At 11 a.m. EDT on October first, the eighteenth tropical depression of the Eastern Pacific hurricane season was born. He's a little guy, but is likely going to grow up to be a tropical storm and get the name Olaf later today or tomorrow. He's not, however, expected to reach hurricane strength.
Heavens
COLUMBIA, Mo. – The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed the Student Aid Financial Responsibility Act to address problems with the current financial aid system. The act calls for several changes to simplify the Federal Application for Student Financial Aid- FAFSA. In a new study, a University of Missouri researcher found flaws in the FAFSA's method for assessing net worth that can create inequalities in the distribution of financial aid.
Berkeley, CA - BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, is the most ambitious attempt yet to map the expansion history of the Universe using the technique known as baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO). A part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III), BOSS achieved "first light" on the night of September 14-15, when it acquired data with an upgraded spectrographic system across the entire focal plane of the Sloan Foundation 2.5-meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico.
CORVALLIS, Ore. – The catastrophic decline around the world of "apex" predators such as wolves, cougars, lions or sharks has led to a huge increase in smaller "mesopredators" that are causing major economic and ecological disruptions, a new study concludes.
WASHINGTON - During its 2009 annual meeting, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) will present two awards for extraordinary impacts on the engineering profession. The Academy's Founders Award will be given to JOHN CASANI, who has made important contributions to deep space exploration, and SHEILA WIDNALL will receive the Arthur M. Bueche Award for leadership in expanding the opportunities for women and minorities in engineering. The awards will be presented at a ceremony on Sunday, Oct. 4.
KNOXVILLE -- Mercury pollution is a persistent problem in the environment. Human activity has lead to increasingly large accumulations of the toxic chemical, especially in waterways, where fish and shellfish tend to act as sponges for the heavy metal.
It's that persistent and toxic nature that has flummoxed scientists for years in the quest to find ways to mitigate the dangers posed by the buildup of mercury in its most toxic form, methylmercury.
Two tropical cyclones in the Western Pacific are keeping in tune to the 1969 hit song by the Beatles, "Come Together." Tropical Depression 18W and Tropical Storm Parma are already beginning to merge now that 18W made landfall in Guam and dissipated. 18W did bring gusty winds and heavy downpours to Guam, and will continue to affect the surf over the next day or two.
NOAA and Norwegian researchers recently completed a comparative analysis of marine ecosystems in the North Atlantic and North Pacific to see what factors support fisheries production, leading to new insights that could improve fishery management plans and the ecosystems.
So accustomed are we to the sunshine, rain, fog and snow of our home planet that we find it next to impossible to imagine a different atmosphere and other forms of precipitation.
To be sure, Dr. Seuss came up with a green gluey substance called oobleck that fell from the skies and gummed up the Kingdom of Didd, but it had to be conjured up by wizards and was clearly a thing of magic.
Not so the atmosphere of COROT-7b, an exoplanet discovered last February by the COROT space telescope launched by the French and European space agencies.
Ram pressure is the drag force that results when something moves through a fluid — much like the wind you feel in your face when bicycling, even on a still day — and occurs in this context as galaxies orbiting about the centre of the cluster move through the intra-cluster medium, which then sweeps out gas from within the galaxies.
(Washington, DC • Sept. 30, 2009) – Completing an 18-month mission orbiting the Earth more than 6,000 times on-orbit the International Space Station (ISS), the Optical Reflector Material Experiment (ORMatE-1) returns to Washington, D.C., to NRL's Electronics Science and Technology Division to begin experiment testing and analysis.
Doctors could predict a patient's risk of receiving a domestic abuse diagnosis years in advance by using electronic medical records as an early warning system, according to research published on bmj.com today.
Lead author Dr Ben Reis from the Children's Hospital Boston Informatics Program and Harvard Medical School investigated whether the wealth of historical electronic data could be used to flag up high risk patients.
Planning a trip to Mars? Take plenty of shielding. According to sensors on NASA's ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer) spacecraft, galactic cosmic rays have just hit a Space Age high.
"In 2009, cosmic ray intensities have increased 19% beyond anything we've seen in the past 50 years," says Richard Mewaldt of Caltech. "The increase is significant, and it could mean we need to re-think how much radiation shielding astronauts take with them on deep-space missions."
Close to 600 scientists from 21 countries met Sept. 23 – 25 2009 in Bremen, Germany, to outline major scientific targets for a new and ambitious ocean drilling research program. The scientific community envisions that this program will succeed the current Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), which ends in 2013. The outcome of the Bremen meeting will result in a new science plan, enabling scientific ocean drilling to take on a central role in environmental understanding and stewardship of our planet in the 21st century.
Montreal, September 29, 2009 – A team of Université de Montréal researchers, led by physics PhD student Olivier Daigle, has developed the world's most sensitive astronomical camera. Marketed by Photon etc., a young Quebec firm, the camera will be used by the Mont-Mégantic Observatory and NASA, which purchased the first unit.