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The Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant near U.S. Route 101 (the Pacific Coast Highway) in the northern portion of San Diego County; Carlsbad, California.

Fires in the Siberian area of Russia are usually quite severe by this time of year and 2019 is no exception. This NOAA/NASA Suomi NPP image taken on July 30, 2019 shows dozens to hundreds of fires burning across a large expanse of this mostly wilderness area of Russia. In fact, this year has been worse than most. Scientists have seen an unprecedented number of wildfires across the region since June. More than 2.7 million hectares (6,671,845 acres) of remote forest is currently burning across six Siberian and Far East regions, according to Russia’s Federal Forestry Agency. That's roughly the size of Massachusetts.

Siberian wildfires.

If shiny things get your attention, prepare to be dazzled by the newly coated LSST Secondary Mirror (M2)! The mirror received its first reflective coating on July 16, 2019, at the LSST summit facility building on Cerro Pachón. The 3.4-meter M2 mirror arrived on the summit in December 2018, after being shipped from Rochester, NY, where it was fabricated by L3Harris (formerly Harris Corporation). Since its arrival the container holding the mirror has been stored inside the LSST observatory building, on the roof of the camera clean room. Until the coating campaign, the mirror hadn't been removed from the box, although careful inspections of all parts of the mirror were conducted to make sure no damage occurred during shipping.

A model of the stars in the GD-1 stellar stream overlaid on data collected by the Gaia spacecraft. The color of each stat represents how strongly its orbit was affected by the unknown dark matter substructure of the galaxy. White represents a significant change from normal, while red represents almost no difference.

A Purdue University group has found ways of transforming structures that occur naturally in cell membranes to create other architectures, like parallel 1nm-wide line segments, more applicable to computing.

Seamless integration of wireless transmission lines into glass-fiber networks results in high-performance data networks. A detailed description of the figure is given at the end of the text.

This infographic illustrates key features of the TOI 270 system, located about 73 light-years away in the southern constellation Pictor. The three known planets were discovered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite through periodic dips in starlight caused by each orbiting world. Insets shows information about the planets, including their correct relative sizes, and how they compare to Earth. Temperatures given for TOI 270 planets are equilibrium temperatures, calculated without the warming effects of any possible atmospheres.

Rice University researchers have determined that an odd, two-faced "Janus" edge is more common than previously thought for carbon nanotubes growing on a rigid catalyst. The conventional nanotube at left has facets that form a circle, allowing the nanotube to grow straight up from the catalyst. But they discovered the nanotube at right, with a tilted Janus edge that has segregated sections of zigzag and armchair configurations, is far more energetically favored when growing carbon nanotubes via chemical vapor deposition.