March 21-22, 2009 


Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Saturday afternoon: 

Lihue, Kauai – 75
Honolulu, Oahu – 81
Kaneohe, Oahu – 77
Kahului, Maui – 79
Hilo, Hawaii – 78
Kailua-kona – 81

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 5 p.m. Saturday evening:

Port Allen, Kauai – 79F
Lihue, Kauai – 72

Haleakala Crater    – missing  (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 30  (near 14,000 feet on the Big Island)

Precipitation Totals – The following numbers represent the largest precipitation totals (inches) during the last 24 hours on each of the major islands, as of Saturday afternoon:

2.74 Mount Waialaele, Kauai
0.49 Poamoho 2, Oahu
0.01 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.02 Kahoolawe
1.90 Puu Kukui, Maui
1.85 Hilo airport, Big Island

Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1032 millibar high pressure system to the north-northeast of the islands. This high pressure system will keep trade winds blowing Saturday into Sunday. Wind speeds will be moderately strong…locally stronger and gusty.

Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with the Infrared Satellite Image of the islands to see all the clouds around the state during the day and night. This next image is one that gives close images of the islands only during the daytime hours, and is referred to as a Close-up visible image. This next image shows a larger view of the Pacific…giving perspective to the wider ranging cloud patterns in the Pacific Ocean. Finally, here’s a looping IR satellite image, making viewable the clouds around the islands 24 hours a day. To help you keep track of where any showers may be around the islands, here’s the latest animated radar image. 

Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 foot Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is the Haleakala Crater, which is near 10,000 feet in elevation. These two webcams are available during the daylight hours here in the islands…and when there’s a big moon rising just after sunset for an hour or two! Plus, during the nights and early mornings you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise too…depending upon weather conditions.

 Aloha Paragraphs

  West Maui Mountains…plumeria flowers
   Photo Credit: Google.com

The trade winds will remain locally strong and gusty, less windy in those more protected areas…especially along the leeward sides of the islands. These early spring trades have become well this weekend, and will continue blowing into the new week ahead. For the moment, these winds are strong enough to keep small craft wind advisories active in those windiest coastal and channel waters, from Kauai down through the Big Island.

Besides the thin high cirrus clouds, and a few passing windward showers…our weather will be fine. Our weather will be quite nice in general, that is if you don’t mind the localized gusty trade winds. Looking at this satellite image, we see those streaks of high cirrus clouds spreading across our skies at times. There will continue to be a bit of sun dimming during the days, with this high cloudiness around. Keep an eye out for nice sunset and sunrise colors Saturday evening and Sunday morning!  

I took a great hike with the West Maui Mountains Watershed Partnership Saturday. A couple of friends, who live over in Haiku and I, joined this group for their first official hike. This Partnership is a voluntary effort by public and private landowners to perserve and protect nearly 50,000 acres at the forested core of West Maui. The Partnership works in the West Maui Mountains, also known as the Mauna Kahalawai, where elevations range from the summit at 5,788 feet, to near sea level. This managed area supports over 126 rare species and communities, and provides 29 billion gallons of water for Maui’s residential, industrial, and agricultural needs annually.

This Partnership protects the water we drink here on Maui, at least in West Maui. They do weed assessment and control…non-native invasive plants compete with and displace native plants. They work towards endangered species protection…nearly 60% of Hawaii’s native flora are in danger of becoming extinct. They do major fence building…over 15 miles of fencing protects nearly 18,000 acres from wild feral ungulates such as pigs, goats, cattle, and deer. They are big into public outreach…with community involvement being essential to their success. They go by WMMWP, which again stands for West Maui Mountains Watershed Partnership. Their website address is: www.westmauiwatershed.org.

I greatly appreciated the contact with the staff from this organization, they were thorough in their presentations…and at the same time very personable. I was also delighted to find out that they all often refer to my website for guidance in weather forecasts. I would recommend taking one of their hikes, and would go back myself. It was special being up in that area, interacting with the gusty trade winds, the occasional passing showers, and the sun too…when at the end of our hike we all sat together in the sun, enjoying each others company, eating lunch. ~~~ Kden (ok then), as we say here in the islands, I really must get out on my weather deck, as I anticipate that the high cirrus clouds are going to be lighting-up nicely at sunset. I’m feeling very mellow after being out in a place that brings me back to myself, which always happens when I have a deep nature experience! I’ll be back again Sunday morning with your next narrative update. I hope you have a fabulous Saturday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: Want to know what will make you happy? Then ask a total stranger — or so says a new study from Harvard University, which shows that another person’s experience is often more informative than your own best guess. The study, which appears in the current issue of Science, was led by Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the 2007 bestseller "Stumbling on Happiness," along with Matthew Killingsworth and Rebecca Eyre, also of Harvard, and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia.

"If you want to know how much you will enjoy an experience, you are better off knowing how much someone else enjoyed it than knowing anything about the experience itself," says Gilbert. "Rather than closing our eyes and imagining the future, we should examine the experience of those who have been there."

Previous research in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics has shown that people have difficulty predicting what they will like and how much they will like it, which leads them to make a wide variety of poor decisions. Interventions aimed at improving the accuracy with which people imagine future events have been generally unsuccessful.

So rather than trying to improve human imagination, Gilbert and his colleagues sought to eliminate it from the equation by asking people to predict how much they would enjoy a future event about which they knew absolutely nothing — except how much a total stranger had enjoyed it. Amazingly enough, those people made extremely accurate predictions.

Interesting2:  By combining data from 48 studies of coral reefs from around the Caribbean, researchers have found that fish densities that have been stable for decades have given way to significant declines since 1995. "We were most surprised to discover that this decrease is evident for both large-bodied species targeted by fisheries as well as small-bodied species that are not fished," said Michelle Paddack of Simon Fraser University in Canada.

"This suggests that overfishing is probably not the only cause." Rather, they suggest that the recent declines may be explained by drastic losses in coral cover and other changes in coral reef habitats that have occurred in the Caribbean over the past 30 years.

Those changes are the result of many factors, including warming ocean temperatures, coral diseases, and a rise in sedimentation and pollution from coastal development. Overfishing has also led to declines of many fish species, and now seems to also be removing those that are important for keeping the reefs free of algae.

"All of these factors are stressing the reefs and making them less able to recover from disturbances such as hurricanes, which also seem to be occurring more frequently," Paddack said. Scientists had previously documented historical declines in the abundance of large Caribbean reef fishes that probably reflect centuries of overexploitation. However, effects of recent degradation of reef habitats on reef fish had not been established before now.

Interesting3:  Nearly one-third of all U.S. bird species are endangered, threatened or in significant decline, with birds in Hawaii facing a "borderline ecological disaster," scientists reported. The State of the Birds report, issued by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar along with conservation groups and university ornithologists, also noted some successes, including the recovery of the bald eagle, the peregrine falcon and other species after the banning of the chemical DDT.

"When we talk about birds and we talk about wildlife, we’re also talking about the economics of this country," Salazar told reporters as the report was released. Wildlife watching and recreation generate $122 billion annually, the report said. Salazar mentioned revenue from hunting, fishing and bird-watching, but added that President Barack Obama’s stimulus package and proposed federal budgets for the remainder of 2009 and 2010 offer more money for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which aims to protect birds and other creatures.

Interesting4:  Salty, liquid water has been detected on a leg of the Mars Phoenix Lander and therefore could be present at other locations on the planet, according to analysis by a group of mission scientists led by a University of Michigan professor. This is the first time liquid water has been detected and photographed outside the Earth. "A large number of independent physical and thermodynamical evidence shows that saline water may actually be common on Mars," said Nilton Renno, a professor in the U-M Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences and a co-investigator on the Phoenix mission.

"Liquid water is an essential ingredient for life. This discovery has important implications to many areas of planetary exploration, including the habitability of Mars." Renno will present these findings March 23 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston. Previously, scientists believed that water existed on Mars only as ice or water vapor because of the planet’s low temperature and atmospheric pressure.

They thought that ice in the Red Planet’s current climate could sublimate, or vaporize, but they didn’t think it could melt. This analysis shows how that assumption may be incorrect. Temperature fluctuation in the arctic region of Mars where Phoenix landed and salts in the soil could create pockets of water too salty to freeze in the climate of the landing site, Renno says. Photos of one of the lander’s legs show droplets that grew during the polar summer.

Based on the temperature of the leg and the presence of large amounts of "perchlorate" salts detected in the soil, scientists believe the droplets were most likely salty liquid water and mud that splashed on the spacecraft when it touched down.

The lander was guided down by rockets whose exhaust melted the top layer of ice below a thin sheet of soil. Some of the mud droplets that splashed on the lander’s leg appear to have grown by absorbing water from the atmosphere, Renno says. Images suggest that some of the droplets darkened, then moved and merged—physical evidence that they were liquid.

Interesting5:  As any parent knows, children love sweet-tasting foods. Now, new research from the University of Washington and the Monell Center indicates that this heightened liking for sweetness has a biological basis and is related to children’s high growth rate. "The relationship between sweet preference and growth makes intuitive sense because when growth is rapid, caloric demands increase.

