Heavens

The Bagrada bug, an invasive stink bug, was discovered in the western hemisphere in 2008 near Los Angeles, CA, presumably introduced via container shipments arriving at the Port of Long Beach. Since then it has spread throughout southern California, southern areas of Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, southern and west-central New Mexico, and western Texas.

A combination of pop songs, talkback radio and cutting-edge science has enabled Australian astronomers to identify a way to prevent catastrophic, multi-billion dollar space junk collisions, a new study has revealed.

The inaugural research project spearheaded by Curtin University in Western Australia, will use the newly operational Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), one of three precursor telescopes for the $2billion Square Kilometre Array project, to detect radio waves reflecting off thousands of objects orbiting the earth.

At times observations have suggested ISON was getting dimmer and might already be in pieces. However, over Nov. 26-27, 2013, the comet once again brightened. In the early hours of Nov. 27, the comet appeared in the view of the European Space Agency/NASA mission the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory in the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph instrument. Coronagraphs block out the bright light of the sun in order to better see the dimmer solar atmosphere, the corona. In these images, the comet looks quite bright as it moves in from the lower right of the image.

The research team had subjects complete a set of tasks commonly used in similar clinical trials. Subjects in the trials were either able-bodied or people with tetraplegia.

"By the end of the trials, everybody preferred the Tongue Drive System over their current assistive technology," said Joy Bruce, manager of Shepherd Center's Spinal Cord Injury Lab and co-author of the study. "It allows them to engage their environment in a way that is otherwise not possible for them."

The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, discovered two subglacial lakes 800 metres below the Greenland Ice Sheet. The two lakes are each roughly 8-10 km2, and at one point may have been up to three times larger than their current size.

Subglacial lakes are likely to influence the flow of the ice sheet, impacting global sea level change. The discovery of the lakes in Greenland will also help researchers to understand how the ice will respond to changing environmental conditions.

DARIEN, IL – A new analysis of National Football League results suggests that the body's natural circadian timing gives a performance advantage to West Coast teams when they play East Coast teams at night.

Two months ago astronomers created a new 3D map of stars at the centre of our Galaxy (the Milky Way), showing more clearly than ever the bulge at its core. Previous explanations suggested that the stars that form the bulge are in banana-like orbits, but a paper published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggests that the stars probably move in peanut-shell or figure of eight-shaped orbits instead.