Cosmochemists have solved a long standing mystery in the formation of the solar system: Oxygen, the most abundant element in Earth's crust, follows a strange, anomalous pattern in the oldest, most pristine rocks, one that must result from a different chemical process than the well-understood reactions that form minerals containing oxygen on Earth.
Heavens
AMHERST, Mass. – Sharp observation by doctoral student Mengmeng Cui in Thomas Russell's polymer science and engineering laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently led her to discover how to kinetically trap and control one liquid within another, locking and separating them in a stable system over long periods, with the ability to tailor and manipulate the shapes and flow characteristics of each.
Super-typhoon Lekima is poised to "make the curve" in the northwestern Pacific Ocean today. The storm's track is expected to shift from a northwesterly direction, and curve to northeasterly direction because it has started encountering mid-latitude westerly winds and a trough. NASA's Terra satellite captured an image of Lekima just before it began its directional shift.
Radar reflectivity data from TRMM's PR instrument were used to create 3-D images that showed differences between super typhoon Lekima and tropical storm Francisco. TRMM is managed by both NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
On Oct. 24 at 1500 UTC/11 a.m. EDT, Francisco's maximum sustained winds were near 60 knots/69 mph/111 kph. Francisco was centered near 26.9 north and 130.8 east, about 134 nautical miles east of Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, Japan. Francisco was moving to the northeast at 7 knots/8 mph/12.9 kph and away from the island.
The world may be increasingly uncivil, and the workplace is no exception. With the rise of smartphones, you've probably even been a perpetrator of bad behavior yourself, checking text messages or taking a call during a meeting or business lunch.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — By tuning gold nanoparticles to just the right size, researchers from Brown University have developed a catalyst that selectively converts carbon dioxide (CO2) to carbon monoxide (CO), an active carbon molecule that can be used to make alternative fuels and commodity chemicals.
At a cosmologically crisp one degree Kelvin (minus 458 degrees Fahrenheit), the Boomerang Nebula is the coldest known object in the Universe – colder, in fact, than the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, which is the natural background temperature of space.
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope have taken a new look at this intriguing object to learn more about its frigid properties and to determine its true shape, which has an eerily ghost-like appearance.
HOUSTON -- ( Oct. 24, 2013 ) -- Just 13 days in space may be enough to cause profound changes in eye structure and gene expression, report researchers from Houston Methodist, NASA Johnson Space Center, and two other institutions in the October 2013 issue of Gravitational and Space Research.
The study, which looked at how low gravity and radiation and oxidative damage impacts mice, is the first to examine eye-related gene expression and cell behavior after spaceflight.
The sun emitted a mid-level solar flare that peaked at 8:30 pm EDT on Oct. 23, 2013. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. Such radiation can disrupt radio signals for as long as the flare is ongoing, anywhere from minutes to hours.
Powerful hurricane Raymond, located off Mexico's south-central Pacific coast, weakened to a tropical storm and has dropped a lot of rain over central western Mexico's coast. NASA's TRMM satellite measured rainfall from space and that data was used to create a rainfall total map.
Raymond has now started to move slowly away from the location where it has been parked since Monday October 21, 2013. Raymond dropped abundant rainfall in much of the same area already hit by deadly flooding and landslides with Hurricane Manuel in September.
From a fish-eye view, rice fields in California's Yolo Bypass providean all-you-can-eat bug buffet for juvenile salmon seeking nourishmenton their journey to the sea. That's according to a new reportdetailing the scientific findings of an experiment that planted fishin harvested rice fields earlier this year, resulting in the fattest,fastest-growing salmon on record in the state's rivers.
The heat is on, at least in the Arctic.
Average summer temperatures in the Eastern Canadian Arctic during the last 100 years are higher now than during any century in the past 44,000 years and perhaps as long ago as 120,000 years, says a new University of Colorado Boulder study.
A remote acoustic detection system designed to identify homemade bombs can determine the difference between those that contain low-yield and high-yield explosives.
That capability – never before reported in a remote bomb detection system – was described in a paper by Vanderbilt engineer Douglas Adams presented at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Dynamic Systems and Control Conference on Oct. 23 in Stanford, CA.
Despite a 7.2 percent national unemployment rate, the job market is a healthy one for college students majoring in information systems, with nearly three quarters of students receiving at least one job offer, according to the nationwide IS Job Index by the Association for Information Systems (AIS) and Temple University's Fox School of Business. The study compiled data from more than 1,200 students and from 48 universities across the United States.
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — University of California, Riverside astronomers Bahram Mobasher and Naveen Reddy are members of a team that has discovered the most distant galaxy ever found. The galaxy is seen as it was just 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only about 5 percent of its current age of 13.8 billion years.