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At least 1.4 million seagulls feed at landfills across North America, which aside from the nuisance it might pose, is also a threat to the health of nearby waters, a new Duke University study finds.

NASA’s Aqua satellite captured an image of Tropical Storm Cindy after it formed and was already affecting the U.S. Gulf Coast states. Cindy continues to crawl toward land and Tropical Storm warnings are in effect for June 21.

On June 21 at 11 a.m. EDT, a Tropical Storm Warning is in effect for San Luis Pass, Texas to the mouth of the Mississippi River.

When NASA’s Aqua satellite passed over the Gulf of Mexico on June 20 at 19:15 UTC (3:15 p.m. EDT), Tropical Depression 3 was already upgraded to Tropical Storm status and named Cindy. The storm was classified as a tropical storm at 2 p.m. EDT. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard Aqua showed Cindy’s center of circulation in the central Gulf of Mexico with a large area of thunderstorms sweeping from northwest to southeast of the center, stretching from eastern Texas to Florida.

Fathers-to-be, take note: You may be more useful in the labor and delivery room than you realize.

That’s one takeaway from a study released last week that found that when an empathetic partner holds the hand of a woman in pain, their heart and respiratory rates sync and her pain dissipates.

“The more empathic the partner and the stronger the analgesic effect, the higher the synchronization between the two when they are touching,” said lead author Pavel Goldstein, a postdoctoral pain researcher in the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab at CU Boulder.

The study of 22 couples, published in the journal Scientific Reports last week, is the latest in a growing body of research on “interpersonal synchronization,” the phenomenon in which individuals begin to physiologically mirror the people they’re with.

The study by Dr Jacques-Olivier Laloë of the University’s College of Science and published in the Global Change Biology journal, argues that warmer temperatures associated with climate change could lead to higher numbers of female sea turtles and increased nest failure, and could impact negatively on the turtle population in some areas of the world.

The effects of rising temperatures

Rising temperatures were first identified as a concern for sea turtle populations in the early 1980s as the temperature at which sea turtle embryos incubate determines the sex of an individual, which is known as Temperature-Dependent Sex Determination (TSD).

Supercomputers help design automobiles and aircraft, create new medical drugs and discover the mysteries of the universe. Now, in a column for the Tri-City Herald, the director of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Steve Ashby, introduces a new national collaboration to take supercomputers to the next level of performance.