Other News
2005 Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook Issued
Another summer of above-normal hurricane activity is being predicted by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which projects 12 to 15 tropical storms for the 2005 season. NOAA estimates that out of those tropical storms, seven to nine may become hurricanes, and three to five of those could be major hurricanes. Officials emphasize that planning and preparation can mitigate the level of destruction.
Several National Research Council reports deal with climate and weather. The 2003 workshop summary, Communicating Uncertainties in Weather and Climate Information, explores how best to communicate such information, whether forecasting weather events, providing seasonal outlooks, or projecting climate change.
Improving the Effectiveness of U.S. Climate Modeling discusses how climate variability and change impacts society and dealing with climate-related disasters, conflicts, or opportunities requires the best possible information. The report makes a number of recommendations on how to enhance the effectiveness of climate modeling. Making Climate Forecasts Matter identifies research directions toward more useful seasonal-to-interannual climate forecasts, examining the state of the science and how we can use forecasting to better manage the human consequences of climate change.
[ FYI Index ]
Singapore's Tech Goals Unite Industry, Schools
(Article information from Small Times)
Singapore long has been a tight-knit world of government, academia and industry moving in tandem to stimulate growth. Now those groups are joining forces to encourage nanotech development .
The National University of Singapore (NUS) first cast an eye towards nanotechnology in 2001 when the school's engineering department decided it was the next logical step in Singapore's history of advanced manufacturing.
Seeram Ramakrishna is co-director of NUS' Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Initiative, or NUSNNI and was one of those who led the NUS’ study. With 125 faculty and research staff sprinkled among 22 nanoscience research labs on campus, NUSNNI has funded nearly $3 million in scholarships since 2002. Its faculty members have secured patents on techniques to manufacture biochips and align nanofibers, and have launched one nanotech startup, Nano Bio International Ltd.
The grand theme for NUSNNI is collaboration. The government, for example, supplies research money within general appropriations for the university. Faculty can also have joint appointments with the National Research Institute, somewhat similar to the U.S. National Institutes of Health but for science and engineering.
From the industrial realm, businesses such as Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd. have collaborated with NUS faculty for years on developing silicon nanodevices, and regularly give graduate-level students engineering problems to tackle as research projects.
Silicon nanodevices are one of several branches of nanotech expertise NUSNNI wants to cultivate; the others are spintronics, nanofibers and nanobiotechnology. In December, Jusung Engineering of South Korea donated $2.2 million to the university's Silicon Nanodevice Lab, to cut transistor size from 90 to 30 nanometers.
Spintronics has emerged as a vital area for NUSNNI because Singapore has a large data-storage industry. NUSNNI already has recruited top spintronics researchers such as Adekunle Adeyeye, who had previously studied and worked at the University of Cambridge in the UK. In 2004, two other NUSNNI professors perfected a way to use germanium nanocrystals as storage for computer memory, an idea Charter Semiconductor now wants to patent in Europe and North America.
[ FYI Index ]
Double Pulsar Puts Einstein to the Test
Einstein has kept his crown. His general theory of relativity, published in 1916, has stood up to the toughest tests astronomers have so far devised - tests based on a unique pair of pulsars found with CSIROs Parkes telescope in 2003.
Dr Ingrid Stairs, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, reported the work by an international team to the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Minneapolis on Monday.
Details of the pulsar system, called J0737-3039, can be found at http://www.atnf.csiro.au/news/press/double_pulsar/.
Astronomers have been closely tracking this exciting duo with CSIRO's 64m Parkes telescope in central New South Wales, Australia; the US National Science Foundation's 100m Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, USA and the 76m Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory in England.
Because the pulsars orbit each other so quickly - once every 2.4 hours - several general relativity effects are predicted to be large. Four effects were measured within a few months of the pulsars' discovery.
Now the astronomers have measured another significant phenomenon: the stars' orbit is shrinking because the pulsar system is losing energy by emitting gravity waves. At present the shrinkage is tiny - just 7mm a day - but the loss will accelerate in future. And that means the pulsars will collide in 85 million years, the scientists say.
The decay of the orbit is exactly what general relativity predicts.
Other general relativity effects are starting to crop up. One is geodetic precession, the stars wobbling like spinning tops as they move in the curved space-time of their orbit. If this is happening it should result in changes in the observed shapes of the radio pulses, as telescopes on Earth start to see slightly different parts of the irregularly shaped radio beams.
The team already has good evidence for this wobble in the more slowly spinning pulsar. Sensitive observations are now revealing small changes in the beam shape of the other, faster-spinning pulsar.
[ FYI Index ]
Cholesterol Lowering Statin Drugs Decrease Risk of Colorectal Cancer
People using cholesterol-lowering drugs for at least five years reduced by almost half their risk of developing colorectal cancer, even in cases where they had other risk factors for developing this cancer. This was the result of research conducted by a group of researchers, headed by Prof. Gad Rennert, from the National Cancer Control Center of the Clalit Health Fund, the Carmel Hospital Medical Center and the Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine in Haifa.
The results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The drugs found to be effective against this cancer were statins (known by the generic names simvastatin and pravastatin), which are commonly used to lower cholesterol and prevent cardiovascular diseases. Today, more than 10% of the adult population takes these drugs.
