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NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has obtained the highest-resolution movie yet of a unique six-sided jet stream, known as the hexagon, around Saturn’s north pole. (more…)
Built with spare parts and without a moment to spare, the International Space Station (ISS)-RapidScat isn’t your average NASA Earth science mission.
Short for Rapid Scatterometer, ISS-RapidScat will monitor ocean winds from the vantage point of the space station . It will join a handful of other satellite scatterometer missions that make essential measurements used to support weather and marine forecasting, including the tracking of storms and hurricanes. It will also help improve our understanding of how interactions between Earth’s ocean and atmosphere influence our climate. (more…)
PASADENA, Calif. – NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has provided scientists the first close-up, visible-light views of a behemoth hurricane swirling around Saturn’s north pole.
In high-resolution pictures and video, scientists see the hurricane’s eye is about 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) wide, 20 times larger than the average hurricane eye on Earth. Thin, bright clouds at the outer edge of the hurricane are traveling 330 mph(150 meters per second). The hurricane swirls inside a large, mysterious, six-sided weather pattern known as the hexagon. (more…)
A freelance photographer happened to be on the scene in New York when one man pushed another onto the subway tracks. The New York Post ultimately ran a photo on its front page, sparking widespread outrage. Based on his research, Brown University psychologist Fiery Cushman suggests that what makes people uncomfortable about the photo may be the idea of profiting from tragedy.
When tragedy occurs, who may profit? Newspapers around the country announced the tragic death of Ki-Suck Han, the man pushed in front of a New York subway car on Monday. Quickly, however, attention turned to an element of the news reporting itself. On the controversial front cover of the New York Post on Tuesday, a full-page photo showed the train hurtling toward Han. Dramatically captured by a freelance photographer while events unfolded, the photograph ran under the headline: “Pushed onto the subway track, this man is about to die.” (more…)
There’s an old adage (with several variations) that California has four seasons: earthquake, fire, flood and drought. While Californians happily cede the title of Hurricane Capital of America to U.S. East and Gulf coasters, every once in a while, Mother Nature sends a reminder to Southern Californians that they are not completely immune to the whims of tropical cyclones. Typically, this takes the form of rainfall from the remnants of a tropical cyclone in the eastern Pacific, as happened recently when the remnants of Hurricane John brought rain and thunderstorms to parts of Southern California. But could a hurricane ever make landfall in Southern California?
The answer, as it turns out, is yes, and no. While there has never been a documented case of a hurricane making landfall in California, the Golden State has had its share of run-ins and close calls with tropical cyclones. In fact, California has been affected by at least a few tropical cyclones in every decade since 1900. Over that timeframe, three of those storms brought gale-force winds to California: an unnamed California tropical storm in 1939, Kathleen in 1976 and Nora in 1997. But the primary threat from California tropical cyclones isn’t winds or storm surge. It’s rainfall — sometimes torrential — which has led to flooding, damage and, occasionally, casualties. (more…)
Warmer waters flowed to shelfbreak south of New England
At a meeting with New England commercial fishermen last December, physical oceanographers Glen Gawarkiewicz and Al Plueddemann from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) were alerted by three fishermen about unusually high surface water temperatures and strong currents on the outer continental shelf south of New England.
“I promised them I would look into why that was happening,” Gawarkiewicz says. (more…)
Berkeley Lab Researchers Take a Mesocale Look at Magnetic Vortex Formations
The phenomenon in ferromagnetic nanodisks of magnetic vortices – hurricanes of magnetism only a few atoms across – has generated intense interest in the high-tech community because of the potential application of these vortices in non-volatile Random Access Memory (RAM) data storage systems. New findings from scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) indicate that the road to magnetic vortex RAM might be more difficult to navigate than previously supposed, but there might be unexpected rewards as well.
In an experiment made possible by the unique X-ray beams at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS), a team of researchers led by Peter Fischer and Mi-Young Im of the Center for X-Ray Optics (CXRO), in collaboration with scientists in Japan, discovered that contrary to what was previously believed, the formation of magnetic vortices in ferromagnetic nanodisks is an asymmetric phenomenon. It is possible that this breaking of symmetry would lead to failure in a data storage device during its initialization process. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— The fastest wind ever discovered blowing off a disk around a stellar-mass black hole has been observed by a team of astronomers that includes a University of Michigan doctoral student.
Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, an orbiting telescope, they clocked the record-breaking super wind at about 20 million mph, or about 3 percent of the speed of light. This is nearly 10 times faster than astronomers had previously observed from a stellar-mass black hole. (more…)
