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(AP) -- NASA couldn't have staged it any better: 10 people in orbit for Thursday's 10th anniversary of the world's most elaborate and expensive housing project, the international space station.

(AP) -- Winter looks likely to be mild in the Midwest and dry in the Southeast, the government said Thursday. Warmer-than-average temperatures are expected for the nation's center, especially Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Arkansas, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Four intriguing places on Mars have risen to the final round as NASA selects a landing site for its next Mars mission, the Mars Science Laboratory.

Flash floods are the most common natural disaster in the United States, and because of their unpredictability they're the leading weather-related cause of death for Americans. They usually arrive with little or no warning, but a Tel Aviv University researcher is trying to predict where and when they will occur - - using lightning.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers have long puzzled over why a small, nearby, isolated galaxy is pumping out new stars faster than any galaxy in our local neighborhood.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Three observatories on Mauna Kea have come together to form the world's most powerful facility for detailed submillimeter imaging. An exploratory project, the Extended Submillimeter Array (eSMA) will explore the Universe using light that the human eye cannot see, at wavelengths around 0.8 millimeter. There are many objects in the sky that emit radiation in this submillimeter range, especially the dusty regions in which new stars, planets and even entire galaxies are being born. These clouds of gas and tiny dust particles are completely dark in visible light, but submillimeter waves can penetrate them.

Vast Martian glaciers of water ice under protective blankets of rocky debris persist today at much lower latitudes than any ice previously identified on Mars, says new research using ground-penetrating radar on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

(AP) -- Astronauts ventured back outside the international space station to perform more repair work on a jammed joint Thursday and promised to keep a tight grip on all their tools so nothing would get away this time.

Right now, as you are reading this, 10 Russian and American men and women orbiting 200 miles above your head are busy installing toilets, refrigerators and new bedrooms aboard the most complicated construction project ever undertaken: the international space station.

While global-warming-induced coastal flooding moves populations inland, the changes in sea level will affect the salinity of estuaries, which influences aquatic life, fishing and recreation.

(AP) -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, his counterparts in 12 states and regional leaders from four other countries signed a declaration Wednesday pledging to work together to combat global warming, a move Schwarzenegger said will help push heads of state to curb their nations' greenhouse gas emissions.

(AP) -- Astronauts vowed to double-check, even triple-check, to make sure a bag of tools is properly tied down during a spacewalk Thursday so it doesn't float away like one did earlier this week.

The health threat to city dwellers posed by Southern California wildfires like those of November 2008 may have been underestimated by officials.

(AP) -- The astronaut who lost her tool bag on a spacewalk admits she made a mistake and says she should have checked to make sure it was tied down.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A strong La Niña that developed early last winter, only to disappear this summer, is showing signs of life again and could affect our winter weather, said University of Colorado at Boulder and NOAA atmospheric scientist Klaus Wolter.

The best map of wind speeds on Jupiter ever produced proves that the massive weather system known as the Great Red Spot has shrunken over the past dozen years.

NASA astronauts on space shuttle Endeavour's STS-126 mission will install an instrument on the International Space Station that can "smell" dangerous chemicals in the air. Designed to help protect crew members' health and safety, the experimental "ENose" will monitor the space station's environment for harmful chemicals such as ammonia, mercury, methanol and formaldehyde.

The explosion of a binary star inside a planetary nebula has been captured by a team led by UCL (University College London) researchers - an event that has not been witnessed for more than 100 years. The study, published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, predicts that the combined mass of the two stars in the system may be high enough for the stars to eventually spiral into each other, triggering a much bigger supernova explosion.

One of the biggest threats to today's farmlands is the loss of soil organic carbon (SOC) and soil organic matter (SOM) from poor land-management practices. The presence of these materials is essential as they do everything from providing plants with proper nutrients to filtering harmful chemical compounds to the prevention of soil erosion. Sustainable management practices for crop residues are critical for maintaining soil productivity, but being able to measure a loss in the quality of soil can be difficult.

Global land use patterns and increasing pressures on water resources demand creative urban stormwater management. Traditional stormwater management focuses on regulating the flow of runoff to waterways, but generally does little to restore the hydrologic cycle disrupted by extensive pavement and compacted urban soils with low permeability. The lack of infiltration opportunities affects groundwater recharge and has negative repercussions on water quality downstream. Researchers know that urban forests, like rural forest land, can play a pivotal role in stormwater mitigation, but developing approaches that exploit the ability of trees to handle stormwater is difficult in highly built city cores or in urban sprawl where asphalt can be the dominant cover feature.