These findings are derived from an epidemiological/molecular research on colorectal cancer carried out in Northern Israel over the last six years and financed by the US National Cancer Institute. Also participating in the research were a team of researchers from the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, headed by Prof. Stephen Gruber. Taking part in the research were 1,953 persons from Northern Israel who developed colorectal cancer and 2,015 control subjects from the general population. The control group was similar in age, sex, religion and place of residence to the cancer patients. All research participants were asked to report on behavioral and health habits, especially the use of various drugs on a permanent and long-term basis.
The research found that the control group used statins at almost double the rate of the colorectal cancer group – 11.6% as opposed to 6.1%. With respect to the protection offered by statin use, this was found to be valid after taking into account risk factors or other factors related to colorectal cancer – such as age, sex, ethnic group, aspirin use, physical activity, vegetable consumption, and family history of colorectal cancer. Even after taking into consideration other risk factors, the statins were found to lower the risk of colorectal cancer by 47%. The biological mechanisms for activating the statins protection are varied, and include factors that negate infection and cell multiplication.
In Israel, every year, more than 3,000 persons are diagnosed with colorectal cancer and 1,500 die from it annually.
According to Prof. Rennert, the research results are encouraging with respect to the chances of preventing colorectal cancer in the future through the use of these drugs by the general population or by high-risk groups.
[ FYI Index ]
Andromeda Galaxy Three Times Bigger in Diameter Than Previously Thought
The lovely Andromeda galaxy appeared as a warm fuzzy blob to the ancients. To modern astronomers millennia later, it appeared as an excellent opportunity to better understand the universe. In the latter regard, our nearest galactic neighbor is a gift that keeps on giving.
Scott Chapman, from the California Institute of Technology, and Rodrigo Ibata, from the Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg in France, have led a team of astronomers in a project to map out the detailed motions of stars in the outskirts of the Andromeda galaxy. Their recent observations with the Keck telescopes show that the tenuous sprinkle of stars extending outward from the galaxy are actually part of the main disk itself. This means that the spiral disk of stars in Andromeda is three times larger in diameter than previously estimated.
At the annual summer meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Chapman outlined the evidence that there is a vast, extended stellar disk that makes the galaxy more than 220,000 light-years in diameter. Previously, astronomers looking at the visible evidence thought Andromeda was about 70,000 to 80,000 light-years across. Andromeda itself is about 2 million light-years from Earth.
The new dimensional measure is based on the motions of about 3,000 of the stars some distance from the disk that were once thought to be merely the "halo" of stars in the region and not part of the disk itself. By taking very careful measurements of the "radial velocities," the researchers were able to determine precisely how each star was moving in relation to the galaxy.
The results showed that the outlying stars are sitting in the plane of the Andromeda disk itself and, moreover, are moving at a velocity that shows them to be in orbit around the center of the galaxy. In essence, this means that the disk of stars is vastly larger than previously known.
Further, the researchers have determined that the nature of the "inhomogeneous rotating disk"-in other words, the clumpy and blobby outer fringes of the disk-shows that Andromeda must be the result of satellite galaxies long ago slamming together. If that were not the case, the stars would be more evenly spaced.
The current results, which are the subject of two papers already available and a third yet to be published, are made possible by technological advances in astrophysics. In this case, the Keck/DEIMOS multi-object spectrograph affixed to the Keck II Telescope possesses the mirror size and light-gathering capacity to image stars that are very faint, as well as the spectrographic sensitivity to obtain highly accurate radial velocities.
A spectrograph is necessary for the work because the motion of stars in a faraway galaxy can only be detected within reasonable human time spans by inferring whether the star is moving toward us or away from us. This can be accomplished because the light comes toward us in discrete frequencies due to the elements that make up the star.
If the star is moving toward us, then the light tends to cram together, so to speak, making the light higher in frequency and "bluer." If the star is moving away from us, the light has more breathing room and becomes lower in frequency and "redder."
If stars on one side of Andromeda appear to be coming toward us, while stars on the opposite side appear to be going away from us, then the stars can be assumed to orbit the central object.
The extended stellar disk has gone undetected in the past because stars that appear in the region of the disk could not be known to be a part of the disk until their motions were calculated. In addition, the inhomogeneous "fuzz" that makes up the extended disk does not look like a disk, but rather appears to be a fragmented, messy halo built up from many previous galaxies' crashing into Andromeda, and it was assumed that stars in this region would be going every which way.
On the flip side, finding that the bulk of the complex structure in Andromeda's outer region is rotating with the disk is a blessing for studying the true underlying stellar halo of the galaxy. Using this new information, the researchers have been able to carefully measure the random motions of stars in the stellar halo, probing its mass and the form of the elusive dark matter that surrounds it.
Although the main work was done at the Keck Observatory, the original images that posed the possibility of an extended disk were taken with the Isaac Newton Telescope's Wide-Field Camera. The telescope, located in the Canary Islands, is intended for surveys, and in the case of this study, served well as a companion instrument.
Chapman says that further work will be needed to determine whether the extended disk is merely a quirk of the Andromeda galaxy, or is perhaps typical of other galaxies.
The main paper will be published this year in The Astrophysical Journal with the title "On the Accretion Origin of a Vast Extended Stellar Disk Around the Andromeda Galaxy." In addition to Chapman and Ibata, the other authors are Annette Ferguson, University of Edinburgh; Geraint Lewis, University of Sydney; Mike Irwin, Cambridge University; and Nial Tanvir, University of Hertfordshire.
