Heavens

The Purple Mountain Observatory and the Department of Astronomy, Nanjing University, in Nanjing China-Research, cooperating with the Albert Einstein institute, in Hannover, Germany, put forward a model of the planar co-orbital circular restricted three-body problem, gave the equations of motion, a set of approximation formulas, and an approximate semi-analytical solution. The study is reported in Issue 53, No. 1 of SCIENCE CHINA Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy because of its significant research value.

Scientists have found evidence of a catastrophic event they believe was responsible for halting the birth of stars in a galaxy in the early Universe.

The researchers, led by Durham University's Department of Physics, observed the massive galaxy as it would have appeared just three billion years after the Big Bang when the Universe was a quarter of its present age.

Forecasters are watching a low pressure area located off the east coast of Madagascar that appears ripe for development in the Southern Indian Ocean. If it becomes a tropical storm, it would be named Hubert.

In the first study of its kind in the United States, Henry Ford Hospital showed that skin transplant surgery is safe and effective for treating vitiligo.

Henry Ford researchers followed 23 patients for up to six months after surgery and found that the treated area regained on average 52 percent of its natural skin color. In eight patients with a specific type of vitiligo, the treated area regained on average 74 percent of its natural skin color.

The sooner people with diabetes start taking metformin, the longer the drug remains effective, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published in the March issue of Diabetes Care, a journal of the American Diabetes Association.

An international team of astronomers, including Professor Tom Marsh and Dr Danny Steeghs from the University of Warwick, have shown that the two stars in the binary HM Cancri definitely revolve around each other in a mere 5.4 minutes. This makes HM Cancri the binary star with by far the shortest known orbital period. It is also the smallest known binary. The binary system is no larger than 8 times the diameter of the Earth which is the equivalent of no more than a quarter of the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

CHAPEL HILL – Children who have been abused psychologically, physically or sexually are more likely to suffer unexplained abdominal pain and nausea or vomiting than children who have not been abused, a study led by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers concludes.

New breakthrough treatments for the most common cancers could soon come from cutting-edge research into some of the world's rarest tumors.

At the ESMO Conference on Sarcoma and GIST, to be held in Milan, Italy, on 9 and 10 March 2010, researchers and some of the world's leading experts will discuss exciting new science on sarcomas—a group of rare tumors found in muscle, blood vessels, deep skin tissues, nerves and the tissues around joints.

According to a new study, men employed in occupations with potential exposure to high levels of sunlight have a reduced risk of kidney cancer compared with men who were less likely to be exposed to sunlight at work. The study did not find an association between occupational sunlight exposure and kidney cancer risk in women. Published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the study is the largest case-control study of kidney cancer to investigate the association with occupational sunlight exposure.

Shoulder motion after rotator cuff surgery remains significantly different when compared to the patient's opposite shoulder, according to Henry Ford Hospital researchers.

In the study, researchers used X-rays providing a 3D view of motion of the arm bone in relation to the shoulder blade, to compared motion in the shoulders of 14 patients who had arthroscopic surgical repair of tendon tears and no symptoms in their other shoulders.

GREENBELT, Md. – Flowing lava can carve or build paths very much like the riverbeds and canyons etched by water, and this probably explains at least one of the meandering channels on the surface of Mars. These results were presented this morning at the 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by Jacob Bleacher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Whether channels on Mars were formed by water or by lava has been debated for years, and the outcome is thought to influence the likelihood of finding life there.

Shortly after the Moon formed, an asteroid smacked into its southern hemisphere and gouged out a truly enormous crater, the South Pole-Aitken basin, almost 1,500 miles across and more than five miles deep.

Scientists at the University of Rochester have discovered that the Earth's magnetic field 3.5 billion years ago was only half as strong as it is today, and that this weakness, coupled with a strong wind of energetic particles from the young Sun, likely stripped water from the early Earth's atmosphere.

The findings, presented in today's issue of Science, suggest that the magnetopause—the boundary where the Earth's magnetic field successfully deflects the Sun's incoming solar wind—was only half the distance from Earth it is today.

HOUSTON -- (March 5, 2010) – Components of the blood or hematopoietic system derive from stem cell subtypes rather than one single stem cell that gives rise to all the different kinds of blood cells equally, said scientists from Baylor College of Medicine (www.bcm.edu) in a report that appears in the current issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell (www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/)

Mars Express encountered Phobos last night, smoothly skimming past at just 67 km, the closest any manmade object has ever approached Mars' enigmatic moon. The data collected could help unlock the origin of not just Phobos but other 'second generation' moons.