Children are programmed to like sweet taste because it fills a biological need by pushing them towards energy sources," said Monell geneticist Danielle Reed, PhD, one of the study authors. Across cultures, children prefer higher levels of sweetness in their foods as compared to adults, a pattern that declines during adolescence.

To explore the biological underpinnings of this shift, Reed and University of Washington researcher Susan Coldwell, PhD, looked at sweet preference and biological measures of growth and physical maturation in 143 children between the ages of 11 and 15.

The findings, reported in the journal Physiology & Behavior, suggest that children’s heightened liking for sweet taste is related to their high growth rate and that sweet preferences decline as children’s physical growth slows and eventually stops.

Interesting6:  Robot fish developed by British scientists are to be released into the sea off north Spain to detect pollution. If next year’s trial of the first five robotic fish in the northern Spanish port of Gijon is successful, the team hopes they will be used in rivers, lakes and seas across the world. The carp-shaped robots, costing 20,000 pounds ($29,000) apiece, mimic the movement of real fish and are equipped with chemical sensors to sniff out potentially hazardous pollutants, such as leaks from vessels or underwater pipelines. They will transmit the information back to shore using Wi-Fi technology. Unlike earlier robotic fish, which needed remote controls, they will be able to navigate independently without any human interaction.

Interesting7:  The volume of toxic chemicals that were released into the environment or sent for disposal in 2007 dropped 5 percent compared with 2006, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. But concealed within the overall numbers was good and bad news. For example, the volume of released or disposed "persistent, bio-accumulative and toxic chemicals," substances like lead, dioxin, mercury and PCBs, was up slightly, the agency said.

Most of those releases were not to air or water, the agency said, meaning that the material was mostly buried in landfills, injected into deep wells or held in impoundments. The number given for PCBs was up by 40 percent, but "it’s good news." said Michael P. Flynn, acting deputy assistant administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Information.

The E.P.A. banned production of PCBs 30 years ago, so pounds counted now, Mr. Flynn said, represent electrical transformers or other equipment being taken out of service and PCBs disposed of in qualified facilities. The material released or disposed of in 2007 came to almost 4.1 billion pounds. More than 20 billion pounds, about five times as much material, was recycled, treated to render it nontoxic or burned for energy, the agency said.

Interesting8:  The world’s oldest champagne, bottled before Victoria became Queen, is still drinkable, with notes of "truffles and caramel", according to the experts. An "addictive" bottle of 1825 Perrier-Jouet was opened at a ceremony attended by 12 of the world’s top wine tasters. Their verdict: the 184-year-old champagne tasted better than some of its younger counterparts.

There are now just two 1825 vintage bottles left – and Perrier-Jouet has no plans to open them soon. The wine and champagne experts convened at the winemaker’s cellars in Epernay in France, for a "once in a lifetime" tasting of the 1825 champagne – officially recognised by Guinness World Records as the world’s oldest.

British wine writer John Stimpfig described the "reverential silence" as Perrier-Jouet cellar master Herve Deschamps eased out the cork, followed by a round of applause as the champagne was poured. "It was a memorable evening, and tasting the wine was like tasting history in a bottle," he said. As for the flavour of a wine bottled just 10 years after the battle of Waterloo, Mr Stimpfig said he drank it more out of curiosity than for pleasure.

He said: "The wine was heavily oxidised, with a sherry-like character. "However I did taste notes of truffles, caramel and mushrooms. "Most of the bubbles had disappeared, although there was a slight spritz left." But Serena Sutcliffe, the head of Sotheby’s international wine department, who helped organise the tasting event, described the wine as "addictive" with a complex flavour of figs and even a "slight nose of the sea". She said:

"What was interesting was that I preferred the 1825 champagne to later vintages we tasted, dating from 1846, 1848 and 1874." She said each sip would have been worth "hundreds of pounds" if it had been sold at auction, but added: "It is virtually impossible to assign a value to the 1825 vintage – we’ve never seen anything like it on the market."

Wine tastes have changed over the past 184 years – the 1825 vintage was sweet, and even had a little brandy added at the "topping-up" stage. But it was this very sweetness that experts believe helped the wine to survive for so long, together with the five to six atmospheres of pressure within the bottle.

No guarantees "It’s the bubbles that kept it younger," said Ms Sutcliffe. She added there was no guarantee that the remaining two bottles of 1825 would be as drinkable as the one she and fellow experts sampled, to mark the release of a new Perrier-Jouet vintage. "They could last for years, and they might be better or worse, " she said.

"At this age, wine tends to go its own way and a lot depends on the cork which in the case of the champagne we drank was in very good condition." Mr Deschamps said Perrier-Jouet intended to keep the remaining two bottles for some years yet. "I don’t expect I will ever open another bottle like it," he said.

Interesting9:  Life would be meaningless and not worth living without the internet, nearly one in seven Hong Kong youngsters said in a survey released Friday. Just under 14 per cent of 1,800 respondents aged 12 to 25 insisted they could not live without the internet while 80 per cent described it as essential.

One-quarter of respondents in the high-rise, high-tech city of 7 million, where 77 per cent of households have broadband access, said they used the internet for more than four hours a day. The Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups, which conducted the survey, said Hong Kong youngsters who spent too long online slept badly, engaged in too little exercise and risked failing eyesight.

March 20-21, 2009 


Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Friday afternoon: 

Lihue, Kauai – 76
Honolulu, Oahu – 83
Kaneohe, Oahu – 77
Kahului, Maui – 80
Hilo, Hawaii – 78
Kailua-kona – 81

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Friday afternoon:

Honolulu, Oahu – 81F
Lihue, Kauai – 74

Haleakala Crater    – missing  (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 30  (near 14,000 feet on the Big Island)

Precipitation Totals – The following numbers represent the largest precipitation totals (inches) during the last 24 hours on each of the major islands, as of Friday afternoon:

2.14 Mount Waialaele, Kauai
0.42 Manoa Lyon Arboretum, Oahu
0.01 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.04 Kahoolawe
0.13 Mahinahina, Maui
0.94 Kamuela Upper, Big Island

Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a 1030+ millibar high pressure system to the north of the islands. Meanwhile, upper level trough to our ENE continues moving away. Our trade winds will be strengthening Saturday into Sunday.

Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with the Infrared Satellite Image of the islands to see all the clouds around the state during the day and night. This next image is one that gives close images of the islands only during the daytime hours, and is referred to as a Close-up visible image. This next image shows a larger view of the Pacific…giving perspective to the wider ranging cloud patterns in the Pacific Ocean. Finally, here’s a looping IR satellite image, making viewable the clouds around the islands 24 hours a day. To help you keep track of where any showers may be around the islands, here’s the latest animated radar image. 

Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 foot Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is the Haleakala Crater, which is near 10,000 feet in elevation. These two webcams are available during the daylight hours here in the islands…and when there’s a big moon rising just after sunset for an hour or two! Plus, during the nights and early mornings you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise too…depending upon weather conditions.

 Aloha Paragraphs

  A humpback whale doing its thing…big time!
   Photo Credit: Google.com

The trade winds will fill our Hawaiian Island weather picture through the weekend…and beyond. These moderately strong trades have become more well established now, and will continue blowing through most of the next week…if not longer. They have become strong enough now, that the NWS forecast office in Honolulu has issued small craft wind advisory flags, in those windiest places around Maui and the Big Island. This advisory won’t be short lived, and remains officially in force, through this coming Monday afternoon at 4pm. The truth is that there’s no end in sight for these balmy trade wind breezes.

The atmosphere has become dry and stable now, which will provide generally sunny skies…with just a few windward showers at times. Our weather will be really nice, attracting lots of people outside this weekend. As you can see from this satellite image, the entire island chain is mostly clear now, giving us a chance to finally bask in some warm Hawaiian sunshine for a change! The few showers that will fall will arrive with the trade winds, along the windward sides. Daytime temperatures will be on the rise, with many sea level beaches topping-out in the lower 80F’s both Saturday and Sunday.

It’s Friday evening, and I’m now off work for the next two days. I had planned on going to see the new film called Duplicity (2009) this evening…starring the handsome Clive Owens, and the good looking Julia Roberts. My schedule has changed however, as my friend, whose having the health issues, called and asked if I wanted to have dinner together. I of course accepted, and invited her out to the Kula Lodge. I’m sure that we’ll have good conversations as usual, and I look forward to being with her. ~~~ On another note, I have a hike planned with the West Maui Mountains Watershed Partnership, into the West Maui Mountains, early Saturday morning. I’m meeting two good friends in Kahului early Saturday morning, and then driving over to Napili to join this hiking group. I’m very much looking forward to hiking into the Maunalei Arboretum. There are Native Hawaiian plant species, as well as other plants from around the world. This is a first time hike up into those mountains, and I’m excited! ~~~ I’m getting ready to leave Kihei, for the drive to my friend’s house in lower Kula – let me look out the window and see what’s happening out there. Just as I thought, it’s mostly clear, with just some scattered cumulus clouds floating around in the strengthening trade wind flow. I’ll be back very early Saturday morning, with your next new weather narrative, up early as I’ll be leaving early for the hiking experience. I look forward to joining you here again then, I hope you have a great Friday night! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: Want to know what will make you happy? Then ask a total stranger — or so says a new study from Harvard University, which shows that another person’s experience is often more informative than your own best guess. The study, which appears in the current issue of Science, was led by Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the 2007 bestseller "Stumbling on Happiness," along with Matthew Killingsworth and Rebecca Eyre, also of Harvard, and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia.

