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Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
It was a pretty typical day for NASA scientists studying pollution in the Hampton Roads region of southeastern Virginia — busy, in other words.
And for good reason. The work they were doing could help improve air-quality forecasts in a region where the air quality picture isn’t totally clear.
MIT and Harvard University researchers have engineered E. coli cells that can be used to study how bacteria at an infection site respond to antibiotic treatment, allowing scientists to learn more about how existing antibiotics work and potentially help them to develop new drugs.
In the new study, which appears in the Aug. 31 issue of Cell Host and Microbe, the researchers found evidence that some existing hypotheses about how bacteria respond to antibiotics are not correct.
On Sept. 5, 2017, the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft captured this image of the area around Bay City, Texas, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southwest of Houston. Hurricane Harvey caused extensive inland flooding, seen as dark blue areas where the water is relatively clear, and green-grey where the water carries sediment. The image covers an area of 32 by 65 miles (52 by 105 kilometers), and is centered at 29.2 degrees north, 95.8 degrees west.
NASA’s Terra satellite passed over Tropical Storm Katia as it was developing along Mexico’s east coast. On Sept. 5, the thirteenth tropical depression of the Eastern Pacific Ocean hurricane season formed about 80 miles (125 kph) east of Tampico, Mexico, in the western Gulf of Mexico.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA’s Terra satellite captured a visible-light image of the depression as it was organizing on Sept. 5 at 1:10 p.m. EDT (1710 UTC). The image showed that deep convection and thunderstorms were forming over the center. By 4 p.m. EDT, the National Hurricane Center noted that the depression had formed.
In the arid far-western region of South Africa is a vast flatland covered with white quartzite gravel known as the Knersvlakte – Afrikaans for “Gnashing Plain” – because it sounds like grinding teeth when you walk across it. It’s a good place to watch unpeopled horizons vanish into ripples of heat haze, but to appreciate its real value you must get down on your knees. The Knersvlakte holds about 1,500 species of plants, including 190 species found nowhere else on earth and 155 that are Red-Listed by conservation biologists as threatened with extinction. To protect them, 211,000 acres have been set aside as the Knersvlakte Nature Reserve.
The GPM core observatory satellite had an exceptional view of hurricane Irma's eye and found extreme rainfall within the Category 5 storm’s eyewall.
