phones or global positioning systems.

Not too hot, not too cold - instead, water temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean should be just around normal for the rest of 2016, according to forecasts from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, or GMAO. With these neutral conditions, scientists with the modeling center at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center say there is unlikely to be a La Niña event in late 2016.

The study, published today in Nature Microbiology, holds promise for a new treatment method against antibiotic-resistant bacteria (commonly known as superbugs).

The star-shaped structures, are short chains of proteins called 'peptide polymers', and were created by a team from the Melbourne School of Engineering.

An international team of astronomers using Hubble have been able to study stellar evolution in real time. Over a period of 30 years dramatic increases in the temperature of the star SAO 244567 have been observed. Now the star is cooling again, having been reborn into an earlier phase of stellar evolution. This makes it the first reborn star to have been observed during both the heating and cooling stages of rebirth.

Measurements of an element in Earth and Moon rocks have just disproved the leading hypotheses for the origin of the Moon.

Jamie Samson and Marta Manser from the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental 1Studies at UZH studied colonies of Cape ground squirrels (Xerus inauris) in the wild at the Kalahari Research Center in South Africa. The diurnal rodents temporarily store their food reserves in several hiding places. As their habitat is very arid and sparsely vegetated, points of reference in the environment, such as trees or bushes, are few and far between. The UZH researchers have now discovered how the social rodents orient themselves to find their way back to their temporary food stashes.

Urinary leakage whilst coughing and jumping is common in women. Using a self-administered treatment via a mobile app called Tät® for three months reduced symptoms, led to fewer leakages and improved quality of life. This according to a study within the project eContinence (in Swedish Tät.nu) at Umeå University published in Neurology and Urodynamics.

The majestic auroras have captivated humans for thousands of years, but their nature -- the fact that the lights are electromagnetic and respond to solar activity -- was only realized in the last 150 years. Thanks to coordinated multi-satellite observations and a worldwide network of magnetic sensors and cameras, close study of auroras has become possible over recent decades. Yet, auroras continue to mystify, dancing far above the ground to some, thus far, undetected rhythm.

That's the ques­tion that North­eastern researchers, led by assis­tant pro­fessor David Choffnes, ask in new research that explores how free app- and web- based ser­vices on Android and iOS mobile devices com­pare with respect to pro­tecting users' privacy.

In par­tic­ular, the team inves­ti­gated the degree to which each plat­form leaks per­son­ally iden­ti­fi­able information--ranging from birth­dates and loca­tions to passwords--to the adver­tisers and data ana­lytics com­pa­nies that the ser­vices rely on to help finance their operations.

The newest tropical depression in the northwestern Pacific Ocean formed Sunday, Sept. 11 far to the east of the big island of Japan. Tropical Depression 17W didn't have a long life, however, as the final warning on the system was issued 12 hours later. By Sept. 12 the storm lost its tropical characteristics.

At 5 a.m. (0900 UTC) on Sunday, Sept. 11 Tropical Depression17W formed about 590 nautical miles east-southeast of Misawa, Japan. Infrared data from Japan's Himawari satellite showed that the depression appeared somewhat elongated.

Early on Sept. 12 Tropical Depression 19W formed east of Vietnam. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the South China Sea and captured a visible image of the storm that had quickly started moving over Vietnam.

When Aqua passed over the South China Sea, the center or Tropical Depression 19W (TD19W) was located over the sea, and just east of central Vietnam. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard Aqua captured a picture of the storm that showed bands of thunderstorms wrapping around the western side of the center were already over land.

Satellite data from NASA revealed that powerful storms in Super Typhoon Meranti were generating almost a foot or almost 300 millimeters of rainfall per hour. The Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core satellite measured the heavy rainfall on one side of the Category 5 super typhoon.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- Two papers published by an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside and several collaborators explain why the universe has enough energy to become transparent.

The study led by Naveen Reddy, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UC Riverside, marks the first quantitative study of how the gas content within galaxies scales with the amount of interstellar dust.