"If you want to know how much you will enjoy an experience, you are better off knowing how much someone else enjoyed it than knowing anything about the experience itself," says Gilbert. "Rather than closing our eyes and imagining the future, we should examine the experience of those who have been there."

Previous research in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics has shown that people have difficulty predicting what they will like and how much they will like it, which leads them to make a wide variety of poor decisions. Interventions aimed at improving the accuracy with which people imagine future events have been generally unsuccessful.

So rather than trying to improve human imagination, Gilbert and his colleagues sought to eliminate it from the equation by asking people to predict how much they would enjoy a future event about which they knew absolutely nothing — except how much a total stranger had enjoyed it. Amazingly enough, those people made extremely accurate predictions.

Interesting2:  By combining data from 48 studies of coral reefs from around the Caribbean, researchers have found that fish densities that have been stable for decades have given way to significant declines since 1995. "We were most surprised to discover that this decrease is evident for both large-bodied species targeted by fisheries as well as small-bodied species that are not fished," said Michelle Paddack of Simon Fraser University in Canada.

"This suggests that overfishing is probably not the only cause." Rather, they suggest that the recent declines may be explained by drastic losses in coral cover and other changes in coral reef habitats that have occurred in the Caribbean over the past 30 years.

Those changes are the result of many factors, including warming ocean temperatures, coral diseases, and a rise in sedimentation and pollution from coastal development. Overfishing has also led to declines of many fish species, and now seems to also be removing those that are important for keeping the reefs free of algae.

"All of these factors are stressing the reefs and making them less able to recover from disturbances such as hurricanes, which also seem to be occurring more frequently," Paddack said. Scientists had previously documented historical declines in the abundance of large Caribbean reef fishes that probably reflect centuries of overexploitation. However, effects of recent degradation of reef habitats on reef fish had not been established before now.

Interesting3:  Nearly one-third of all U.S. bird species are endangered, threatened or in significant decline, with birds in Hawaii facing a "borderline ecological disaster," scientists reported. The State of the Birds report, issued by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar along with conservation groups and university ornithologists, also noted some successes, including the recovery of the bald eagle, the peregrine falcon and other species after the banning of the chemical DDT.

"When we talk about birds and we talk about wildlife, we’re also talking about the economics of this country," Salazar told reporters as the report was released. Wildlife watching and recreation generate $122 billion annually, the report said. Salazar mentioned revenue from hunting, fishing and bird-watching, but added that President Barack Obama’s stimulus package and proposed federal budgets for the remainder of 2009 and 2010 offer more money for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which aims to protect birds and other creatures.

Interesting4:  Salty, liquid water has been detected on a leg of the Mars Phoenix Lander and therefore could be present at other locations on the planet, according to analysis by a group of mission scientists led by a University of Michigan professor. This is the first time liquid water has been detected and photographed outside the Earth. "A large number of independent physical and thermodynamical evidence shows that saline water may actually be common on Mars," said Nilton Renno, a professor in the U-M Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences and a co-investigator on the Phoenix mission.

"Liquid water is an essential ingredient for life. This discovery has important implications to many areas of planetary exploration, including the habitability of Mars." Renno will present these findings March 23 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston. Previously, scientists believed that water existed on Mars only as ice or water vapor because of the planet’s low temperature and atmospheric pressure.

They thought that ice in the Red Planet’s current climate could sublimate, or vaporize, but they didn’t think it could melt. This analysis shows how that assumption may be incorrect. Temperature fluctuation in the arctic region of Mars where Phoenix landed and salts in the soil could create pockets of water too salty to freeze in the climate of the landing site, Renno says. Photos of one of the lander’s legs show droplets that grew during the polar summer.

Based on the temperature of the leg and the presence of large amounts of "perchlorate" salts detected in the soil, scientists believe the droplets were most likely salty liquid water and mud that splashed on the spacecraft when it touched down.

The lander was guided down by rockets whose exhaust melted the top layer of ice below a thin sheet of soil. Some of the mud droplets that splashed on the lander’s leg appear to have grown by absorbing water from the atmosphere, Renno says. Images suggest that some of the droplets darkened, then moved and merged—physical evidence that they were liquid.

Interesting5:  As any parent knows, children love sweet-tasting foods. Now, new research from the University of Washington and the Monell Center indicates that this heightened liking for sweetness has a biological basis and is related to children’s high growth rate. "The relationship between sweet preference and growth makes intuitive sense because when growth is rapid, caloric demands increase.

Children are programmed to like sweet taste because it fills a biological need by pushing them towards energy sources," said Monell geneticist Danielle Reed, PhD, one of the study authors. Across cultures, children prefer higher levels of sweetness in their foods as compared to adults, a pattern that declines during adolescence.

To explore the biological underpinnings of this shift, Reed and University of Washington researcher Susan Coldwell, PhD, looked at sweet preference and biological measures of growth and physical maturation in 143 children between the ages of 11 and 15.

The findings, reported in the journal Physiology & Behavior, suggest that children’s heightened liking for sweet taste is related to their high growth rate and that sweet preferences decline as children’s physical growth slows and eventually stops.

Interesting6:  Robot fish developed by British scientists are to be released into the sea off north Spain to detect pollution. If next year’s trial of the first five robotic fish in the northern Spanish port of Gijon is successful, the team hopes they will be used in rivers, lakes and seas across the world. The carp-shaped robots, costing 20,000 pounds ($29,000) apiece, mimic the movement of real fish and are equipped with chemical sensors to sniff out potentially hazardous pollutants, such as leaks from vessels or underwater pipelines. They will transmit the information back to shore using Wi-Fi technology. Unlike earlier robotic fish, which needed remote controls, they will be able to navigate independently without any human interaction.

Interesting7:  The volume of toxic chemicals that were released into the environment or sent for disposal in 2007 dropped 5 percent compared with 2006, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. But concealed within the overall numbers was good and bad news. For example, the volume of released or disposed "persistent, bio-accumulative and toxic chemicals," substances like lead, dioxin, mercury and PCBs, was up slightly, the agency said.

Most of those releases were not to air or water, the agency said, meaning that the material was mostly buried in landfills, injected into deep wells or held in impoundments. The number given for PCBs was up by 40 percent, but "it’s good news." said Michael P. Flynn, acting deputy assistant administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Information.

The E.P.A. banned production of PCBs 30 years ago, so pounds counted now, Mr. Flynn said, represent electrical transformers or other equipment being taken out of service and PCBs disposed of in qualified facilities. The material released or disposed of in 2007 came to almost 4.1 billion pounds. More than 20 billion pounds, about five times as much material, was recycled, treated to render it nontoxic or burned for energy, the agency said.

Interesting8:  The world’s oldest champagne, bottled before Victoria became Queen, is still drinkable, with notes of "truffles and caramel", according to the experts. An "addictive" bottle of 1825 Perrier-Jouet was opened at a ceremony attended by 12 of the world’s top wine tasters. Their verdict: the 184-year-old champagne tasted better than some of its younger counterparts.

There are now just two 1825 vintage bottles left – and Perrier-Jouet has no plans to open them soon. The wine and champagne experts convened at the winemaker’s cellars in Epernay in France, for a "once in a lifetime" tasting of the 1825 champagne – officially recognised by Guinness World Records as the world’s oldest.

British wine writer John Stimpfig described the "reverential silence" as Perrier-Jouet cellar master Herve Deschamps eased out the cork, followed by a round of applause as the champagne was poured. "It was a memorable evening, and tasting the wine was like tasting history in a bottle," he said. As for the flavour of a wine bottled just 10 years after the battle of Waterloo, Mr Stimpfig said he drank it more out of curiosity than for pleasure.

He said: "The wine was heavily oxidised, with a sherry-like character. "However I did taste notes of truffles, caramel and mushrooms. "Most of the bubbles had disappeared, although there was a slight spritz left." But Serena Sutcliffe, the head of Sotheby’s international wine department, who helped organise the tasting event, described the wine as "addictive" with a complex flavour of figs and even a "slight nose of the sea". She said:

"What was interesting was that I preferred the 1825 champagne to later vintages we tasted, dating from 1846, 1848 and 1874." She said each sip would have been worth "hundreds of pounds" if it had been sold at auction, but added: "It is virtually impossible to assign a value to the 1825 vintage – we’ve never seen anything like it on the market."

Wine tastes have changed over the past 184 years – the 1825 vintage was sweet, and even had a little brandy added at the "topping-up" stage. But it was this very sweetness that experts believe helped the wine to survive for so long, together with the five to six atmospheres of pressure within the bottle.

No guarantees "It’s the bubbles that kept it younger," said Ms Sutcliffe. She added there was no guarantee that the remaining two bottles of 1825 would be as drinkable as the one she and fellow experts sampled, to mark the release of a new Perrier-Jouet vintage. "They could last for years, and they might be better or worse, " she said.

