High, cold cloud tops with bitter cold temperatures are indicators that there's a lot of strength in the uplift of air within a tropical cyclone. NASA's Aqua satellite passed by Hurricane Gilma and saw a concentrated area of very cold cloud tops.
NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Hurricane Gilma on August 9 at 5:53 a.m. EDT. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument captured an infrared image of the cloud temperatures that showed the strongest storms and heaviest rainfall were wrapped around the storm's center. Cloud top temperatures in that area were as cold as -63 Fahrenheit (-52 Celsius), indicating very strong thunderstorms (a tropical cyclone is made up of hundreds of thunderstorms), with potentially heavy rainfall. The higher a cloud top extends into the atmosphere, the colder it is, and that data is picked up by the AIRS instrument onboard the Aqua satellite.

On August 9, 2012 at 11 a.m. EDT (8 a.m. PDT) Gilma's maximum sustained winds are near 75 mph (120 kmh), down from 80 mph (130 kmh) which makes Gilma a category one hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane wind scale. Gilma was far from land and its center was about 715 miles (1,155 km) southwest of the southern tip of Baja California, near latitude 16.2 north and longitude 118.6 west. Gilma is moving toward the west-northwest near 7 mph (11 kmh). Forecasters expect Gilma to turn to the northwest because a ridge of high pressure that has been guiding it is now weakening.

NASA'S Project Morpheus lander, an experimental vehicle designed with a view toward future U.S. space missions beyond Earth's orbit, crashed and burst into flames at the Kennedy Space Center in central Florida on Thursday.

During a so-called autonomous free-flight test, NASA said the vehicle lifted off the ground successfully but "then experienced a hardware component failure, which prevented it from maintaining stable flight."

No one was injured in the accident, which followed nearly a year of testing on Morpheus at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. But NASA TV footage showed the space capsule engulfed almost totally in flames after the crash, with little left to salvage.

Astronomers at the University of Zürich and the ETH Zürich, together with other international researchers, have found large amounts of invisible "dark matter" near the Sun. Their results are inconsistent with the theory that the Milky Way Galaxy is surrounded by a massive "halo" of dark matter, but this is the first study of its kind to use a method rigorously tested against mock data from high quality simulations. The authors also find tantalizing hints of a new dark matter component in our Galaxy.

Dark matter was first proposed by the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s. He found that clusters of galaxies were filled with a mysterious dark matter that kept them from flying apart. At nearly the same time, Jan Oort in the Netherlands discovered that the density of matter near the Sun was nearly twice what could be explained by the presence of stars and gas alone. In the intervening decades, astronomers developed a theory of dark matter and structure formation that explains the properties of clusters and galaxies in the Universe, but the amount of dark matter in the solar neighbourhood has remained more mysterious. For decades after Oort's measurement, studies found 3-6 times more dark matter than expected. Then last year new data and a new method claimed far less than expected. The community was left puzzled, generally believing that the observations and analyses simply weren't sensitive enough to perform a reliable measurement.

For years, many scientists had thought that plate tectonics existed nowhere in our solar system but on Earth. Now, a UCLA scientist has discovered that the geological phenomenon, which involves the movement of huge crustal plates beneath a planet's surface, also exists on Mars.

"Mars is at a primitive stage of plate tectonics. It gives us a glimpse of how the early Earth may have looked and may help us understand how plate tectonics began on Earth," said An Yin, a UCLA professor of Earth and space sciences and the sole author of the new research.

Yin made the discovery during his analysis of satellite images from a NASA spacecraft known as THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) and from the HIRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. He analyzed about 100 satellite images -- approximately a dozen were revealing of plate tectonics.

Yin has conducted geologic research in the Himalayas and Tibet, where two of Earth's seven major plates divide.

The ancient Martian crater where the Curiosity rover landed looks strikingly similar to the Mojave Desert in California with its looming mountains and hanging haze, scientists said Wednesday.

"The first impression that you get is how Earth-like this seems looking at that landscape," said chief scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology.

Overnight, the car-size rover poked its head out for the first time since settling in Gale Crater, peered around and returned a flood of black-and-white pictures that will be stitched into a panorama.

It provided the best view so far of its destination since touching down Sunday night after nailing an intricate choreography. During the last few seconds, a rocket-powered spacecraft hovered as cables lowered Curiosity to the ground.

The cameras recorded the cats' outdoor activities and showed that they are hunting down more critters than expected

A new report gives new meaning to the old phrase, "Look what the cat dragged in."

Researchers from the University of Georgia recently took a deeper look into the predatory lives of house cats by putting cameras around their necks. About 60 cat owners in Athens, Georgia enlisted their pet cats for the study.

