As Hurricane Harvey continued to strengthen, NASA analyzed the storm’s rainfall, cloud heights and cloud top temperatures. NASA’s GPM and Aqua satellite provided information while an animation of GOES-East satellite imagery showed Harvey’s progression toward the Texas coast. 

Harvey's intensification has been aided by movement through an environment that includes low vertical wind shear and the warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico.

Within the next century, rising ocean temperatures around the Galápagos Islands are expected to make the water too warm for a key prey species, sardines, to tolerate. A new study by Wake Forest University biologists, published in PLOS One Aug. 23, uses decades of data on the diet and breeding of a tropical seabird, the Nazca booby, to understand how the future absence of sardines may affect the booby population.

Fuels that are produced from nonpetroleum-based biological sources may become greener and more affordable, thanks to research performed at the University of Illinois’ Prairie Research Institutethat examines the use of a processing catalyst made from palladium metal and bacteria.

The Seven Sisters, as they were known to the ancient Greeks, are now known to modern astronomers as the Pleiades star cluster – a set of stars which are visible to the naked eye and have been studied for thousands of years by cultures all over the world. Now Dr Tim White of the Stellar Astrophysics Centre at Aarhus University and his team of Danish and international astronomers have demonstrated a powerful new technique for observing stars such as these, which are ordinarily far too bright to look at with high performance telescopes. Their work is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Two NASA WB-57F research aircraft successfully tracked the August 21 solar eclipse as part of a NASA project led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) to study the solar corona and Mercury’s surface.

NASA’s Aqua satellite provided an infrared look at the newly formed Tropical Depression 16W in the Philippine Sea. 16W is known locally in the Philippines as "Jolina."  

Pardon the pun, but Canada is practically overflowing with freshwater.

And, believe it or not, that abundance causes problems for water researchers.

“Canada is blessed with more freshwater than anywhere else in the world, but there’s no way you can put sensors in to monitor everything,” said Al Pietroniro, executive director of National Hydrological Services, an adjunct professor with the University of Saskatchewan and member of the Centre for Hydrology. “It’s too big.”

Scientists concerned that global warming may release huge stores of methane from reservoirs beneath Arctic tundra and deposits of marine hydrates – a theory known as the “clathrate gun” hypothesis – have turned to geologic history to search for evidence of significant methane release during past warming events.

A new study published this week in the journal Nature suggests, however, that the last ice age transition to a warmer climate some 11,500 years ago did not include massive methane flux from marine sediments or the tundra. Instead, the likely source of rising levels of atmospheric methane was from tropical wetlands, authors of the new study say.

Ice has always been fascinating to Alison Criscitiello.

“I had a science teacher who did a short unit on glaciers … I couldn’t believe they were real,” she says. That classroom encounter when she was in eight grade in Winchester, Massachusetts, had a lasting impact.

Caffeine, the widely consumed stimulant and igniter of sluggish mornings, has been found to temper taste buds temporarily, making food and drink seem less sweet, according to new Cornell University research.