"At this age, wine tends to go its own way and a lot depends on the cork which in the case of the champagne we drank was in very good condition." Mr Deschamps said Perrier-Jouet intended to keep the remaining two bottles for some years yet. "I don’t expect I will ever open another bottle like it," he said.

Interesting9:  Life would be meaningless and not worth living without the internet, nearly one in seven Hong Kong youngsters said in a survey released Friday. Just under 14 per cent of 1,800 respondents aged 12 to 25 insisted they could not live without the internet while 80 per cent described it as essential.

One-quarter of respondents in the high-rise, high-tech city of 7 million, where 77 per cent of households have broadband access, said they used the internet for more than four hours a day. The Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups, which conducted the survey, said Hong Kong youngsters who spent too long online slept badly, engaged in too little exercise and risked failing eyesight.

March 19-20, 2009 


Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Thursday afternoon: 

Lihue, Kauai – 75
Honolulu, Oahu – 78
Kaneohe, Oahu – 76
Kahului, Maui – 75
Hilo, Hawaii – 73
Kailua-kona – 83

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Thursday afternoon:

Barking Sands, Kauai – 79F
Hilo, Hawaii – 67

Haleakala Crater    – missing  (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 28  (near 14,000 feet on the Big Island)

Precipitation Totals – The following numbers represent the largest precipitation totals (inches) during the last 24 hours on each of the major islands, as of Thursday afternoon:

0.66 Mount Waialaele, Kauai
0.20 Poamoho, Oahu
0.00 Molokai
0.08 Lanai
0.03 Kahoolawe
1.18 West Wailuaiki, Maui
1.77 Waiakea Uka, Big Island

Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a far away high pressure system to the north of the islands Friday. Meanwhile, upper level trough to our ENE is moving away now. Our winds will be trade winds Friday…strengthening Saturday.

Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with the Infrared Satellite Image of the islands to see all the clouds around the state during the day and night. This next image is one that gives close images of the islands only during the daytime hours, and is referred to as a Close-up visible image. This next image shows a larger view of the Pacific…giving perspective to the wider ranging cloud patterns in the Pacific Ocean. Finally, here’s a looping IR satellite image, making viewable the clouds around the islands 24 hours a day. To help you keep track of where any showers may be around the islands, here’s the latest animated radar image. 

Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 foot Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is the Haleakala Crater, which is near 10,000 feet in elevation. These two webcams are available during the daylight hours here in the islands…and when there’s a big moon rising just after sunset for an hour or two! Plus, during the nights and early mornings you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise too…depending upon weather conditions.

 Aloha Paragraphs

  This is what we’re looking for!
   Photo Credit: Google.com

The trade winds blew Thursday, but will gain strength Friday…and remain active through the upcoming weekend. A trough of low pressure is moving across our area Thursday night. This has kept the trade winds from becoming as strong as they would have otherwise been. As they become more well established Friday, they will continue blowing into early next week. They will likely be strong enough by Saturday, that we’ll see NWS issued small craft wind advisory flags going up, over those typically windiest coasts and channels around Maui and the Big Island.

An atmospheric destabilizing upper trough of low pressure, (wow that’s a lot of meteorological words!) kept most of Hawaii’s skies cloudy Thursday. The instability brought about by this low pressure system, caused a few localized heavy showers to fall here and there. As you can see from this satellite image, there’s lots of clouds overhead Thursday evening, which will keeping our starlight overnight to a minimum. The island of Kauai has broke into the clear, with Oahu not too far behind…as this slug of upper and middle level moisture shifts eastward. Here’s the looping radar image too, so you can keep track of where any showers will be falling during the night.
   
As mentioned in the paragraph above, we found relatively thick clouds over our islands Thursday. As this looping satellite image shows, there are still quite a few clouds from Maui County, down over the Big Island. This has been such an off and on pattern, as Monday was nice, Tuesday was wet, Wednesday was nice again…and Thursday turned wet again. By the way, check out this webcam view of Mauna Kea summit on the Big Island, where inclement conditions continue to show snowy conditions up there…that is until the sun goes down and blanks out the view after sunset.

The good thing about all of this, is that things will change back to the positive side of the weather spectrum…as we move into the upcoming weekend.  You may have noticed that I didn’t include Friday in that perspective. I would have liked to, but as the upper disturbance moves away to the east, we will see a chunk of residual cold air left in its wake. This may keep the windward sides of the islands still a bit wet during the last work day of the week. There may be some afternoon clouds and showers over the larger islands of Maui and the Big Island locally too. Elsewhere, I’d say that there’s a very good chance of much more sunshine Friday however. This weekend, and I’m not quite ready to say "trust me on this", looks like it should have greatly improved weather.

I’m about ready to leave Kihei, for the drive back upcountry to Kula. It’s been a big day, in terms of lots going on in the world of weather, here in paradise. As I do everyday, let me look out the window, and see what’s cookin’ out there. Oops, it’s as cloudy as heck out there again, with light rain falling. I must say, after looking at clouds and showers falling outside of this office all day, I’m ready to get out there myself! It gets me looking forward to getting back home, throwing on my rain jacket, and heading out for my evening walkabout. ~~~ I will be back with your next new weather narrative early Friday morning, you can trust me on this fact. Wow, as of 845pm Thursday evening, there had been 18,702 page impressions on this website, with 334 clicks on my google ads…I’m impressed! Thanks so much to all of you, who use this site as your weather information source. Have a great Thursday night! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: A fossil from famous shale deposits in Canada was thought to be unremarkable, but a new study finds that it’s actually the remains of a 500-million-year-old monster-looking predator. The Burgess Shale (a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Canadian Rockies of British Columbia) has yielded exceptionally well-preserved fossils that present a remarkable snapshot of Cambrian marine life from 505 million years ago.

The first fragments of the monster fossil (a species called Hurdia victoria) were described nearly 100 years ago, and at the time, they were thought to be part of a crustacean-like animal, and other parts were subsequently described as multiple organisms including jellyfish, sea cucumbers and other arthropods. Now it’s clear that Hurdia was a relatively large predatory animal, possibly up to 1.5 feet (0.5 meter) in length.

It had a segmented body with a head bearing a pair of spiny claws and a circular jaw structure with many teeth. "Finding a complete fossilized animal is extremely rare. Soft tissues tend to decay rapidly after death, and harder parts tend to disarticulate or break into pieces, often leaving very few clues as to what the original animals looked like," said Jean-Bernard Caron of the Royal Ontario Museum, which houses many Burgess Shale fossils, including pieces of Hurdia.

A study of the fossil by Caron and his colleagues, detailed in the March 20 issue of the journal Science, sheds light on the origin of the largest group of living animals, the arthropods — a group that includes insects, crustaceans, spiders, millipedes and centipedes.

Interesting2:  Fire fighters are still our heroes, but a new study raises concerns about their health and mobility. Researchers found that more than 75 percent of emergency responder candidates for fire and ambulance services in Massachusetts are either overweight or obese. The findings, in the March 19 issue of the journal Obesity, have significant consequences for public health and safety.

Emergency responders (firefighters, ambulance personnel and police) are expected to be physically fit to perform strenuous duties without compromising the safety of themselves, colleagues or the community. Traditionally, these professions recruited persons of above-average fitness from a pool of healthy young adults.

However, given the current obesity epidemic, the candidate pool is currently drawn from an increasingly heavy American youth. The researchers from Boston University School of Medicine, Boston Medical Center, Harvard University and the Cambridge Health Alliance reviewed the pre-placement medical examinations of firefighter and ambulance recruits from two Massachusetts clinics between October 2004 and June 2007.

Candidates older than 35 and those who had failed their services’ minimum criteria were excluded from the study in order to focus only on young recruits and those most likely to go on to gain employment as emergency responders. Among the 370 recruits, only about 22 percent were of normal weight; 43.8 percent were overweight, and 33 percent were obese.

According to the study’s results, today’s young recruits are significantly heavier than older veteran firefighters from the 1980s and 1990s. The researchers showed that excess weight as measured by body mass index (BMI) was associated with higher blood pressures, worse metabolic profiles and lower exercise tolerance on treadmill stress tests.

All normal weight recruits achieved a National Fire Protection Agency’s recommended minimum exercise threshold of 12 metabolic equivalents, while 7 percent of overweight and 42 percent of obese recruits failed to reach this criteria.

Interesting3: New Zealand’s biggest retail variety chain, The Warehouse, will start charging 10 New Zealand cents (about 5 US cents) for plastic shopping bags next month to protect the environment, according to news reports. The company, which has 128 variety and discount stationery stores, says it wants to take 20 million bags out of circulation in the next year.

The Warehouse, which is New Zealand’s biggest footwear and music retailer, said that surveys at four trial stores revealed that 85 per cent of customers would not use plastic bags if they had to pay for them. The stores will sell reusable shopping bags for 1 New Zealand dollar.

New Zealand has reduced the use of plastic bags by about 100 million a year since a number of retail chains signed a packaging accord to discourage them in 2004, the New Zealand Herald reported.

Interesting4:  Recommendations to increase fish consumption because of health benefits may not be environmentally sustainable and more research is needed to clarify the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids, writes Dr. David Jenkins of St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and coauthors in an analysis in Canadian Medical Association Journal. Health agencies and the medical community around the world recommend the consumption of fish for health benefits and people in developed countries have been urged to increase their consumption of fatty fish 2 to 3 fold.

