Heavens

NASA's TRMM Satellite observed heavy rainfall occurring in Typhoon Krosa before it ran into strong wind shear. On Nov. 1, Krosa was a Typhoon that was threatening Hainan Island, China and Vietnam. By Nov. 4 after moving through the South China Sea, Krosa weakened to a depression.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - Nov. 1, 2013 – California has improved its grade on the March of Dimes 2013 Premature Birth report card, moving from a 'B' grade in 2012 to an 'A' grade in 2013.

PISCATAWAY, NJ – Teenagers in the child welfare system are at higher-than-average risk of abusing marijuana, inhalants and other drugs, according to a study in the November issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

AMHERST, Mass. -- In a major new survey of the early universe conducted from the NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, University of Massachusetts Amherst astronomer Mauro Giavalisco and colleagues at several other institutions identify the most distant, thus the earliest galaxy ever detected.

For the first time, a NASA airborne campaign will measure changes in the height of the Greenland Ice Sheet and surrounding Arctic sea ice produced by a single season of summer melt.

NASA's C-130 research aircraft flew from the Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va., to Greenland on Wednesday where they will conduct survey flights to collect data that will improve our understanding of seasonal melt and provide baseline measurements for future satellite missions. Flights are scheduled to continue through Nov. 16.

Typhoon Krosa became wide-eyed in imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite as the storm moved past the Philippines and into the South China Sea. Krosa re-strengthened after it passed over the northern Philippines and its eye expanded by 10 nautical miles from the previous day.

PITTSBURGH, Nov. 1, 2013 – The red, swollen and painful gums and bone destruction of periodontal disease could be effectively treated by beckoning the right kind of immune system cells to the inflamed tissues, according to a new animal study conducted by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh. Their findings, published this week in the early online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offer a new therapeutic paradigm for a condition that afflicts 78 million people in the U.S. alone.

Doom may be averted for the Smith Cloud, a gigantic streamer of hydrogen gas that is on a collision course with the Milky Way Galaxy. Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have discovered a magnetic field deep in the cloud's interior, which may protect it during its meteoric plunge into the disk of our Galaxy.

A recent slowdown in global warming has led some skeptics to renew their claims that industrial carbon emissions are not causing a century-long rise in Earth's surface temperatures. But rather than letting humans off the hook, a new study in the leading journal Science adds support to the idea that the oceans are taking up some of the excess heat, at least for the moment.

A radio telescope once used to track ballistic missiles has helped astronomers determine how the magnetic field structure and rotation of the young and rapidly rotating Crab pulsar evolves with time. The findings are published in the journal Science today (Friday).

On Oct.31 at 0255 UTC, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instrument known as MODIS that flies aboard NASA"s Terra satellite captured a picture of Tropical Storm Krosa. The MODIS image showed Krosa's western edge over Luzon in the northern Philippines

A key instrument that will fly on the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite – R (GOES-R) spacecraft, NOAA's next-generation of geostationary satellites, is cleared for installation on the spacecraft.

COLUMBUS, Ohio—Astronomers at The Ohio State University have calculated the odds that, sometime during the next 50 years, a supernova occurring in our home galaxy will be visible from Earth.

The good news: they've calculated the odds to be nearly 100 percent that such a supernova would be visible to telescopes in the form of infrared radiation.

The bad news: the odds are much lower—dipping to 20 percent or less—that the shining stellar spectacle would be visible to the naked eye in the nighttime sky.

Women working in Head Start, the nation's largest federally funded early childhood education program which serves nearly one million low-income children, report higher than expected levels of physical and mental health problems, according to researchers at Temple University. Their findings are reported in the first-ever survey conducted on the health of Head Start staff.

In a paper published October 31 in the journal Preventing Chronic Disease, the Temple researchers, led by Robert Whitaker, professor of public health and pediatrics, reported that:

When a person is infected with HIV the virus infects the cells of the immune system. From here the virus spreads around the body, while at the same time breaking down important parts of the body's defence system. HIV's ability to avoid being eliminated by the body's immune system - as opposed to many other types of virus - is one of the main problems associated with this widespread virus. But Danish researchers have now found out how the body's own defence system is activated when the HIV virus infects a cell, and how this helps to protect against uncontrolled virus growth.