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A trio of researches with the U.S.’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has found that though there are fewer total days per year when tornados occur in the U.S., the number that occur on days when there are tornados has increased over the past couple of decades. In their paper published in the journal Science, Harold Brooks, Gregory Carbin and Patrick Marsh describe how they studied weather data over the past half century and what they found when looking for trends.

An international team of scientists has succeeded in explaining the formation and propagation over astronomical distances of jets of matter emitted by young stars—one of the most fascinating mysteries of modern astronomy. Using a patented experimental device and large-scale numerical simulations, the team obtained data consistent with astrophysical observations.

Industrial ecology, a rapidly growing field focused on sustainable production and consumption, has contributed numerous important tools to modern environmental management—life cycle assessment; “industrial symbiosis,” or the by-product exchange between neighboring facilities; “design for environment”; and the use of material flow analysis to track resource use in supply chains, companies, and economies.

Kazutomo Suenaga of the Nanotube Research Center of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and Ryosuke Senga of the Nano-carbon Characterization Team, NTRC, AIST, have synthesized an atomic chain in which two elements are aligned alternately and have evaluated its physical properties on an atomic level.

Hiking in the mountains or lying on the beach are good ways to relieve stress on Earth, but on spaceflights there’s no way to get back to nature. Astronauts feeling stressed on long-duration flights, however, may soon find computerized solace in the form of a virtual reality-based relaxation system being developed by Dartmouth researchers and their colleagues.

Four urban sections of the San Andreas Fault system in Northern California have stored enough energy to produce major earthquakes, according to a new study that measures fault creep. Three fault sections – Hayward, Rodgers Creek and Green Valley – are nearing or past their average recurrence interval, according to the study published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA).

Observing the quantum behavior of light is a big part of Alan Migdall’s research at the Joint Quantum Institute. Many of his experiments depend on observing light in the form of photons—-the particle complement of light waves—-and sometimes only one photon at a time, using “smart” detectors that can count the number of individual photons in a pulse.

The Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) instrument for NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite – R (GOES-R) completed development and testing and is now ready for integration with the spacecraft. The GOES-R satellite will be the first flight of this sophisticated lightning mapping instrument in geostationary orbit and will enable early predictions of intensifying storms and severe weather events.

One way to combat the rising level of errors and fraud in life sciences research is through massive online laboratories, which use videogames to engage large numbers of non-professional investigators and prevent scientists from manually testing their own hypotheses, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University say.

A 7-year-project to develop a barcoding and tracking system for tissue stem cells has revealed previously unrecognized features of normal blood production: New data from Harvard Stem Cell Institute scientists at Boston Children’s Hospital suggests, surprisingly, that the billions of blood cells that we produce each day are made not by blood stem cells, but rather their less pluripotent descendants, called progenitor cells. The researchers hypothesize that blood comes from stable populations of different long-lived progenitor cells that are responsible for giving rise to specific blood cell types, while blood stem cells likely act as essential reserves.