In August 8th, the VERIS rocket is going to launch from the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico.

VERIS is short for Very high Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and its 15-minute trip will carry an instrument that can measure properties of the structures in the sun's upper atmosphere down to 145 miles across, some eight times clearer than any similar telescope currently in space.

There are two ways to influence the public - basically carrots and sticks. A stick is, of course, taxes and fees and regulations and armed federal agents at your house should you choose not to obey the law.

A carrot is to create a Behavioral Insights project, similar to one that exists in the United Kingdom, tasked with using the awesome power of social science to create the behavior they want - it's like framing on steroids. 

In this Hubble Space Telescope composite image taken in April 2013, the sun-approaching Comet ISON floats against a seemingly infinite backdrop of numerous galaxies and a handful of foreground stars.

The icy visitor, with its long gossamer tail, appears to be swimming like a tadpole through a deep pond of celestial wonders.

In reality, the comet is much, much closer. The nearest star to the Sun is over 60,000 times farther away, and the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way is over thirty billion times more distant.

These vast dimensions are lost in this deep space Hubble exposure that visually combines our view of the universe from the very nearby to the extraordinarily far away.

Since the United States lacks regulatory guidelines or a standardized risk assessment for herbal supplement use, it falls on pediatricians to try and recognize what natural pharmaceuticals could be impacting the health of mothers and children during breastfeeding.

Omega-3 fatty acids, contained in oily fish such as salmon and trout, selectively inhibit growth and induce cell death in early and late-stage oral and skin cancers, according to a new paper.

Oxytocin, the warm, fuzzy miracle hormone that promotes feelings of love, social bonding and well-being, isn't quite as simple as those miracle-cure-of-the-week newspaper stories want you to believe.

It turns out that correlation is not causation, which surprises no one in science, and that oxytocin is also linked to emotional pain. Maybe someone will call this other form Dark Oxytocin, because stressful social situations continue to haunt you and and even trigger fear and anxiety in the future, you can blame hormones. And putting Dark in front of mysterious things is popular.

When some galaxies stop forming new stars, they become "quenched".

Quenched galaxies in the distant past appear to be much smaller than the quenched galaxies in the Universe today, which is something of a science mystery; how can these galaxies grow if they are no longer forming stars?
Hubble COSMOS survey results may have delivered a surprisingly simple answer to this long-standing cosmic riddle.

The Standard Model has some gaps and is unable to explain phenomena like dark matter or gravitational interaction between particles. Some physicists are seeking what they call "New Physics", something more fundamental, but there has been no direct proof of its existence, only indirect observation of dark matter, as deduced, among other things, from the movement of the galaxies.

A small clinical study showed promise for a new method of treating chronic wounds; an ultrasound applicator that can be worn like a band-aid.

The applicator delivers low-frequency, low-intensity ultrasound directly to wounds, and was found to significantly accelerate healing in five patients with venous ulcers, which are caused when valves in the veins malfunction, causing blood to pool in the leg instead of returning to the heart. This pooling, called venous stasis, can cause proteins and cells in the vein to leak into the surrounding tissue leading to inflammation and formation of an ulcer. 

The CDF and DZERO experiments recently produced a combination of their precision measurements of the W boson mass, and proceeded to include the LEP II results to obtain a "world average" of that very important parameter of the Standard Model.

The measurement is described in detail in a paper which explains the combination procedure (not trivial, since there are a number of systematic uncertainties that are partly correlated between the experiments). The Tevatron inputs are as follows:

CDF Run I (107/pb, 1.8 TeV): M_W = 80432+-79 MeV
CDF Run II (2.2/fb, 1.96 TeV): M_W = 80387+-19 MeV
DZERO Run I (95/pb, 1.8 TeV): M_W = 80478+-83 MeV