However, there has been insufficient attention given to studies that fail to show a significant health benefit from omega-3 fatty acids and the evidence that while some may benefit, others may not. This analysis looks at the evidence for the health benefits of fish.

The authors point out that even at current fish consumption levels, global fisheries are in severe crisis as demand outstrips supply and declining stocks are being diverted from local markets to affluent markets, with serious consequences for the food security of poorer countries and coastal communities.

Global stocks have been declining since the late 1980s and there have been more than 100 cases of marine extinctions. "These trends imply the collapse of all commercially exploited stocks by mid-century," state the authors. "Yet the dire status of fisheries resources is largely unrecognized by the public, who are both encouraged to eat more fish and are misled into believing we live in a sea of plenty."

Interesting5:  A new article published in The Milbank Quarterly explores how food prices can affect weight outcomes, revealing that pricing interventions can have a significant effect on obesity rates. Raising the prices of less healthy foods (e.g., fast foods and sugary products) and lowering the prices of healthier foods (e.g., fruits and vegetables) are associated with lower body weight and lesser likelihood of obesity.

Children and adolescents, the poor, and those already at a higher weight are most responsive to these changes in prices. Small taxes on unhealthy food items or small subsidies for healthy foods are not likely to produce substantial changes in BMI or obesity prevalence while nontrivial pricing interventions may have a measurable effect on Americans’ weight outcomes.

“This review provides evidence about the potential effectiveness of using food pricing policies to affect weight outcomes, including the potential impact of excise and other taxes on less healthy products and of subsidies for more healthy products,” the authors conclude.

Interesting6: Using the natural glue that marine mussels use to stick to rocks, and a variation on the inkjet printer, a team of researchers led by North Carolina State University has devised a new way of making medical adhesives that could replace traditional sutures and result in less scarring, faster recovery times and increased precision for exacting operations such as eye surgery.

Traditionally, there have been two ways to join tissue together in the wake of a surgery: sutures and synthetic adhesives. Sutures work well, but require enormous skill and longer operating times. Additionally, the use of sutures is associated with a number of surgical complications, including discomfort, infection and inflammation. Synthetic adhesives are also widely used, but they are the source of increasing concerns over their toxicological and environmental effects.

One such concern with some synthetic medical adhesives is that – because they are not biodegradable – they do not break down in the body and therefore may cause inflammation, tissue damage, or other problems. But new research shows that adhesive proteins found in the "glue" produced by marine mussels may be used in place of the synthetic adhesives without these concerns, because they are non-toxic and biodegradable, according to study co-author Dr. Roger Narayan.

In addition, the mussel proteins can be placed in solution and applied using inkjet technology to create customized medical adhesives, which may have a host of applications. For example, Narayan says this technique may "significantly improve wound repair in eye surgery, wound closure and fracture fixation." Narayan is an associate professor in the joint biomedical engineering department of NC State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Interesting7: A lost humpback whale’s efforts to find it way out of busy shipping lanes around Hong Kong, was Thursday enthralling people in the former British colony. The plight of the 10-metre adult whale has for two days made television and newspaper headlines in the normally money-obsessed city, providing an unexpected distraction from a tide of bleak economic news.

The humpback whale, the first ever seen in Hong Kong waters, is believed to have become separated from a group of whales migrating from the tropical waters where they spend winter to their summertime Arctic feeding grounds. It was first spotted surfacing, raising its tail and exhaling water through its blow hole Monday and Tuesday in busy shipping lanes close to Hong Kong’s landmark Victoria Harbour.

On Wednesday night, it had moved to the south of Hong Kong island and appeared to be heading eastward to the usual northerly migration route for whales in the South China Sea. However, a kayak paddler who tailed it for several hours Thursday said it appeared to be no closer to the open sea and was disoriented and confused by heavy shipping passing close to it.

Experts said they believe the whale is healthy and if it can find its way into open waters, it should be able to rejoin other whales and continue its route toward the Arctic. However, boatloads of sightseers with cameras have headed out to try to track the whale since it was first sighted, and an appeal has been issued for people not to sail too close to the lost whale.

There were also concerns that there is a lack of food for the whale in Hong Kong’s heavily polluted waters, where fish stocks are critically low, and the whale could weaken if it fails to find its way out soon. Whale expert Samuel Hung Ha-yiu, head of a research centre on dolphins and porpoises, said trying to guide the mammal toward open waters could be counter-productive.

"We recommend the government refrain from doing anything outside of monitoring the animal," he said, adding that trying to usher it out would raise its stress levels and risk it becoming beached.

Interesting8: With Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and high school and college graduations upcoming, there will be plenty of gift-giving and well wishes. When those start pouring in, let yourself be grateful—it’s the best way to achieve happiness according to several new studies conducted by Todd Kashdan, associate professor of psychology at George Mason University.

Gratitude, the emotion of thankfulness and joy in response to receiving a gift, is one of the essential ingredients for living a good life, Kashdan says. Kashdan’s most recent paper, which was recently published online at the Journal of Personality, reveals that when it comes to achieving well-being, gender plays a role.

He found that men are much less likely to feel and express gratitude than women. “Previous studies on gratitude have suggested that there might be a difference in gender, and so we wanted to explore this further—and find out why. Even if it is a small effect, it could make a huge difference in the long run,” says Kashdan.

In one study, Kashdan interviewed college-aged students and older adults, asking them to describe and evaluate a recent episode in which they received a gift. He found that women compared with men reported feeling less burden and obligation and greater levels of gratitude when presented with gifts.

In addition, older men reported greater negative emotions when the gift giver was another man. “The way that we get socialized as children affects what we do with our emotions as adults,” says Kashdan. “Because men are generally taught to control and conceal their softer emotions, this may be limiting their well-being.”

Interesting9: Hippos spend lots of time in the water and now it turns out (or researchers argue), they are the closest living relative to whales. It also turns out, the two are swimming in a bit of controversy. Jessica Theodor, an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary, and her colleague Jonathan Geisler, associate professor at Georgia Southern University are disputing a recent study that creates a different family tree for the hippo.

That research was published in Nature in December 2007 by J. G. M. Thewissen, a professor at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, and his colleagues. Thewissen says that whales are more closely linked to an extinct pig-like animal, often known as India’s pig or Indohyus, while hippos are closely related to living pigs. But this isn’t accurate according to Theodor."

What Thewissen is saying is that Indohyus is the closest relative of whales – and we agree. Where we think he is wrong, is that he is saying that that hippos are more closely related to true pigs than they are to whales," says Theodor. "This contradicts most of the data from DNA from the last 12 or 13 years. Those data place hippos as the closest living relative to whales."

She says Thewissen did not use DNA evidence, instead used fossil evidence alone to create a family tree and reach the conclusion that hippos have more in common with pigs than whales. "And the reason their tree is so different is simple: by excluding all the DNA information they left out all the data that shows a strong relationship between whales and hippos."

March 18-19, 2009 


Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Wednesday afternoon: 

Lihue, Kauai – 76
Honolulu, Oahu – 84
Kaneohe, Oahu – 78
Kahului, Maui – 79
Hilo, Hawaii – 81
Kailua-kona – 84

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Wednesday afternoon:

Kailua-kona – 82F
Princeville, Kauai – 73

Haleakala Crater    – missing  (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 28  (near 14,000 feet on the Big Island)

Precipitation Totals – The following numbers represent the largest precipitation totals (inches) during the last 24 hours on each of the major islands, as of Wednesday afternoon:

1.27 Mount Waialaele, Kauai
2.65 Punaluu Pump, Oahu
0.02 Molokai
0.03 Lanai
0.34 Kahoolawe
1.56 West Wailuaiki, Maui
1.19 Piihonua, Big Island

Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing high pressure systems to the NNW and NE of the islands. Our winds will be trade winds Wednesday…becoming better established Thursday.

Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with the Infrared Satellite Image of the islands to see all the clouds around the state during the day and night. This next image is one that gives close images of the islands only during the daytime hours, and is referred to as a Close-up visible image. This next image shows a larger view of the Pacific…giving perspective to the wider ranging cloud patterns in the Pacific Ocean. Finally, here’s a looping IR satellite image, making viewable the clouds around the islands 24 hours a day. To help you keep track of where any showers may be around the islands, here’s the latest animated radar image. 

Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 foot Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is the Haleakala Crater, which is near 10,000 feet in elevation. These two webcams are available during the daylight hours here in the islands…and when there’s a big moon rising just after sunset for an hour or two! Plus, during the nights and early mornings you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise too…depending upon weather conditions.

 Aloha Paragraphs

  Sunset Hula Dancer
   Photo Credit: Google.com

The trade winds returned to the Hawaiian Islands Wednesday…becoming fast paced already on the Big Island. As these trade winds continue to fill back into our Hawaiian Island weather picture Thursday, they will become even more well established going into the weekend. There are no marine advisories for either wind or waves, with none expected for the time being. The winds are still a bit gusty over the mountain summits on the Big Island, where a wind advisory is in effect. These winds are blowing between 25 and 35 mph Wednesday evening. Here’s a webcam picture of the top of Mauna Kea, on the Big Island. While we’re looking at mountain tops, here’s the webcam for the summit of the Haleakala Crater on Maui.

