TheSkyNet is celebrating its two year anniversary today with the official launch of a new research project, as well as a range of improvements and new features to make contributing to astronomical research at home more enjoyable, and even easier.
Launched on September 13th 2011, theSkyNet is a community computing project dedicated to astronomy, initiated by the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Perth, Western Australia.
The average American today can look forward to over two more years of healthy life than they could just a generation ago, Harvard researchers have found.
The MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible image of Hurricane Humberto that showed it's eye was cloud-filled. Humberto was moving away from the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic Ocean.
Microbes that live in rice paddies, northern peat bogs and other previously unexpected environments are among the bacteria that can generate highly toxic methylmercury, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center have learned.
How social media users create and monitor their online personas may hint at their feelings of self-esteem and self-determination, according to an international team of researchers.
"The types of actions users take and the kinds of information they are adding to their Facebook walls and profiles are a refection of their identities," said S. Shyam Sundar, Distinguished Professor of Communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory, Penn State. "You are your Facebook, basically, and despite all its socialness, Facebook is a deeply personal medium."
An expedition of international scientists to the far reaches of Antarctica's remote Pine Island Glacier has yielded exact measurements of an undersea process glaciologists have long called the "biggest source of uncertainty in global sea level projections."
The research, which appears in the latest issue of Science magazine, was conducted by scientists at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, Calif., the University of Alaska, Pennsylvania State University, NASA, and the British Antarctic Survey.
University of Iowa space physicist Don Gurnett says there is solid evidence that NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has become the first manmade object to reach interstellar space, more than 11 billion miles distant and 36 years after it was launched.
The finding is reported in a paper published in the Sept. 12 online issue of the journal Science.
Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and Green Bank Telescope (GBT) spotted the faint radio glow from NASA's famed Voyager 1 spacecraft -- the most distant man-made object.
According to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the VLBA imaged the signal from Voyager 1's main transmitter after the spacecraft had already passed beyond the edge of the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles from the Sun that surrounds our Solar System.
The location, widespread nature, and number of fires in this satellite image suggest that these fires were deliberately set to manage land. Farmers often use fire to return nutrients to the soil and to clear the ground of unwanted plants. While fire helps enhance crops and grasses for pasture, the fires also produce smoke that degrades air quality. In Mozambique and Madagascar, the growing season runs from the first rains in October – November. Thus, the clearing of lands in early September heralds the new growing season.
Gabrielle is a fighter. Tropical Storm Gabrielle regained tropical storm status on Sept. 12 at 11 a.m. EDT after being knocked down to tropical depression status earlier in the day. NASA's GOES Project used NOAA's GOES-East satellite data to create an image that showed wind shear is still having a big effect on Gabrielle, and another low pressure area appears to be organizing in the Gulf of Mexico.
Hubble previously observed this cluster back in 2002. However, this new image combines visible and infrared data from Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to reveal this patch of sky in greater detail than ever before, with a combined total exposure time of over 34 hours.
INDIANAPOLIS, Sept. 12, 2013 — Glimpses of the events that nurtured life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago are coming from an unlikely venue almost 1 billion miles away, according to the leader of an effort to understand Titan, one of the most unusual moons in the solar system.
The birth of stars is an event that eludes intuitive understanding. It is the collapse of dense molecular clouds under their own weight that offers the best sites of star formation. Now, Pralay Kumar Karmakar from the Department of Physics at Tezpur University, Assam province, India, and his colleague have proposed a new model for investigating molecular cloud fluctuations at sites of star formation and thus are able to study their pulsational dynamics, in a paper published in EPJ D.
The birth of stars is an event that eludes intuitive understanding. It is the collapse of dense molecular clouds under their own weight that offers the best sites of star formation. Now, Pralay Kumar Karmakar from the Department of Physics at Tezpur University, Assam province, India, and his colleague have proposed a new model for investigating molecular cloud fluctuations at sites of star formation and thus are able to study their pulsational dynamics, in a paper published in EPJ D.