WASHINGTON, July 26, 2016 -- When we go outside, we expose ourselves to the most common carcinogen of all: ultraviolet (UV) rays in sunlight. Most of us know we should apply sunscreen to protect our skin, but some of us forget and suffer a flaky, irritated sunburn in return. In this week's Reactions, we highlight the chemistry behind UV radiation, melanin and sunburns. See the video here: https://youtu.be/7ZXvngquyT4.
Heavens
Tropical Depression 05W strengthened into a tropical storm and was renamed Mirinae as NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the South China Sea and captured a visible image of the storm.
On Tuesday, July 26, 2016 at 06:05 a.m. UTC (2:05 a.m. EDT) the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer aboard NASA's Aqua satellite looked at the storm in visible light. The image showed a somewhat elongated storm. The strongest thunderstorms around the center appear slightly elongated from southwest to northeast, as a result of moderate vertical wind shear.
It's an age-old astronomical truth: To resolve smaller and smaller physical details of distant celestial objects, scientists need larger and larger light-collecting mirrors. This challenge is not easily overcome given the high cost and impracticality of building and -- in the case of space observatories -- launching large-aperture telescopes.
Tropical Storm Darby weakened to a remnant low pressure system in the Central Pacific Ocean today, July 26. NASA's Aqua satellite and RapidScat instrument provided a "last look" at Darby when it was still a tropical storm the previous day.
Infrared data from NASA's Aqua satellite showed a transition within Tropical Storm Frank over three days, and now Frank has become the Eastern Pacific's fifth hurricane.
Two tropical cyclones in the Eastern Pacific Ocean have see-sawed in strength today, July 26, 2016.
Infrared satellite imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite showed colder cloud top temperatures in Frank today as it became a hurricane and warming temperatures in Georgette as it weakened from a hurricane to a tropical storm. The infrared data, taken July 26 at 0959 UTC (5:59 a.m. EDT) showed a much smaller Tropical Storm Georgette in comparison to the now hurricane, Frank.
BINGHAMTON, NY - Mood and personality play an important role in how companies should manage their IT systems, according to a new study co-authored by a researcher at Binghamton University, State University of New York.
A couple of times in four billion years, evolution has slowed to a crawl. And an eon or so has passed before more complex life forms, such as simple animals, could arise.
Evolution may have been waiting for a decent breath of oxygen, said researcher Chris Reinhard. And that was hard to come by. His research team is tracking down O2 concentrations in oceans, where earliest animals evolved.
Water is the key to life on Earth. Scientists continue to unravel the mystery of life on Mars by investigating evidence of water in the planet's soil. Previous observations of soil observed along crater slopes on Mars showed a significant amount of perchlorate salts, which tend to be associated with brines with a moderate pH level. However, researchers have stepped back to look at the bigger picture through data collected from the 2001: Mars Odyssey, named in reference to the science fiction novel by Arthur C.
Astronomers at the University of Michigan's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) discovered for the first time that the hot gas in the halo of the Milky Way galaxy is spinning in the same direction and at comparable speed as the galaxy's disk, which contains our stars, planets, gas, and dust. This new knowledge sheds light on how individual atoms have assembled into stars, planets, and galaxies like our own, and what the future holds for these galaxies.
Tropical Depression 05W developed on July 25, 2016 as NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead and captured temperature data on the storm as it came together.
RapidScat is an instrument that flies aboard the International Space Station and measures winds over an ocean surface. RapidScat provided a look at the winds around Tropical Storm Frank in the Eastern Pacific and saw strongest winds south of the center.
On July 24, RapidScat showed that RapidScat measured wind speeds near 29 meters per second (65 mph/104.6 kph) south and east of the center. RapidScat showed that winds around the rest of the storm were about 18 meters per second (40 mph/64 kph).
A team of researchers at Tohoku University has discovered that the Mg-Sc alloy shows shape memory properties. This finding raises the potential for development and application of lightweight SMAs across a number of industries, including the aerospace industry.
Shape memory alloys (SMAs) show distinctive behaviours such as shape recovery upon heating and have a superelastic effect. They have been used in various industrial fields such as consumer electronics, housing facilities, personal ornaments, anti-seismic engineering and medical equipment.
A new species of extinct flesh-eating marsupial that terrorised Australia's drying forests about 5 million years ago has been identified from a fossil discovered in remote northwestern Queensland.
The hypercarnivore, which is thought to have weighed about 20 to 25 kilograms, is a distant and much bigger cousin of Australia's largest living, flesh-eating marsupial, the Tasmanian Devil, which weighs in at about 10 kilogram.
3-D movies immerse us in new worlds and allow us to see places and things that we otherwise couldn't. But behind every 3-D experience is something that is uniformly despised: those goofy glasses.
In a new paper, a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science have demonstrated a display that lets you watch 3-D films in a movie theater without extra eyewear.
Dubbed "Cinema 3D", the prototype uses a special array of lenses and mirrors to enable viewers to watch a 3-D movie from any seat in a theater.