As the trade winds take back over here in the islands, our weather will improve, with more sunshine…soon but perhaps not quite yet. This clearing will be a little slower than expected, as yet another upper level trough of low pressure will be passing by just to the south of the islands. The instability brought about by this low pressure system, sparked some thunderstorms to our southwest during the day Wednesday. As you can see from this satellite image, there’s a fair amount of high clouds being carried over our islands, which are the tops of cumulonimbus clouds well offshore. Whatever showers that form in our vicinty, at least for the time being, could be enhanced by the cold air aloft…associated with this area of low pressure.

It’s early Wednesday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last part of today’s narrative. As I was mentioning this morning, we’re moving through the very last days of winter 2009, as we prepare to slide across the starting line into the spring season. It looks very likely that when we greet the spring equinox, or what’s officially called the vernal equinox, we will have a fine trade wind weather pattern going on then. The time of this occurrence will be March 20th, at 1:44am here in the Hawaiian Islands. This makes early Friday morning the beginning of spring, so that we just have the rest of Wednesday night through Thursday to still experience the last few momdents of winter 2009.

Looking out the window here in Kihei, before I jump in the car, for the 40 or so minute drive home to Kula…I see lots of cirrus clouds. These clouds are clearly showing up in the satellite image just up the page. You can see this particular clump of clouds to the west and southwest of Hawaii…out over the ocean. Looking at this looping satellite image, I don’t really see any signs of incoming showers, although there are some falling over the sea outside of radar range. It will be interesting to see if we have any heavy showers forming over or around the islands tonight, or into the day Thursday…it wouldn’t overly surprise me. ~~~ These troughs of low pressure just keep forming out to the west and SW of us, with little prior warning. If we are to believe the computer models however, they suggest that by Friday, and into the weekend, that we would see less high clouds, and more sunshine. Working against the showers, will be the strengthening trade winds over the next couple of days. If they got a little stronger than they were today, they could limit the cloud growth vertically, and help eliminate the chance of heavier showers.

That’s it for Wednesday, I really have to run, or at least get home, so I can get out for my sunset walk. I hope that you have a great Wednesday night, and that you will stop by for another visit on Thursday! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting:  The Ancient Egyptians cherished their fragrant scents, too, as perfume flacons from this period indicate. In its permanent exhibition, Bonn University’s Egyptian Museum has a particularly well preserved example on display. Screening this 3,500-year-old flacon with a computer tomograph, scientists at the university detected the desiccated residues of a fluid, which they now want to submit to further analysis.

They might even succeed in reconstructing this scent. Pharaoh Hatshepsut was a power-conscious woman who assumed the reins of government in Egypt around the year 1479 B.C. In actual fact, she was only supposed to represent her step-son Thutmose III, who was three years old at the time, until he was old enough to take over. But the interregnum lasted 20 years.

"She systematically kept Thutmose out of power," says Michael Höveler-Müller, the curator of Bonn University’s Egyptian Museum. Hatshepsut’s perfume is also presumably a demonstration of her power. "We think it probable that one constituent was incense – the scent of the gods," Michael Höveler-Müller declares.

This idea is not so wide of the mark, as it is a known fact that in the course of her regency Haptshepsut undertook an expedition to Punt – the modern Eritrea, and the Egyptians had been importing precious goods such as ebony, ivory, gold, and just this incense, from there since the third millennium B.C. Apparently the expedition brought back whole incense plants, which Hatshepsut then had planted in the vicinity of her funerary temple.

The filigree flacon now under examination by the researchers in Bonn bears an inscription with the name of the Pharaoh. Hence it was probably once in her possession. The vessel is exceptionally well preserved. "So we considered it might be rewarding to have it screened in the University Clinics Radiology Department," Höveler-Müller explains. "As far as I know this has never been done before."

This world premier will now in all probability be followed by another one: "The desiccated residues of a fluid can be clearly discerned in the x-ray photographs," the museums curator explains. "Our pharmacologists are now going to analyze this sediment." The results could be available in a good years time.

If they are successful, the scientists in Bonn are even hoping to "reconstruct" the perfume so that, 3,500 years after the death of the woman amongst whose possessions it was found, the scent could then be revitalized. Hatshepsut died in 1457 B.C. Analysis of the mummy ascribed to her showed that the ruler was apparently between 45 and 60 years of age at the end of her life; that she was also overweight, and suffering from diabetes, cancer, osteoporosis and arthritis.

Interesting2:  New software developed with help from the Wildlife Conservation Society will allow tiger researchers to rapidly identify individual animals by creating a three-dimensional model using photos taken by remote cameras. The software, described in an issue of the journal Biology Letters, may also help identify the origin of tigers from confiscated skins.

The new software, developed by Conservation Research Ltd., creates a 3D model from scanned photos using algorithms similar to fingerprint-matching software used by criminologists. Researchers currently calculate tiger populations by painstakingly reviewing hundreds of photos of animals caught by camera "traps" and then matching their individual stripe patterns, which are unique to each animal.

Using a formula developed by renowned tiger expert Ullas Karanth of WCS, researchers accurately estimate local populations by how many times individual tigers are "recaptured" by the camera trap technique. It is expected that the new software will allow researchers to rapidly identify animals, which in turn could speed up tiger conservation efforts.

"This new software will make it much easier for conservationists to identify individual tigers and estimate populations," said Ullas Karanth, Senior Conservation Scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society and one of the study’s co-authors. "The fundamentals of tiger conservation are knowing how many tigers live in a study area before you can start to measure success."

The study’s authors found that the software was up to 95 percent accurate in matching tigers from scanned photos. Researches were also able to use the software to identify the origin of confiscated tiger skins based on solely on photos. Development of the software was funded through a Panthera project in collaboration with WCS.

Interesting3:  NASA scientists analyzing the dust of meteorites have discovered new clues to a long-standing mystery about how life works on its most basic, molecular level. "We found more support for the idea that biological molecules, like amino acids, created in space and brought to Earth by meteorite impacts help explain why life is left-handed," said Dr. Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

"By that I mean why all known life uses only left-handed versions of amino acids to build proteins." Glavin is lead author of a paper on this research appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences March 16. Proteins are the workhorse molecules of life, used in everything from structures like hair to enzymes, the catalysts that speed up or regulate chemical reactions.

Just as the 26 letters of the alphabet are arranged in limitless combinations to make words, life uses 20 different amino acids in a huge variety of arrangements to build millions of different proteins. Amino acid molecules can be built in two ways that are mirror images of each other, like your hands. Although life based on right-handed amino acids would presumably work fine, "you can’t mix them," says Dr. Jason Dworkin of NASA Goddard, co-author of the study.

"If you do, life turns to something resembling scrambled eggs — it’s a mess. Since life doesn’t work with a mixture of left-handed and right-handed amino acids, the mystery is: how did life decide — what made life choose left-handed amino acids over right-handed ones?" Over the last four years, the team carefully analyzed samples of meteorites with an abundance of carbon, called carbonaceous chondrites.

The researchers looked for the amino acid isovaline and discovered that three types of carbonaceous meteorites had more of the left-handed version than the right-handed variety – as much as a record 18 percent more in the often-studied Murchison meteorite. "Finding more left-handed isovaline in a variety of meteorites supports the theory that amino acids brought to the early Earth by asteroids and comets contributed to the origin of only left-handed based protein life on Earth," said Glavin.

NASA scientists analyzing the dust of meteorites have discovered new clues to a long-standing mystery about how life works on its most basic, molecular level. "We found more support for the idea that biological molecules, like amino acids, created in space and brought to Earth by meteorite impacts help explain why life is left-handed," said Dr. Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "By that I mean why all known life uses only left-handed versions of amino acids to build proteins."

Glavin is lead author of a paper on this research appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences March 16. Proteins are the workhorse molecules of life, used in everything from structures like hair to enzymes, the catalysts that speed up or regulate chemical reactions. Just as the 26 letters of the alphabet are arranged in limitless combinations to make words, life uses 20 different amino acids in a huge variety of arrangements to build millions of different proteins. Amino acid molecules can be built in two ways that are mirror images of each other, like your hands.

Although life based on right-handed amino acids would presumably work fine, "you can’t mix them," says Dr. Jason Dworkin of NASA Goddard, co-author of the study. "If you do, life turns to something resembling scrambled eggs — it’s a mess. Since life doesn’t work with a mixture of left-handed and right-handed amino acids, the mystery is: how did life decide — what made life choose left-handed amino acids over right-handed ones?"

Over the last four years, the team carefully analyzed samples of meteorites with an abundance of carbon, called carbonaceous chondrites. The researchers looked for the amino acid isovaline and discovered that three types of carbonaceous meteorites had more of the left-handed version than the right-handed variety – as much as a record 18 percent more in the often-studied Murchison meteorite. "Finding more left-handed isovaline in a variety of meteorites supports the theory that amino acids brought to the early Earth by asteroids and comets contributed to the origin of only left-handed based protein life on Earth," said Glavin.

