Forum for Science, Industry and Business

Satellite spots Tropical Storm Nadine and 2 developing lows

On Sept. 21 at 7:45 a.m. EDT, NOAA's GOES-13 satellite captured an image of Tropical Storm Nadine in the eastern Atlantic, and a developing low in the central Atlantic. Nadine is south of the frontal boundary draped across the Azores islands. NOAA's GOES-13 satellite sits in a fixed orbit over the eastern U.S. and captures continuous visible and infrared imagery of the eastern U.S. and the Atlantic Ocean. The image was created by NASA's GOES Project, located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

On Sept. 21 at 7:45 a.m. EDT, GOES-13 captured an image of Tropical Storm Nadine in the eastern Atlantic, and developing lows in the central Atlantic and eastern Pacific.

Credit: NASA/NOAA GOES Project

The Developing Atlantic Low Pressure Area

There's a non-tropical low pressure area in the central Atlantic Ocean that was also picked up on the GOES-13 satellite image from today, Sept. 21. The low is located about 450 miles east of Bermuda and the shower and thunderstorm activity didn't change much from the previous day. This low is tracking to the north-northwest into cooler waters, which will drop its chances for developing into a sub-tropical depression. In the meantime, it has a 50 percent chance of making it to sub-tropical depression status before hitting the cooler waters.

The Developing Eastern Pacific Low Pressure Area

The low pressure area off the western coast of Mexico has a better chance of development than its Atlantic counterpart, and as a tropical depression, not a sub-tropical one. Satellite data show that the low appears to be getting organized and has a visible appearance of circulation. The low is located about 400 miles south of the southern tip of Manzanillo, Mexico and is moving to the west-northwest. The National Hurricane Center noted that conditions are ripe for development with low wind shear and warm sea surface temperatures. There's a 70 percent chance that this low could become the thirteenth tropical depression of the Eastern Pacific hurricane season. If it develops into a tropical storm over the weekend of Sept. 22 and 23, it would be named Miriam.

Rob Gutro | EurekAlert!
Further information:
http://www.nasa.gov

Im Focus: LaserTAB: More efficient and precise contacts thanks to human-robot collaboration

At the productronica trade fair in Munich this November, the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT will be presenting Laser-Based Tape-Automated Bonding, LaserTAB for short. The experts from Aachen will be demonstrating how new battery cells and power electronics can be micro-welded more efficiently and precisely than ever before thanks to new optics and robot support.

Fraunhofer ILT from Aachen relies on a clever combination of robotics and a laser scanner with new optics as well as process monitoring, which it has developed...

Im Focus: The pyrenoid is a carbon-fixing liquid droplet

Plants and algae use the enzyme Rubisco to fix carbon dioxide, removing it from the atmosphere and converting it into biomass. Algae have figured out a way to increase the efficiency of carbon fixation. They gather most of their Rubisco into a ball-shaped microcompartment called the pyrenoid, which they flood with a high local concentration of carbon dioxide. A team of scientists at Princeton University, the Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford University and the Max Plank Institute of Biochemistry have unravelled the mysteries of how the pyrenoid is assembled. These insights can help to engineer crops that remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while producing more food.

A warming planet

Im Focus: Highly precise wiring in the Cerebral Cortex

Our brains house extremely complex neuronal circuits, whose detailed structures are still largely unknown. This is especially true for the so-called cerebral cortex of mammals, where among other things vision, thoughts or spatial orientation are being computed. Here the rules by which nerve cells are connected to each other are only partly understood. A team of scientists around Moritz Helmstaedter at the Frankfiurt Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and Helene Schmidt (Humboldt University in Berlin) have now discovered a surprisingly precise nerve cell connectivity pattern in the part of the cerebral cortex that is responsible for orienting the individual animal or human in space.

The researchers report online in Nature (Schmidt et al., 2017. Axonal synapse sorting in medial entorhinal cortex, DOI: 10.1038/nature24005) that synapses in...

Im Focus: Tiny lasers from a gallery of whispers

New technique promises tunable laser devices

Whispering gallery mode (WGM) resonators are used to make tiny micro-lasers, sensors, switches, routers and other devices. These tiny structures rely on a...

Im Focus: Ultrafast snapshots of relaxing electrons in solids

Using ultrafast flashes of laser and x-ray radiation, scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Garching, Germany) took snapshots of the briefest electron motion inside a solid material to date. The electron motion lasted only 750 billionths of the billionth of a second before it fainted, setting a new record of human capability to capture ultrafast processes inside solids!

When x-rays shine onto solid materials or large molecules, an electron is pushed away from its original place near the nucleus of the atom, leaving a hole...