Heavens

July 30, 2013, Boston, Mass. -- Sun-drenched rooms make for happy residents, but large glass windows also bring higher air-conditioning bills. Now a bioinspired microfluidic circulatory system for windows developed by researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University could save energy and cut cooling costs dramatically -- while letting in just as much sunlight.

Astronomers have found a new way of measuring the spin in supermassive black holes, which could lead to better understanding about how they drive the growth of galaxies.

The scientists at Durham University, UK, observed a black hole - with mass 10 million times that of our Sun - at the centre of a spiral galaxy 500 million light years from Earth while it was feeding on the surrounding disc of material that fuels its growth and powers its activity.

NASA and NOAA satellites continue to keep a close eye on the remnants of Tropical Storm Dorian as they make their way through the eastern Caribbean Sea.

On Saturday, July 27 at 11 a.m. EDT, Dorian was still a tropical storm, but that didn't last. Dorian was near 18.5N and 52.1W, about 720 miles (1,160 km) east of the Northern Leeward Islands. Dorian's maximum sustained winds were near 40 mph (65 kph) and it was moving to the west at 23 mph (37 kph).

Washington, D.C.— Hydrogen is deceptively simple. It has only a single electron per atom, but it powers the sun and forms the majority of the observed universe. As such, it is naturally exposed to the entire range of pressures and temperatures available in the whole cosmos. But researchers are still struggling to understand even basic aspects of its various forms under high-pressure conditions.

For the first time since exoplanets, or planets around stars other than the sun, were discovered almost 20 years ago, X-ray observations have detected an exoplanet passing in front of its parent star.

An advantageous alignment of a planet and its parent star in the system HD 189733, which is 63 light-years from Earth, enabled NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM Newton Observatory to observe a dip in X-ray intensity as the planet transited the star.

WASHINGTON, July 29, 2013 — After six years of anticipation, that rock star of plants — a rainforest giant known as the corpse flower for its putrid odor — has bloomed here, and is the subject of a new video by the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society. It is available at http://www.bytesizescience.com.

NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of smoke from northern Oregon's Sunnyside Turnoff Fire on July 25 as the satellite passed overhead in space.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument that flies aboard Aqua captured an image of the smoke and heat from the Sunnyside Turnoff Fire on July 25 at 21:10 UTC (5:10 p.m. EDT/2:10 p.m. PDT). MODIS has the ability to detect hot spots or fires and they appear red in the image.