For about four to six hours per day for seven to 10 days, pet owners would place kitty cameras, which were made by the National Geographic CritterCam team, around their cats' necks and let them free outside. During that period of time outdoors, the camera would record all of the cats' activities. Later, the cats would be let back in and owners would download the footage.

According to the National Geographic CritterCam team, which makes mobile data gathering systems to record animal behavior, these kitty cameras were the smallest they've created to date.

The study found that only 30 percent of the 74 million U.S. house cats prey on smaller animals, but this 30 percent is taking part in much more outdoor hunting than previously thought. According to study leader Kerrie Anne Loyd, previous numbers were likely lower because "they didn't include the animals that cats ate or left behind."

While the study didn't give a total number of prey killed by the house cats, about 49 percent of critters killed by house cats were left for dead, 30 percent were eaten and just under 25 percent were brought home.

Of the total critters killed, 41 percent were lizards, snakes, and frogs; 25 percent were mammals like chipmunks; 20 percent were insects and worms, and 12 percent were birds. In fact, house cats are one of the reasons that one in three American bird species are becoming endangered.

In addition to killing prey, the house cats were taking part in dangerous activities like crossing roads, playing in storm drains, entering crawl spaces and eating/drinking things they found.

This weekend, the Perseid meteor shower will be at its peak. While this year's light show probably won't match the 2009 shower, when watchers could see up to 173 shooting stars an hour, the Perseids are a celestial spectacle well worth packing off to somewhere away from the glare of city lights.

The Perseids take their name from Perseus, the constellation nestled between Cassiopeia and Taurus. The meteors appear to originate from a point within Perseus, but they are actually dust shaken off from the tail of the comet Swift-Tuttle.

Swift-Tuttle makes a complete pass within its orbit every 133 years, but its dust trail hangs around for much longer. As Earth passes through the residual dust cloud, the tiny particles that hit our atmosphere streak across the sky. Usually these meteors burn up, but some make it to the ground as meteorites.

Researchers in Canada's western Arctic have found evidence of a crater that formed when a huge meteorite slammed into Earth millions of years ago.

Measuring about 15 miles (25 kilometers) across, the formation was named the Prince Albert impact crater after the peninsula where it was discovered. Researchers don't know exactly when it was created, but evidence suggests the crater is between 130 million and 350 million years old, according to a statement from the University of Saskatchewan.

Meteors are fragments of asteroids or comets that enter Earth's atmosphere at high speeds; most are small, some as tiny as a grain of sand, so they discintegrate in the air, and only rarely are they large enough to make it to Earth's surface. When meteors slam into Earth, they are called meteorites.

A team of geologists spotted this newly identified meteorite crater while surveying the region for possible energy and mineral resources. They were initially intrigued by steeply tilted strata visible in river gorges and other features in the flat tundra of northwestern Victoria Island.

"Unless you recognized the telltale clues, you wouldn't know what you were looking at," researcher Brian Pratt explained in the statement. "You might see a bunch of broken rocks and wonder how they got there, but we found abundant shatter cones."

In the 1998 movie "Armageddon," Bruce Willis plays an oil-drilling platform engineer who leads a team that lands on an asteroid aimed at Earth, drills a hole into its center and explodes a nuclear device that splits the asteroid, saving the planet.

Could it actually happen? Definitely not, say physics graduate students at the University of Leicester in England.

Leaving aside the question of whether we have spacecraft that could transport the drilling team to intercept the asteroid, the group of four students concluded that we simply don't have a big enough bomb to split the asteroid so that the two halves would pass by the Earth.

Ben Hall, Gregory Brown, Ashley Back and Stuart Turner devised a formula to calculate how much energy would be needed to split an asteroid of the size depicted in the film. They reported in two related papers in the University of Leicester Journal of Special Physical Topics that it would require 800 trillion terajoules of energy to split the asteroid in two with both pieces clearing the planet. Unfortunately, the largest nuclear bomb known, a Russian monster known as Big Ivan, yields only 418,000 joules. Hence, they said, the project would require a bomb a billion times as powerful to save the Earth.

Scientists have come up with a theory which could answer one of the biggest mysteries in the universe.

In 2010, NASA scientists discovered four stars which absolutely dwarf anything that comes before them - they are 300 times as massive as the Sun, and twice as large as it was predicted stars could ever be.

Now researchers at the Bonn University in Germany, say the stars, part of the giant star cluster R136 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is about 160,000 light years from Earth, could be the size they are thanks to a few mergers and acquisitions.

Until the discovery of these objects in 2010, observations of the Milky Way and other galaxies suggested that the upper limit for stars formed in the present day universe was about 150 times the mass of the Sun.

This value represented a universal limit and appeared to apply wherever stars formed.
'Not only the upper mass limit but the whole mass ingredient of any newborn assembly of stars appears identical irrespective of the stellar birthplace', said Prof. Dr Pavel Kroupa of the University of Bonn, a co-author on the new paper.