Interesting4:  The long tails sported by many male birds in the tropics look like they’re a drag to carry around and a distinct disadvantage when fleeing predators, but experiments by University of California, Berkeley, biologists shows that they exact only a minimal cost in speed or energy – at least in hummingbirds. "We estimate that having a long tail increases a bird’s daily metabolic costs by 1 to 3 percent, which means the bird has to visit 1 to 3 percent more flowers in its territory," said Christopher J. Clark, a graduate student in UC Berkeley’s Department of Integrative Biology.

"Is that a lot? It’s hard to say, but we argue that it’s not, especially when compared to the costs of things like molting and migration." As a way to attract admiring females, in fact, long tail feathers may be one of the easiest ornamentations to evolve with the least consequences, the researchers say. Clark and Robert Dudley, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology, report the results of their study in the March issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, which appeared online this week.

Male birds of numerous species have evolved elaborate colors and decorations to attract females, many of them involving tail feathers. The peacock’s eye-popping display, the broad, gauzy tail of the male lyre bird and the two-foot-long, iridescent green tail of the quetzal are but three examples.

Some biologists have made computer models of elongated tails, like those of the Jamaican red-billed streamertail hummingbird, the scissor-tail hummingbird or the marvelous spatuletail hummingbird, and have predicted as much as a 50 percent greater energy cost when flying with a long tail.

In his experiment, Clark outfitted short-tailed Anna’s hummingbirds (Calypte anna) with long tail feathers from a red-billed streamertail (Trochilus polytmus), giving the hummingbirds two tail feathers that were five times the normal length for an Anna’s, and put the hummers through their paces in a wind tunnel.

He and Dudley found that the hummingbirds with enhanced tail feathers suffered only a 3.4 percent drop in their maximum speed. This corresponded to an 11 percent increase in energy needed to fly at high speeds. For moderate and low speeds – the speeds at which hummingbirds typically flit from flower to flower and hover the long-tailed birds expended considerably less extra energy.

Interesting5:  Feathers and other feather-like stuff are known in several so-called saurischian dinosaurs, including tyrannosaurs and maniraptors — the ancestors to modern birds. Now, feather-like structures have been found for the first time in dinosaurs other than saurischians. The finding upends paleontological thinking about feathers, suggesting they might go back to the origin of all dinosaurs, more than 200 million years.

The newest fuzzy dinosaur is a so-called heterodontosaur (Tianyulong confuciusi) and it belongs to the mainly vegetarian "ornithischian" group of dinosaurs, one of the two major groups of dinosaurs along with the frequently carnivorous saurischians. Heterodontosaurs had fox-sized bodies and lived as far back as 198 million years ago in the Cretaceous Period.

The fossil was found in the well-known Liaoning Province fossil beds in China and is described by Xioa-Ting Zheng of the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature in China; Hai-Lu You of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences’ Institute of Geology; and Xing Xu and Zhi-Ming Dong of the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in the March 19 issue of the journal Nature.

The team found evidence of hollow, feather-like structures, with no branching, on the fossil creature’s neck, back and tail, some of which were more than 2 inches long. However, these structures are a far cry from the bird feathers typically found in today’s backyards.

Intersting6:  Our bottled water habit has a huge environmental impact, including the amount of energy it takes to make the plastic bottles, fill them and ship them to thirsty consumers worldwide. A new study breaks down just how much energy is used at each step of the process. An estimated total of the equivalent of 32 million to 54 million barrels of oil was required to generate the energy to produce the amount of bottled water consumed in the United States in 2007, according to the study, detailed in the January-March issue of the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Of course, this is but a third of a percent of the energy that the United States consumes as a whole in a year. In 2007, the last year for which global statistics were available, more than 200 billion liters of bottled water were sold around the world, mostly in North America and Europe.

The total amount sold in the United States alone that year (33 billion liters) averages out to about 110 liters (almost 30 gallons) of water per person, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation. Since 2001, bottled water sales have increased by 70 percent in the United States, far surpassing those of milk and beer. Only sodas have larger sales.

The energy required to produce bottled water is particularly of interest now, at a time when many nations are looking for ways to reduce their energy use and associated climate impacts. Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, a nonpartisan research institute, and his colleague Heather Cooley recently realized that no one had done a comprehensive survey of the energy use involved in the complete production cycle of bottled water, so they took on the task.

The energy use breaks down into roughly four parts of the production cycle: that used to make the plastic and turn it into bottles, to treat the water, to fill and cap the bottles, and finally to transport them. "Energy is used in a lot of different phases," Gleick said. Most plastic bottles are made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET). Little pellets of PET are melted and fused together to make the bottle mold.

Gleick and Cooley estimated that about 1 million tons of PET were used to make plastic bottles in the United States in 2007, with 3 million tons used globally; the energy used to produce that global amount of PET and the bottles it was turned into was equivalent to about 50 billion barrels of oil, they found. (Some companies have been shifting toward using lighter-weight plastics for their bottles, which reduces the amount of PET produced by about 30 percent and would therefore lower the amount of energy required to make them.

The transition to less energy-intensive plastic is slow though, and not all companies use them.) The amount of energy involved in that first step was a surprise to Gleick: "I didn’t know how much energy it takes to make plastic or turn plastic into a bottle," he told LiveScience.

The energy required to treat water is substantially less and depends on how many treatments are used on the water and doesn’t account for the bulk of the energy spent in production. Likewise, the energy used to clean, fill, seal and label the bottles is only about 0.34 percent of the energy built into the bottle itself.

The energy used to transport the bottled water depends mainly on how far it is shipped and what transportation method is used. Air cargo is the costliest energy method, followed by truck, cargo ship and rail shipping, in that order. A different study on the carbon footprint of wine also found this breakdown of energy use for transportation methods.

In their study, Gleick and Cooley used the examples of different types of water shipped to Los Angeles: water produced locally and shipped by truck involved the least amount of energy, followed by water sent by cargo ship from Fiji, with water produced in France and shipped by cargo ship and rail having the highest energy costs.

March 17-18, 2009 


Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Tuesday afternoon: 

Lihue, Kauai – 75
Honolulu, Oahu – 77
Kaneohe, Oahu – 76
Kahului, Maui – 78
Hilo, Hawaii – 75
Kailua-kona – 77

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Tuesday afternoon:

Port Allen, Kauai – 79F
Princeville, Kauai – 72

Haleakala Crater    – missing  (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 27  (near 14,000 feet on the Big Island)

Precipitation Totals – The following numbers represent the largest precipitation totals (inches) during the last 24 hours on each of the major islands, as of Tuesday evening:

0.89 Hanalei River, Kauai
0.03 Kahuku Training Area, Oahu
0.00 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.01 Kahoolawe
1.08 Kahakuloa, Maui
0.45 Kapapala Ranch, Big Island

Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a departing low pressure system located to the northeast of the islands, moving away. Meanwhile, we see high pressure systems to the NNW and NE of the islands. Our winds will become light trade winds Wednesday…becoming better established Thursday.

Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with the Infrared Satellite Image of the islands to see all the clouds around the state during the day and night. This next image is one that gives close images of the islands only during the daytime hours, and is referred to as a Close-up visible image. This next image shows a larger view of the Pacific…giving perspective to the wider ranging cloud patterns in the Pacific Ocean. Finally, here’s a looping IR satellite image, making viewable the clouds around the islands 24 hours a day. To help you keep track of where any showers may be around the islands, here’s the latest animated radar image. 

Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 foot Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is the Haleakala Crater, which is near 10,000 feet in elevation. These two webcams are available during the daylight hours here in the islands…and when there’s a big moon rising just after sunset for an hour or two! Plus, during the nights and early mornings you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise too…depending upon weather conditions.

 Aloha Paragraphs

  Really nice north shore geography…Kauai
   Photo Credit: Google.com

Light and variable winds will give way to strengthening trade winds later Wednesday or on Thursday.  A low pressure center, now to the northeast of our islands continues moving away, but has left a trough of low pressure in its wake. This trough is keeping the trade winds at bay for the moment. As the trade winds fill back into our Hawaiian Island weather picture during the next 12-24 hours, they will become well established into the weekend.

An upper level trough of low pressure will be moving across our area tonight…bringing showers, especially over Maui County, and to some lesser extent the Big island. This upper air feature has lead to a new round of localized showers, some of which that have been quite heavy. The NWS has kept a flash flood watch active for both the Big Island and Maui Tuesday night, continuing into early Wednesday morning. As the trade winds return later Wednesday, the emphasis for showers will migrate back over to the windward coasts and slopes then into Thursday. 

A canopy of high clouds limited our sunshine Tuesday, I might add…greatly. Here’s a satellite image, showing those clouds, with only very limited thin spots at the time of this writing. Meanwhile. the lower level clouds, and their associated showers, have for the most part taken aim on the islands of Maui County, to some extend the Big Island. This looping radar image will help us to keep an eye on that precipitation. These showers will back off during the day Wednesday, with a fairly normal trade wind weather pattern returning Thursday into the weekend.

