Science is for Sharing

 Clouds on Venus are made concentrated sulfuric acid ...! not Water as in earth's atmosphere.... Venus experienced tremendous volcanic activity, flooding the surface with new lava and filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, causing a runaway greenhouse effect...  Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Read more: http://fettss.arc.nasa.gov/collection/details/venus-globe-1/

My colleague Mr.Sobhan Kumar Kompalli, Scientist in Space Physics Laboratory has clicked more than 100 snaps of the beautiful 'Lunar Eclipse' that entertained earthlings on 10-Dec-2011. Here is a matrix of few selected snaps by the  amateur  photographer. Also have a view of the Simulated Lunar Eclipse ( animation)  which I generated using the open source software 'Stellarium'. You are welcome to watch  the drama unfold......! Photograph by Mr.Sobhan Kumar Kompalli (sobhan1urs@gmail.com)

Global warming forces Birds to higher altitudes and not necessarily to higher latitudes.... finds a study....... birds aren't migrating as rapidly as scientists previously anticipated, based on recorded temperature increases. "However, our understanding of the response of tropical birds to warming is still poor," said German Forero-Medina, a Ph.D. student at Duke's Nicholas School who is lead author of the new study. "Moving to the north doesn't help them, because tropical temperatures do not change very much with latitude. So moving up to higher elevations is the only way to go, but there are few historical data that can serve as baselines for comparison over time." Read more: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-climate-tropical-birds-higher-elevations.html  "Elevational Ranges of Birds on a Tropical Montane Gradient Lag Behind Warming Temperatures" German Forero-Medina, John Terborgh, S. Jacob Socolar & Stuart L. Pimm. PLoS ONE,...

A new Project Aims to Predict South Asian Floods Are our Glaciers melting .... faster ....??? How it affects the nearby lakes and rivers flow and will it cause floods...? A new effort, dubbed HIMLA and led by Molly Brown of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, aims to change this by harnessing state-of-the-art, satellite-based monitoring and modeling techniques. Scientists will feed data from satellite instruments such as MODIS and ASTER into a hydrological model that will produce daily snow/water equivalence maps that will feed into other hydrological models to determine how much freshwater flows into the region’s rivers from snow and glaciers.  The ultimate goal: an early warning system for flood prediction.... Read more from NASA's blog:  http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/whatonearth/posts/post_1323195383980.html

We have seen fire in earth where gravity is dominant. Can you guess how the same fire out of same fuel would behave in zero gravity or say in space....? Read this interesting article to know more... http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/FLEX_Video.html In space, where there is no up or down, flames behave in unconventional ways. When a flame burns on Earth, heated gases rise from the fire creating a buoyant flow that draws oxygen into the flame and combustion products away from it. In space, warm gases do not rise, and molecular diffusion drives flame behavior. "In space molecular diffusion draws oxygen to the flame and combustion products away from the flame at a rate 100x slower than the buoyant flow on Earth," Dan Dietrich, project scientist, NASA's Glenn Research Center, said. Flames in space burn with a lower temperature, at a lower rate, and with less oxygen than in normal gravity. This means that materials used to extinguish ...

Waves created by lightning flashes – here shown in blue, green, and red – circle around Earth, creating something called Schumann resonance. These waves can be used to study the nature of the atmosphere they travel through. (Credit: NASA/Simoes)  At any given moment about 2,000 thunderstorms roll over Earth, producing some 50 flashes of lightning every second. Each lightning burst creates electromagnetic waves that begin to circle around Earth captured between Earth's surface and a boundary about 60 miles up. Some of the waves -- if they have just the right wavelength -- combine, increasing in strength, to create a repeating atmospheric heartbeat known as Schumann resonance. NASA's Vector Electric Field Instrument (VEFI) aboard the U.S. Air Force's Communications/Navigation Outage Forecast System (C/NOFS) satellite has detected Schumann resonance from space. This comes as a surprise. Fernando Simões, Robert Pfaff, Henry Freudenreich. Satellite observations of Schu...

LRO Camera Team Releases High Resolution Global Topographic Map of Moon. click on the image to go to the official website and high resolution image. Source: NASA-LRO http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news/lro-topo.html