A new image of supernova remnant W44, which combines far-infrared and X-ray data from ESA’s Herschel and XMM-Newton space observatories, shows the aftershock of a stellar explosion rippling through space. W44 is about 10,000 light-years away, in the dense star-forming clouds of the constellation of Aquila, the Eagle, and is one of the best examples of a supernova remnant interacting with its parent molecular cloud.
The Price Revolution in Europe, the runaway inflation that occurred during the years between 1515 to 1650, has been attributed to the sudden influx of silver from Mexico and Peru after discovery of the New World, which led to the decline in the value of of silver, and the growth of the European population and therefore competition for goods, which drove up prices.
The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) drives many of the catastrophic climate events that occur from one year to the next: floods, droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes.
However, climate scientists do not yet know how ENSO will respond to climate change. A new multi-century reconstruction of ENSO variability, based on fossil corals from Papua New Guinea, reveals a century-long decline in the number of El Niño events starting in the mid-1500s. It is the first time such a shift in activity has been documented in either modern observations or past reconstructions.
This reduced activity coincided with the initiation of an unusually cool period in the Northern Hemisphere called the Little Ice Age (LIA), which continued on into the mid-1800s.
Astronomers have identified a body that is very probably a planet wandering through space - without a parent star. This is the closest such object to oue Solar System, a distance of about 100 light-years and its comparative proximity and the absence of a bright star very close to it have allowed the team to study its atmosphere in great detail.
Free-floating planets are planetary-mass objects that roam through space without any ties to a star. Possible examples of such objects have been found before but without knowing their ages, it was not possible for astronomers to know whether they were really planets or brown dwarfs, “failed” stars that lack the bulk to trigger the reactions that make stars shine.
Maybe more interesting than the
just reported result of searches for the Higgs boson into four-lepton final states (ee, eμ, μμ) are the result presented by CMS and ATLAS on the searches for the Higgs decay into tau-lepton pairs. The reason for the interest comes from the fact that last July the rather high rates of Higgs decays to photon pairs had suggested to some that this new particle might have reduced couplings to fermions, and could thus be a non-Standard Model particle after all.
Today new results of Higgs searches have first been shown in Kyoto, at the
Hadron Collider Physics conference. Let us see the CMS and ATLAS updates of their measurements in the ZZ-> 4 leptons final state, which constitutes the best signal-to-noise channel to study Higgs properties cleanly and measure mass and spin-parity of the new found particle.
We all love paradoxes, those seemingly consistent logical brain-teasers where we sort out what can and should and might and must happen and that invariably lead to self-contradictory arguments.
If you are like me and my friends, there is nothing you enjoy more than sitting around during half-time of the Steelers game and arguing over Maxwell's Demon - the many ways to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, namely that heat transfer happens, from warmer to colder, until equilibrium is reached. If I put an ice pack next to Ben Roethlisberger's blazing hot 145 third down QBR (Total Quarterback Rating), for example, the ice pack will not cool down, it will warm up. So it has always been, so shall it must be. It is common sense.
In the Journal of Minimal Access Surgery, a case report details a 46-year-old physically fit female with a history of excessive bleeding and benign growths on her uterus. Her surgery was performed through a two inch-long incision in the belly button, the thinnest part of the abdomen, using the robotic arms in a "chopstick" fashion, said Dr. John R. Lue, Chief of the Medical College of Georgia Section of General Obstetrics and Gynecology at Georgia Health Sciences University, showing that the precision and three-dimensional view provided by robots can enable essentially scar-free surgery for some women needing hysterectomies
Tel Beth-Shemesh, an ancient village that resisted the aggressive expansion of neighboring Philistines, has been hiding an 11th century B.C. sacred compound. The complex is comprised of an elevated, massive circular stone structure and an intricately constructed building characterized by a row of three flat, large round stones.
How do you test the effects of weightlessness in space without risking lives and a lot of money?
Use a bed. People in bed with their heads 6° below the horizontal for long periods causes their bodies to react in similar ways to being weightless and so bedrest studies are being used to answer questions on how our bodies adapt to living in space and and even how our bodies adapt to growing old. Like Tang and pens that write upside down, findings from bedrest studies may apply directly to people on Earth.
