Seeing Stars Through The Cloud
London, UK (SPX) May 01, 2015 -
SKA Organisation and AWS are launching the AstroCompute in the Cloud grant programme to accelerate the development of innovative tools and techniques for processing, storing and analysing the global astronomy community's vast amounts of astronomic data in the cloud.
Grant recipients will have access to credits for AWS cloud services over a two-year period and up to one petabyte (PB) of sto ...
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Technologies enable ambitious MMS mission
Greenbelt MD (SPX) May 01, 2015 -
It was unprecedented developing a mission that could fly four identically equipped spacecraft in a tight formation and take measurements 100 times faster than any previous space mission - an achievement enabled in part by four NASA-developed technologies that in some cases took nearly 10 years to mature.
"To get to this point in time, we had to overcome a number of engineering challenges," ...
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Russia to Create World's First Rocket Engine Manufacturing Holding
Moscow (Sputnik) May 01, 2015 -
Russia's United Rocket and Space Corporation (URSC) is drafting a proposal on creation a unique holding, which is set to unite several manufacturers of engines for rockets and missiles, Russia's daily newspaper Izvestia reports on Tuesday.
The exact structure of the holding and its head-enterprise are yet to be defined.
"Yes, we are working on the creation of a rocket engine manufact ...
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Arianespace at the EU-Japan Business Round Table
Tokyo, Japan (SPX) May 01, 2015 -
Arianespace Chairman and CEO Stephane Israel took an active role in this week's meetings of the EU-Japan Business Round Table, which seeks to further strengthen relations between the European Union and Japan - including a focus on launch services.
As part of a high-level delegation - which comprises some 50 senior executives from leading Japanese and European companies - Israel discussed w ...
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Strong Evidence for Coronal Heating by Nanoflares
Indianapolis IN (SPX) May 01, 2015 -
The Sun's surface is blisteringly hot at 6,000 kelvins or 10,340 degrees Fahrenheit - but its atmosphere is another 300 times hotter. This has led to an enduring mystery for those who study the Sun: What heats the atmosphere to such extreme temperatures? Normally when you move away from a hot source the environment gets cooler, but some mechanism is clearly at work in the solar atmosphere, the c ...
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Telenor satellite begins post-launch maneuvers according to plan
Palo Alto CA (SPX) May 01, 2015 -
Space Systems/Loral reports that a satellite designed and built for Telenor Satellite Broadcasting (TSBc), was successfully launched and is performing post-launch maneuvers according to plan. The satellite, THOR 7, deployed its solar arrays on schedule following its launch aboard an Ariane 5 launch vehicle from the European Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. It began firing its main thruster ea ...
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NASA pushes back against proposal to slash climate budget
Washington (AFP) May 1, 2015 -
NASA pushed back Thursday against a congressional proposal to slash more than $300 million in funding from its branch focused on climate issues.
The proposal would cut funding to NASA's Earth Sciences division, which researches the planet's natural systems and processes - including climate change, severe weather and glaciers.
Republican Lamar Smith, who chairs the House of Representativ ...
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China chokes as tobacco profits a tough habit to quit
Baoshan, China (AFP) April 29, 2015 -
In the tobacco-producing heartland of China - the world's largest cigarette market - smoking is commonplace at work, in taxis and even in hospitals.
Snatching a break, construction worker Yao Xinggang takes deep puffs on a cigarette through a traditional-style water pipe.
He has a two-pack-a-day habit, but insists: "It's less harmful to health because the smoke is filtered through the ...
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'Almost total devastation' near Nepal quake epicentre: Red Cross
Geneva (AFP) April 30, 2015 -
The Red Cross warned Thursday that nearly all homes had been wiped out in some towns and villages near the epicentre of Nepal's devastating earthquake.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) said they remained "extremely concerned" about the welfare of hundreds of thousands of people in Nepal, five days after a massive earthquake that killed nearly 6,000 ...
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DR Congo grants amnesty to hundreds of M23 rebels
Kinshasa (AFP) April 30, 2015 -
The Democratic Republic of Congo announced Thursday it had granted amnesty to around 375 ex-members of the defeated M23 rebel movement.
The rebels' 18-month war, during which they briefly seized the key eastern DR Congo town of Goma, capital of the mineral-rich North Kivu province, was brought to an end in 2013 by government troops and UN peacekeepers.
Some 1,300 rebels fled to Uganda an ...
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McDonald's supplier gets Beijing's biggest pollution fine: Xinhua
Beijing (AFP) April 30, 2015 -
A McDonald's joint venture in China supplying its outlets with French fries has been slapped with a record 3.9 million yuan ($630,000) fine for water pollution, state media reported.
The fine levied against Beijing Simplot Food Processing is the largest ever meted out by the city of Beijing for pollution, the official Xinhua news agency said, citing the municipal environmental watchdog.
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Disease fears hit Nepal's quake-hit homeless
Kathmandu (AFP) April 30, 2015 -
With its sewage system badly damaged, carcasses rotting in the rubble and thousands of people sleeping rough, experts say Nepal faces a race against time to ensure a devastating earthquake does not trigger a public health disaster.
More than 5,500 people were killed in Saturday's quake and relief officials will be desperate to avoid a second tragedy akin to a cholera outbreak traced back to ...
