Science

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NASA's AIRS Monitors Tropical Storm Fay as It Deluges the East Coast

From its vantage point aboard the Aqua satellite, the instrument maps how much moisture the storm's clouds contain.

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NASA's AIRS instrument captured this image of Tropical Storm Fay around 2 p.m. local time on July 10, 2020, as the storm swept through New England.

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Giant A-68 iceberg three years on

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A-68A in open waters.

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NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Spies Newly Discovered Comet NEOWISE

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An unprocessed image from the WISPR instrument on board NASA’s Parker Solar Probe shows comet NEOWISE on July 5, 2020, shortly after its closest approach to the Sun. The Sun is out of frame to the left. The faint grid pattern near the center of the image is an artifact of the way the image is created. The small black structure near the lower left of the image is caused by a grain of dust resting on the imager’s lens.

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Conditions Ripe for Active Amazon Fire, Atlantic Hurrican Seasons

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On August 11, 2019, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured these images of several fires burning in the states of Rondônia, Amazonas, Pará, and Mato Grosso. This year’s drought combined with the recent uptick in deforestation make these states particularly vulnerable this fire season to fires that can grow out of control and spread.

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Scientists Dive Deep Into Hidden World of Quantum States

New technique developed by scientists at Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley could help find silicon’s successor in race against Moore’s Law

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Right: Animation of a Van Hove singularity (VHS) shown approximately 1 nanometer below the surface of an oxide heterostructure made of atomically thin layers of strontium titanate and samarium titanate. Left: Atomic composition of the oxide heterostructure illustrated by colored dots: Purple represents samarium; orange represents strontium; light blue represents titanium; and small red dots represent oxygen.

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VERITAS: Exploring the Deep Truths of Venus

Under consideration to become the next Discovery Program mission, VERITAS would reveal the inner workings of Earth's mysterious "twin."

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An artist's concept of active volcanos on Venus, depicting a subduction zone where the foreground crust plunges into the planet's interior at the topographic trench.

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Comet NEOWISE Sizzles as It Slides by the Sun, Providing a Treat for Observers

Catch the comet in the morning sky until July 11, after which you can find it just after sunset until mid-August.

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Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE appears as a string of fuzzy red dots in this composite of several heat-sensitive infrared images taken by NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission on March 27, 2020.

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Keeping a Steady Eye on Sea Level Change From Space

The Sentinel-6/Jason-CS satellite mission will add to a long-term sea level dataset that's become the gold standard for climate studies from orbit.

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Coastal areas around the world - such as the Zambezi River Delta shown in a Landsat 8 satellite image - are contending with the consequences of a warming planet including droughts and floods, in addition to changing sea levels.

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Shock waves from stellar explosions take preferential direction

Supernovae and magnetic fields in the laboratory In a paper (DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab92a4) published in the Astrophysical Journal, a team led by researchers at École Polytechnique have paved the way to unravelling the mystery as to why many supernova remnants that we observe from Earth are axisymmetric (elongated along one axis) rather than spherical.

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Shock waves from stellar explosions take preferential direction

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Portable system boosts laser precision, at room temperature

“Light squeezer” reduces quantum noise in lasers, could enhance quantum computing and gravitational-wave detection.

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An MIT-designed miniature “squeezer” reduces quantum noise in lasers at room temperature. The marble-sized system could enable better laser precision for quantum computing and gravitational-wave detection. This illustration shows an artist’s interpretation of the system.