Despite fractional openings in North Korea, such as the reopening of the Kaesong industrial zone on Monday, there is little chance of any improvement in the "catastrophic human rights situation" under the head of state, Kim Jong-un, according to scholarly valuation. "Unnoticed by the regime, information from abroad contradicting the state propaganda is in fact presently leaking into the country via mobile phones, radios and DVDs, and the joint North and South Korean industrial park at Kaesong will also mean more outside contact. But this will not improve the human rights situation.
Heavens
CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- Is your cable television on the fritz? One explanation, scientists suspect, may be the weather — the weather in space, that is.
MIT researchers are investigating the effects of space weather — such as solar flares, geomagnetic storms and other forms of electromagnetic radiation — on geostationary satellites, which provide much of the world's access to cable television, Internet services and global communications.
NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites captured images as Typhoon Man-yi made landfall in southern Japan and moved across the big island.
Typhoon Man-yi was approaching Japan when NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead and captured a visible image on Sept. 15 at 0410 UTC/12:10 a.m. EDT. Man-yi weakened to a tropical storm as it quickly crossed Japan dropping heavy rainfall and causing deadly mudslides when NASA's Terra satellite passed overhead on Sept. 16. Man-yi is now headed northeast into the Sea of Okhotsk.
There were three tropical cyclones between the north Eastern Pacific and the North Atlantic Ocean on Saturday, Sept. 14, and NOAA's GOES-East satellite captured them in one image created by NASA. Because Mexico was being hit with Tropical Storm Ingrid and Manuel, both coasts were under Tropical Storm Warnings. The National Hurricane Center cautioned that some areas in eastern and western Mexico may receive up to two feet of rainfall from each storm!
Scientists have discovered a 'cosmic factory' for producing the building blocks of life, amino acids, in research published today in the journal Nature Geoscience.
The team from Imperial College London, the University of Kent and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have discovered that when icy comets collide into a planet, amino acids can be produced. These essential building blocks are also produced if a rocky meteorite crashes into a planet with an icy surface.
New research has revealed that more ice leaves Antarctica by melting from the underside of submerged ice shelves than was previously thought, accounting for as much as 90 per cent of ice loss in some areas.
Iceberg production and melting causes 2,800 cubic kilometres of ice to leave the Antarctic ice sheet every year. Most of this is replaced by snowfall but any imbalance contributes to a change in global sea level.
For five years, a scientific expedition tried reaching Pine Island Glacier ice shelf in a remote, wind-ridden corner of Antarctica. The obstacles to get to the ice shelf were extreme, but the science goal was simple: to measure how fast the sea was melting the 37-mile long ice tongue from underneath by drilling through the ice shelf.
MADISON — In synthetic chemistry, making the best possible use of the needed ingredients is key to optimizing high-quality production at the lowest possible cost.
The element rhodium is a powerful catalyst — a driver of chemical reactions — but is also one of the rarest and most expensive. In addition to its common use in vehicle catalytic converters, rhodium is also used in combination with other metals to efficiently drive a wide range of useful chemical reactions.
Friday the thirteenth is known for being unlucky and residents along Mexico's eastern and western coast are experiencing that feeling as a result of newborn Tropical Depression 13E in the eastern Pacific Ocean, and newborn Tropical Storm Ingrid in the Gulf of Mexico. Both storms formed during the morning of Sept. 13. Both storms were captured on one infrared imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite, and both storms have the potential to drop as much as 20 inches of rain.
Eastern Canada is now expecting some winds and rain from Tropical Depression Gabrielle as it transfers its energy to a cold front. NASA's Aqua satellite captured an infrared image of Gabrielle that showed some very cold cloud top temperatures and strong thunderstorms around its center.
Fish skin is unique in that it lacks keratin, the fibrous protein found in mammalian skin that provides a barrier against the environment. Instead, the epithelial cells of fish skin are in direct contact with the immediate environment: water. Similarly, the epithelial cells that line the gastrointestinal tract are also in direct contact with their immediate milieu.
"I like to think of fish as an open gut swimming," said J. Oriol Sunyer, a professor in the the Department of Pathobiology of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Veterinary Medicine.
NASA and NOAA satellites have been tracking the progression of low pressure System 93L through the Caribbean Sea and into the southwestern Gulf of Mexico over a week's time, and it became Tropical Storm Ingrid mid-day on Sept. 13. NOAA's GOES-East satellite captured an image of Ingrid's center over the Bay of Campeche.
In 2005 the Hubble Space Telescope spotted unusually small galaxies densely packed with red stars in the distant, young universe. They were nicknamed "red nuggets," not only because they are small and red but also their existence challenged current theories of galaxy formation, making them precious in astronomers' eyes.
Since no "red nuggets" were seen nearby, astronomers wondered why they had disappeared over time. New research shows that they didn't disappear completely. In fact, they were simply hidden within the data of previous surveys.
NASA's Terra satellite passed over newborn Tropical Storm Man-yi and captured and image that clearly showed two vortices rotating around a large center of circulation. Man-yi formed on Sept. 12 in the northwestern Pacific Ocean as the sixteenth tropical depression and by Sept. 13 it strengthened into a tropical storm.
Southwesterly wind shear has taken its toll on hurricane Humberto, and NASA's TRMM satellite noticed that in rainfall data.
When NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite passed over Hurricane Humberto on September 12, 2013 at 1625 UTC/12:25 p.m. EDT the eye was no longer visible. An analysis derived from
TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) and Precipitation Radar (PR) data showed that most of the precipitation with Humberto was located in the northwestern quadrant, pushed there by the strong southwesterly wind shear.