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Science measures humanity's mark on extreme weather
Paris April 28, 2015 -
Global warming since the Industrial Revolution is responsible for about three-quarters of certain heat extremes today, and nearly a fifth of unusually heavy downpours, according to a new study.
Erich Fischer and Reto Knutti from the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Zurich, used simulations and modelling to compare weather extremes from the pre-industrial and modern eras in a ...
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Nations fail to meet own climate fund deadline
Paris (AFP) April 30, 2015 -
Nations missed a self-imposed deadline to firm up pledges worth $4.7 billion (4.2 billion euros) to the Green Climate Fund (GCF) by Thursday, mustering arrangements for less than $4 billion, the fund said.
This leaves it short of the threshold to start funding projects to curb dangerous climate change, GCF executive director Hela Cheikhrouhou told journalists by teleconference from Songdo, S ...
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Diverse sea creatures evolved to reach same swimming solution
London, UK (SPX) May 01, 2015 -
The ability to move one's body rapidly through water is a key to existence for many species on this blue planet of ours. The Persian carpet flatworm, the cuttlefish and the black ghost knifefish look nothing like each other - their last common ancestor lived 550 million years ago, before the Cambrian period - but a new study uses a combination of computer simulations, a robotic fish and video fo ...
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Partially logged rainforests emitting more carbon than previously thought
London UK (SPX) May 01, 2015 -
Global carbon emissions from forests could have been underestimated because calculations have not fully accounted for the dead wood from logging.
Living trees take in carbon dioxide whereas dead and decaying ones release it. Understanding the proportion of both is important for determining whether a large area of forest is a source of carbon dioxide, or a 'sink' that helps to absorb carbon ...
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How cracking explains underwater volcanoes and the Hawaiian bend
Sydney, Australia (SPX) May 01, 2015 -
University of Sydney geoscientists have helped prove that some of the ocean's underwater volcanoes did not erupt from hot spots in the Earth's mantle but instead formed from cracks or fractures in the oceanic crust.
The discovery helps explain the spectacular bend in the famous underwater range, the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain, where the bottom half kinks at a sixty degree angle to the ...
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Engineering a better future for the Mississippi Delta
Boulder CO (SPX) May 01, 2015 -
River deltas, low-lying landforms that host critical and diverse ecosystems as well as high concentrations of human population, face an uncertain future. Even as some deltas experience decreased sediment supply from damming, others will see increased sediment discharge from land-use changes. Accurate estimates of the current rate of subsidence in the Mississippi Delta (southern USA) are importan ...
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Bigger bang for your buck: Restoring fish habitat by removing barriers
Madison WI (SPX) May 01, 2015 -
A few years ago, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Limnology created the first map of all the road crossings and dams blocking the tributary rivers that feed the five Great Lakes. These tributaries serve as migratory highways, providing fish like walleye and lake sturgeon access to headwater breeding grounds.
"It painted a pretty horrifying picture of what it's ...
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Human weapons may not have caused the demise of the Neanderthals
Amsterdam, Netherlands (SPX) May 01, 2015 -
The demise of Neanderthals may have nothing to do with innovative hunting weapons carried by humans from west Asia, according to a new study published in the Journal of Human Evolution. The researchers, from Nagoya University and The University of Tokyo, Japan, say their findings mean that we may need to rethink the reasons humans survived Neanderthals - and that we may not have behaved as diffe ...
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Ancient connection between the Americas enhanced extreme biodiversity
Washington DC (SPX) May 01, 2015 -
Species exchange between North and South America created one of the most biologically diverse regions on Earth. A new study by Smithsonian scientists and colleagues published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that species migrations across the Isthmus of Panama began about 20 million years ago, some six times earlier than commonly assumed. These biological re ...
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Silicon: An important element in rice production
London, UK (SPX) May 01, 2015 -
Silicon (Si) is the second most abundant element of the earth`s crust after oxygen. It has long been neglected by ecologists, as it is not considered an essential nutrient for plants. However, research of recent years showed that it is beneficial for the growth of many plants, including important crops such as rice, wheat and barley.
For instance, Si enhanced the resistance against pests, ...
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Whitening the Arctic Ocean: May restore sea ice, but not climate
Washington DC (SPX) May 01, 2015 -
Some scientists have suggested that global warming could melt frozen ground in the Arctic, releasing vast amounts of the potent greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere, greatly amplifying global warming. It has been proposed that such disastrous climate effects could be offset by technological approaches, broadly called geoengineering. One geoengineering proposal is to artificially whiten the ...
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Joy for rescued Nepalese but fears grow for rural areas
Kathmandu (AFP) April 30, 2015 -
Rescuers pulled a teenage boy and a woman in her thirties alive from the rubble of Nepal's earthquake Thursday, as the Red Cross warned of "total devastation" in areas near the epicentre.
The rescue of 15-year-old Pemba Tamang, who told AFP he stayed alive by eating a jar of ghee (clarified butter), was hailed as a miracle five days after the massive quake that has so far claimed nearly 6,00 ...
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Climbing to resume on Mount Everest by next week: official
Kathmandu (AFP) April 30, 2015 -
Climbing will resume on Mount Everest by next week after an earthquake-triggered avalanche that left 18 people dead on the world's highest peak, a Nepalese government official said Thursday.
Saturday's avalanche that ripped through base camp also destroyed ladders through the treacherous Khumbu icefall higher up the mountain, raising doubts about the future of this year's climbing season. ...
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