aM laboratory May 2008 There are some bad things going on in the world. Natural disasters in the Far East are taking up a lot of the headlines. But a lot of things are happening closer to home. And now, another sign of desperate times, these so called xenophobic attacks in Gauteng. But it isn't all bad. So on a happier note, I had the most lovely sunny autumn weekend in Durban that consisted mostly of laying about on a blanket on the grass and just reeeelaxing.
Last transmitter dies, finalizing retirement for ocean-sensing satellite If you have ever seen the graph displayed above, you've admired the work of the Jason satellite. Jason—along with its predecessor TOPEX, and its successor Jason-2—has been tracking the surface of the ocean level for more than two decades now. The data collected reveals regional and short-term changes in sea level, but the key finding is that the global ocean level has been rising at a rate of over 3mm/year due to a combination of melting glaciers and expansion driven by the increased heat absorbed by the oceans. Through careful planning with the satellites, NASA and its international partners have arranged it so that each orbiter has overlapped with its predecessor for a couple of years. By early last year, the Jason-2 satellite was calibrated making the original Jason superfluous. In late June, controllers finally lost contact with the satellite, indicating that its backup transmitter had failed.
Just Fucking Google It Mysterious radio bursts come from outside our galaxy Astronomers using a radiotelescope to perform a survey of a broad patch of the sky have spotted a set of unusual events that last for just a handful of milliseconds. The events don't repeat and aren't accompanied by anything obvious at optical or X-ray wavelengths. A careful examination of their properties, however, gives reason to believe that they are likely to occur at great distances from our galaxy, suggesting they are the product of cataclysmic occurrences. There's really not a lot to say about the Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) themselves. If the radio bursts were coming from within our galaxy, then a variety of situations could produce signals with that kind of energy. If they're that far away, then they must be very energetic. So, what's the cataclysm? So, for now, the source is a bit of a mystery.
the googly gooeys Wildfires Smoke Crosses the Atlantic Intense wildfires in Quebec sent smoke billowing out of Canada at the end of June 2013. The fires produced towering pyrocumulus clouds that injected smoke high into the atmosphere. Upper-level winds then dispersed it across the Atlantic Ocean. Wildfire smoke is a combination of gases and aerosols—tiny solid and liquid particles suspended in air—so remote-sensing instruments that detect aerosols can find smoke. On June 23, 2013, OMPS detected a plume dense with smoky aerosols over the North Atlantic Ocean, east of Newfoundland. The ambiguity explains why remote sensing scientists rarely use just one sensor to analyze smoke transport events like this. OMPS measurements can be affected by the height of the plume and by the brightness of underlying clouds; OMPS sees higher plumes more readily than lower plumes, and bright underlying clouds can cause aerosol values to be appear artificially high. Instrument(s): Suomi NPP - OMPS
I know this great little place in London… Interstellar gas allows chemical reactions caused by quantum tunneling In recent years, astronomers have detected some simple organic chemicals in the disks of material surrounding some stars. In our own Solar System, these seem to have undergone reactions that converted them into more complex molecules—some of them crucial for life—that have been found on meteorites. So, understanding the reactions that can take place in space can help provide an indication of the sorts of chemistry available to start life both here and around other stars. Based on a publication in Nature Chemistry, it seems that the chemistry that can take place in the cold clouds of gas of space is much more complex than we had predicted. The key to understanding the work is the idea of activation energy. This, as you might imagine, is a problem in a cold gas cloud. The reaction the authors were looking at involved methanol, which has been found in gas clouds, and a hydroxyl radical. Once the temperature drops sufficiently, however, things start to change.
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