• NASA plans to search for signs of life on Jupiter’s moon Europa

    Early in December NASA officials announced that they plan to launch a $1.5 billion rover to Mars in 2020. NASA investigates the possible habitability of Europa, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon. One concept that may be gaining traction is a so-called “clipper” probe

  • Tracking the origins of HIV

    Alfred Roca, an assistant professor in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois, thinks that the genomes of an isolated West African human population provide important clues about how the Human immunodeficiency

  • Tropical Cyclone 04A expected to make landfall in Somalia

    According to latest Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) report, Tropical Cyclone 04A is located approximately 280 nm south of Cape Guardafui, Somalia, and is moving southwestward at 12 knots over the past six hours. Animated multispectral satellite imagery shows

  • ScienceCasts: Christmas Sky Show

    This Christmas, the Moon and Jupiter are converging for a heavenly sky show. Jupiter and the Moon are only a degree or two apart, depending on your location (in the Americas) and the time of evening. If you watch through binoculars, you can see Aldebaran right…

  • Ambrym’s twin lava lakes captured by satellite

    Vanuatu’s Ambrym volcano with its roiling pools of lava glow a deep orange, spewing fountains of lava and seemingly endless plumes of steam and gas. The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) aboard the Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite

  • Haze continues to spread across Northern India and Bangladesh

    Smoky haze spreads from northern India eastward into Bangladesh, filling the lowlands south of the Himalayas and valleys along rivers such as the Brahmaputra, in northeastern India and Bangladesh (flowing westward from right edge and then southward). The Ganges River,