Portugal has been experiencing the worst drought in years. Drought and the dry conditions that follow lead to wildfires set by just a spark or a lightning strike. Portugal's north has been plagued with wildfires due to these such conditions. Spain and France have joined their firefight lending water-dumping aircraft in an effort to quell the raging fires. The dry conditions, heat, high winds, and difficult terrain in the area where the fires have been most active have produced what the firefighters over there have dubbed "the perfect storm."
Heavens
The combined computing power of 200,000 private PCs helps astronomers take an inventory of the Milky Way. The Einstein@Home project connects home and office PCs of volunteers from around the world to a global supercomputer. Using this computer cloud, an international team lead by scientists from the Max Planck Institutes for Gravitational Physics and for Radio Astronomy analysed archival data from the CSIRO Parkes radio telescope in Australia.
Biologists at LMU have demonstrated that people can acquire the capacity for echolocation, although it does take time and work.
When NASA's Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) begins operation aboard the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission managed by NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., it will attempt to show two-way laser communication beyond Earth is possible, expanding the possibility of transmitting huge amounts of data. This new ability could one day allow for 3-D High Definition video transmissions in deep space to become routine.
Using an instrument on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, called the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager, or HMI, scientists have overturned previous notions of how the sun's writhing insides move from equator to pole and back again, a key part of understanding how the dynamo works. Modeling this system also lies at the heart of improving predictions of the intensity of the next solar cycle.
MINNEAPOLIS – Studies show that migraine is more common among people with lower incomes. This relationship is examined in a study published in the August 28, 2013, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, looking at whether developing migraines limits people's educational and career achievements, leading to a lower income status, or whether problems related to low income such as stressful life events and poor access to health care increase the likelihood of developing migraines.
For the first time, astronomers have seen the image of a distant quasar split into multiple images by the effects of a cloud of ionized gas in our own Milky Way Galaxy. Such events were predicted as early as 1970, but the first evidence for one now has come from the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) radio telescope system.
For online and print audiences deep into lazy late-summer-day reading, yearning for diversions from everyday cares, how about a glimpse 400 years back in time at a famous clash between Galileo and an arch-enemy over why ice floats on water? That debate, between a giant in the history of science and a little-remembered naysayer who challenged Galileo's idea that Earth revolves around the sun, is the topic of a story in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News.
The Los Angeles Times reports: "The Rim fire spread deeper into Yosemite National Park on Tuesday with flames racing unimpeded to the east even as firefighters shored up defenses for communities on the western edges of the blaze. The fire was 20% contained by Tuesday evening, with almost all of the containment coming on the fire's southwest edge. On the east, the fire has a relatively flat, clear path farther into Yosemite and the 3,700 firefighters battling the blaze have fewer options to control it.
Astronomers have only been observing the Sun with telescopes for 400 years — a tiny fraction of the Sun's age of 4.6 billion years. It is very hard to study the history and future evolution of our star, but we can do this by hunting for rare stars that are almost exactly like our own, but at different stages of their lives. Now astronomers have identified a star that is essentially an identical twin to our Sun, but 4 billion years older — almost like seeing a real version of the twin paradox in action [1].
A modified law of gravity correctly predicted, in advance of the observations, the velocity dispersion -- the average speed of stars within a galaxy relative to each other -- in 10 dwarf satellite galaxies of the Milky Way's giant neighbor Andromeda.
The relatively large velocity dispersions observed in these types of dwarf galaxies is usually attributed to dark matter. Yet predictions made using the alternative hypothesis Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) succeeded in anticipating the observations.
NASA satellite imagery on Aug. 27 showed that wind shear was having an effect on the thunderstorms in Tropical Storm Kong-Rey's northern quadrant.
From Inciweb.org: Fire crews had their hands full with very active fire behavior today. Near Duckwall Ridge, the fire spotted across the line with crews working to control the spot. The fire also crossed the 3N01 road in Reynolds Creek, prompting an expansion of the evacuation advisory in the Highway 108 corridor. Fire crews also were working to contain a spot fire in the southeast portion of the fire as it crossed to the south of Highway 120 at Ackerson Flat.
The Chelyabinsk meteorite either collided with another body in the solar system or came too close to the Sun before it fell to Earth, according to research announced today (Tuesday 27th August) at the Goldschmidt conference in Florence.
A team from the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy (IGM) in Novosibirsk have analysed fragments of the meteorite, the main body of which fell to the bottom of the Chebarkul Lake near Chelyabinsk on 15 February this year.
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – August 26, 2013 – The same compound in a common household clothes detergent shows promise as a treatment to preserve muscle tissue after severe injury. Researchers at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center's Institute for Regenerative Medicine hope the oxygen-generating compound could one day aid in saving and repairing limbs and tissue.
The research in rats, published online ahead of print in PLOS ONE, found that injections of the compound sodium percarbonate (SPO) can produce enough oxygen to help preserve muscle tissue when blood flow is disrupted.