Документ взят из кэша поисковой машины. Адрес оригинального документа : http://www.stsci.edu/~jkalirai/PressStarClustersTorontoStar.pdf Дата изменения: Fri Sep 19 22:26:13 2008 Дата индексирования: Tue Oct 2 01:34:01 2012 Кодировка: Поисковые слова: storm

TheStar.com | sciencetech | A week's worth of science news, Jan. 14

4/2/08 11:41 AM

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A week's worth of science news, Jan. 14
Jan 14, 2007 04:30 AM
PETER CALAMAI Email story Print Choose text size Report typo or correction Email the author

HURRICANE -HUNTING BALLOONS Those squiggles crossing the Atlantic Ocean on the map have proved a big surprise to meteorologists and could provide a key to better hurricane forecasting. The coloured tracks indicate the unexpected paths taken by eight giant weather balloons as they drifted slowly westward, 20 kilometres up in the atmosphere, after being launched from Niger in West Africa last summer.

Atmospheric physicists believe that the tropical storms and hurricanes that reach North America are largely born at that height and between 10 and 20 degrees north of the equator. The seedlings for the storms are weak weather systems known as easterly waves. The scientists expected to see regular waves producing much straighter tracks. Instead the four storey- high superpressure balloons zigged, zagged and even doubled back eastwards during journeys that lasted six to 18 days. This finding underlines how little is known about these crucial hurricane- breeding winds in the mid Atlantic. The west coast of Africa is beyond the range of U.S., hurricane- hunter airplanes. Launching traditional weather balloons from ships over that wide an area of ocean would cost a mint. So the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., devised an ingenious approach. Each drifting balloon carries an arsenal of miniaturized instrument packages, released automatically twice a day. These "dropsondes" descend by parachute, radioing readings on temperature, pressure and winds to the balloon, which passes the information along via satellite. A recent center newsletter reported that some of this year's 300 dropsondes "collected measurements from hurricanes - to - be Florence and Gordon just as each system reached tropicalstorm strength." Gathering such information should improve forecasters' skill in predicting which weather systems will grow into hurricanes. Experts are already speculating that heavy surges of hot, dry air from the Sahel region may have helped reduce Atlantic hurricane activity last year from the devastating 2005 season to near - normal levels. FINANCIALLY HEALTHY DRINKS In Casablanca , the Claude Rains character professed to be "shocked, shocked" that gambling was taking place at Rick's, the establishment run by Humphrey Bogart. In a similar vein, Microscope is shocked, shocked to discover that when nutrition studies of soft drinks, juices and milk were sponsored solely by industry, the results were four to eight times more likely to be favourable to the sponsor's financial interests than when there was no industry funding. So when you hear that a certain juice is rich in anti- oxidants that are allegedly shown to inhibit cancer or some other affliction, you should immediately ask who paid for the research. That may not be easy to find out. Of the 206 medical and scientific articles reviewed by researchers from Children's Hospital Boston, just more than half identified any kind of financial sponsorship, industry or otherwise.

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TheStar.com | sciencetech | A week's worth of science news, Jan. 14

4/2/08 11:41 AM

In the current issue of the journal Public Library of Science Medicine , the authors argue that financial conflict of interest is more pernicious than other potential research biases because it "acts consistently in one direction over time." Check out the rigorous details of this study for free at www.plos.org . SIMPLE STELLAR SERENDIPITY Astronomer Harvey Richer confesses that he's been "singularly unsuccessful" in buying winning lottery tickets. Yet stellar serendipity has paid off with long odds for the University of British Columbia professor and Jason Kalirai, Richer's former Ph.D. student. At the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle last week, Kalirai reported that the two researchers have found the most distant globular cluster ever detected, more than a billion light years distant. The discovery promises to shed light on the evolution of galaxies, because these star balls are most probably the offspring of the Big Bang's earliest stars. The prosaic term globular cluster really doesn't do justice to this cosmic phenomenon. These balls can contain hundreds of thousands, even millions, of stars, so closely packed that a thousand stars can reside in a space smaller than the stretch between our own Sun and the nearest neighbouring star. Kalirai and Richer were studying NGC 6397, one of the hundreds of globular clusters in our own Milky Way galaxy. They'd photographed it during 126 orbits of the Hubble space telescope, an exposure providing unprecedented detail of a tiny patch of sky about one - tenth the size of the full moon. Examining the results, the astronomers spotted what looked like a bunch of white dwarf stars. Since that made no sense, they took a closer look and found they'd captured a globular cluster in a distant galaxy that just happened to be in line with NGC 6397. "The cluster was so far away that it appears as a point, just like a star," said Richer in an interview. Since the light from that cluster takes a billion years to reach Earth, we're seeing it that much earlier in stellar evolution, providing clues to the life cycle of clusters in the Milky Way galaxy. CLICK HERE www.sefora.org This website pledges to challenge political leaders who "systematically ignore scientific evidence and analysis, put ideological interests ahead of scientific truth, suppress valid scientific evidence, and harass and threaten scientists for speaking honestly about their research." This cyberspace scold is Scientists and Engineers for America, which boasts 15 Nobel laureates on its board of advisors plus two former U.S. presidential science advisors. With issues such as the teaching of intelligent design, a federal ban on embryonic stem cell research, and visa restrictions on foreign researchers, the group is certainly operating in a target - rich environment.
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