Tropical Storm Priscilla was short-lived because it formed on Sunday, Oct. 20 very close to the coast of western Mexico and made landfall that same day. NASA's Terra satellite provided a visible picture of the storm as it was making landfall.
The Lucy mission led by Southwest Research Institute is one step closer to its 2021 launch to explore the Trojan asteroids, a population of ancient small bodies that share an orbit with Jupiter. With the successful completion of its critical design review last week, the Lucy spacecraft is on track to begin a 12-year journey of almost 4 billion miles to visit a record-breaking seven asteroids—one main belt asteroid and six Trojans.
The sunshield for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has passed a test critical to preparing the observatory for its 2021 launch. Technicians and engineers fully deployed and tensioned each of the sunshield's five layers, successfully putting the sunshield into the same position it will be in a million miles from Earth.
NASA's Terra satellite passed over the Northwestern Pacific Ocean on Oct. 21 and captured a visible image of Tropical Storm Neoguri. Satellite imagery revealed that the storm is becoming extra-tropical.
At least 55 elephants have died in a month in Zimbabwe due to a lack of food and water, its wildlife agency said Monday, as the country faces one of the worst droughts in its history.
El Niño events cause serious shifts in weather patterns across the globe, and an important question that scientists have sought to answer is: how will climate change affect the generation of strong El Niño events? A new study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by a team of international climate researchers led by Bin Wang of the University of Hawaii's International Pacific Research Center (IPRC), has an answer to that question. Results show that since the late 1970's... Читать дальше...
A group of brain cells, the corticobasal ganglia projecting neurons, are important for vocal learning in young birds, but not in adult birds, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
A new study led by Yale University confirms a long-held theory about the last great mass extinction event in history and how it affected Earth's oceans. The findings may also answer questions about how marine life eventually recovered.
Flooding from torrential rains caused by cyclones and monsoonal storms, as well as other catastrophic events, are responsible for moving huge amounts of fresh wood to a watery grave deep under the ocean, according to Earth scientists.
Did a murderer walk through the room? Did a shark just swim by? Is this a poisonous mushroom? Which reef species are lost when the coral dies? These questions can potentially be answered quickly and cheaply based on tiny samples of DNA found in the environment. But identifying DNA requires a trustworthy library of previously identified DNA sequences for comparison. Smithsonian scientists and their colleagues analyzed more than 4.7 million animal DNA sequences from GenBank, the most commonly used tool for this purpose... Читать дальше...
Butterflies and moths rank among the most diverse groups in the animal kingdom, with nearly 160,000 known species, ranging from the iconic blue morpho to the crop-devouring armyworm.
Candidates at job interviews expect to be evaluated on their experience, conduct, and ideas, but a new study by Yale researchers provides evidence that interviewees are judged based on their social status seconds after they start to speak.
US consulting firm McKinsey said Monday that a third of big global banks may not survive a major financial shock, with those in western Europe and Asia most at risk.
The threat of climate change has overtaken the prospect of nuclear war as the most pressing concern facing humanity, a former Colombian president and Nobel peace laureate warned Monday.
Space mice, radiation vests, robotic avatars and recycling polymers for 3-D printers are among the science experiments bound for the International Space Station on the next commercial resupply mission from Virginia.
Bigger than Jaws, but not nearly as dangerous, the largest fish in the sea, a whale shark, was spotted off the Florida coast.
Better management of the world's farms and forests could contribute up to a third of the emissions cuts needed to stave off devastating climate change, an international team of scientists said Monday.
Global shipping firms under pressure to cut carbon emissions are experimenting with an age-old technology: sails to harness ocean winds and reduce reliance on costly fuels.
Antarctica's ice sheet spans close to twice the area of the contiguous United States, and its land boundary is buttressed by massive, floating ice shelves extending hundreds of miles out over the frigid waters of the Southern Ocean. When these ice shelves collapse into the ocean, they expose towering cliffs of ice along Antarctica's edge.
The proliferation of fires in the Amazon rainforest drew international attention in August, especially when French President Emmanuel Macron called for urgent action.
Typhoon Bualoi rapidly intensified over 24 hours and quickly developed an eye and powerful thunderstorms.On Oct. 21, the eye of Typhoon Bualoi was just over 50 miles from the island of Saipan when NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite passed overhead. Saipan is the largest island of the Northern Mariana Islands. The Marianas are a commonwealth of the United States in the western Pacific Ocean.
As California's wildfire season intensifies, a growing number of residents in the state want to ban people from building in areas at greatest risk.
Found as an ingredient in many processed and packaged foods, palm oil is the most widely consumed vegetable oil. Now, researchers reporting in Current Biology on October 21 have discovered an unlikely ally for palm oil production: pig-tailed macaques.
A team of researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Alaska has found that they could estimate the size of bubbles that form from underwater volcanoes by listening to infrasound produced by bubble formation. In their paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the group describes their study of the infrasound that was produced by an undersea volcano eruption near an Aleutian island and what they learned from it.
An international team of scientists led by Prof. Kevin Verstrepen (VIB-KU-Leuven) and Prof. Steven Maere (VIB-UGent) has discovered that some of the most renowned classic Belgian beers, including Gueuze and Trappist ales, are fermented with a rare and unusual form of hybrid yeasts. These yeasts combine DNA of the traditional ale yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, with that of more stress-resistant feral yeasts such as Saccharomyces kudriavzevii.