It’s early Tuesday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last part of today’s narrative.  What a day, as totally cloudy skies blanketed the entire state of Hawaii…what else is new! There were some good showers falling too, which as we started the day, looked they would impact the Big Island most readily. The computer models were pointing this out too, although as it turned out…Maui got the most rainfall. There was no official reports of thunderstorms that I saw, but there were some red radar echos, indicating heavy rains, out along the Hana coast of east Maui, during the afternoon hours. The NWS office issued a flood advisory for that area, but has since cancelled it. My neighbors up in Kula emailed, and told me that it was really coming down up there too.

I feel a little miffed, as I spent the day in an office, a bit detached from all the weather that was occurring out the window! It showered lightly late in the afternoon here in Kihei, but nothing heavy by any means. Looking out the window before I leave for the drive back upcountry, it’s still lightly raining out there. I’ll be using my wind shield wipers all the way home, which will at least present some fun. When I get home I’ll put on my rain jacket, and get outside for my customary walk, unless that is, it’s pouring like crazy. If I run into some really hectic weather conditons, on the way home, I’ll come back online and tell you about it. Otherwise, I’ll catch up with you early Wednesday morning, when I’ll have your brand new weather narrative waiting here for you then. I hope you have a great Tuesday night wherever you happen to be hanging your hat! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! – Once, while on vacation in Rome, I noticed a marble column in St. Peter’s with a golden telephone on it. As a young priest passed by, I  asked who the telephone was for. The priest told me it was a direct line to heaven, and if I’d like to call, it would be a thousand dollars. I was amazed, but declined the offer.

Throughout Italy, I kept seeing the same golden telephone on a
marble column. At each, I asked about it and the answer was always the same: It was a direct line to heaven and I could call for a thousand dollars.

Then I finished my tour in Ireland .. I decided to attend Mass at a local village church. When I walked in the door I noticed the golden telephone. Underneath it there was a sign stating: "DIRECT LINE TO HEAVEN: 25 cents." "Father," I said, "I have been all over Italy and in all the cathedrals I visited, I’ve seen telephones exactly like this one. But the price is always a thousand dollars. Why is it that this one is only 25 cents?"

The priest smiled and said, "Darlin’, you’re in Ireland now. It’s
a local call." 

~~~ A friend of my mine named Sharon, from the Santa Cruz, California area, sent this to me this morning…seemed fitting.

Interesting: Ancient garbage can be like gold to archaeologists. During excavation of an 800-year-old trash dump in Lyon, France, scientists discovered the archaeological equivalent of golden shoe soles: A trove of leather soles of shoes, which is helping scientists understand how leather stays preserved in wet, oxygen-free environments. That knowledge could aid restoration of other leather artifacts, according to a report on analysis of the old soles scheduled for the current issue of ACS’ semi-monthly journal Analytical Chemistry.

In the article, Michel Bardet and colleagues point out that leather consists of collagen, a tough protein that can remain intact hundreds of thousands of years under ideal conditions. The French soles were buried in mud in the absence of oxygen — good conditions for preservation. They used laboratory technology called nuclear magnetic resonance to compare composition of the ancient leather to modern leather. It turned out that tannin, which helps to preserve leather, had been washed out of the old soles and replaced by iron oxides. The iron oxides, which leached into the leather from surrounding soil, helped preserve the soles in the absence of tannins.

Interesting2:  Scientists have long established that the Antarctic Peninsula is one of the most rapidly warming spots on Earth. Now, new research using detailed satellite data indicates that the changing climate is affecting not just the penguins at the apex of the food chain, but simultaneously the microscopic life that is the base of the ecosystem. The research was published in the journal Science by researchers with the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) LTER (Long Term Ecological Research) program.

The LTER, which has 26 sites around the globe, including two in Antarctica, enables tracking of ecological variables over time, so that the mechanisms of climate change impact on ecosystems can be revealed. The specific findings were made by researchers with the Palmer LTER, using data collected near Palmer Station and from the research vessel Laurence M. Gould. Both Palmer Station and the Laurence M. Gould are operated by NSF’s Office of Polar Programs.

Hugh Ducklow, of the Marie Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, the principal investigator for the Palmer LTER project, said that the new findings are scientifically significant, but they also are consistent with the climate trends on the Peninsula and other observed changes. However, it took new scientific tools and analytical work by post-doctoral fellow Martin Montes Hugo to verify scientifically what scientists had been inferring from other changes for some time.

"I have to say the findings weren’t a surprise; I think with the weight of all the other observations that we had on changes happening to organisms higher up in the food chain, we thought that phytoplankton weren’t going to escape this level of climate change," Ducklow said. "But it took Martin to have all the right tools and the abilities to go in and do the analysis and prove what we suspected."

Interesting3:  Massive predators like Albertosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex may have been at the top of the food chain, but they were not the only meat-eating dinosaurs to roam North America, according to Canadian researchers who have discovered the smallest dinosaur species on the continent to date. Their work is also helping re-draw the picture of North America’s ecosystem at the height of the dinosaur age 75 million years ago. "Hesperonychus is currently the smallest dinosaur known from North America. But its discovery just emphasizes how little we actually know, and it raises the possibility that there are even smaller ones out there waiting to be found," said Nick Longrich, a paleontology research associate in the University of Calgary’s Department of Biological Sciences.

"Small carnivorous dinosaurs seemed to be completely absent from the environment, which seemed bizarre because today the small carnivores outnumber the big ones," he said. "It turns out that they were here and they played a more important role in the ecosystem than we realized. So for the past 100 years, we’ve completely overlooked a major part of North America’s dinosaur community."

In a paper published March 16 in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Longrich and University of Alberta paleontologist Philip Currie describe a new genus of carnivorous dinosaur that was smaller than a modern housecat and likely hunted insects, small mammals and other prey through the swamps and forests of the late Cretaceous period in southeastern Alberta, Canada.

Weighing approximately two kilograms and standing about 50 centimeter tall, Hesperonychus elizabethae resembled a miniature version of the famous bipedal predator Velociraptor, to which it was closely related. Hesperonychus ran about on two legs and had razor-like claws and an enlarged sickle-shaped claw on its second toe. It had a slender build and slender head with dagger-like teeth.

"It was half the size of a domestic cat and probably hunted and ate whatever it could for its size – insects, mammals, amphibians and maybe even baby dinosaurs," Longrich said. "It probably spent most of its time close to the ground searching through the marshes and forests that characterized the area at the end of the Cretaceous."

Interesting4:  A new image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope offers a rare view of an imminent collision between the cores of two merging galaxies, each powered by a black hole with millions of times the mass of the sun. The galactic cores are in a single, tangled galaxy called NGC 6240, located 400-million light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. Millions of years ago, each core was the dense center of its own galaxy before the two galaxies collided and ripped each other apart. Now, these cores are approaching each other at tremendous speeds and preparing for the final cataclysmic collision. They will crash into each other in a few million years, a relatively short period on a galactic timescale.

The spectacular image combines visible light from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and infrared light from Spitzer. It catches the two galaxies during a rare, short-lived phase of their evolution, when both cores of the interacting galaxies are still visible but closing in on each other fast. "One of the most exciting things about the image is that this object is unique," said Stephanie Bush of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass., lead author of a new paper describing the observation in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal. "Merging is a quick process, especially when you get to the train wreck that is happening. There just aren’t many galactic mergers at this stage in the nearby universe."

Interesting5:  A new Queen’s University study shows that detergents used to clean up spills of diesel oil actually increase its toxicity to fish, making it more harmful. "The detergents may be the best way to treat spills in the long term because the dispersed oil is diluted and degraded," says Biology professor Peter Hodson. "But in the short term, they increase the bioavailability and toxicity of the fuel to rainbow trout by 100-fold."

The detergents are oil dispersants that decrease the surface tension between oil and water, allowing floating oil to mix with water as tiny droplets. Dr. Hodson and his team found that dispersion reduces the potential impacts of oil on surface-dwelling animals, while this should enhance biodegradation, it also creates a larger reservoir of oil in the water column.

This increases the transfer of hydrocarbons from oil to water, Dr. Hodson explains. The hydrocarbons pass easily from water into tissues and are deadly to fish in the early stages of life. "This could seriously impair the health of fish populations, resulting in long-term reductions in economic returns to fisheries," he says. The study is published in the journal, Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.

The researchers also determined that even though chemical dispersants are not typically used in freshwater, turbulent rivers can disperse spilled diesel and create similar negative effects. "It doesn’t matter if the oil is being dispersed by chemicals or by the current," says Dr. Hodson. "Now that we know how deadly dispersed oil is, it is important to assess the risks of diesel spills to fish and fisheries in terms of the spill location, and the timing relative to fish spawning and development."

Interesting6:  For every gram of salt that Americans reduce in their diets daily, a quarter of a million fewer new heart disease cases and over 200,000 fewer deaths would occur over a decade, researchers said at the American Heart Association’s 49th Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention. These results were derived from a validated computer-simulation of heart disease among U.S. adults.

“A very modest decrease in the amount of salt — hardly detectable in the taste of food — can have dramatic health benefits for the U.S.,” said Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, Ph.D., M.D., M.A.S., lead author of the study and an assistant professor of Medicine and of Epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco.

“It was a surprise to see the magnitude of the impact on the population, given the very small reductions in salt that we were modeling.” A 3-gram–a-day reduction in salt intake (about 1200 mg of sodium) would result in 6 percent fewer cases of new heart disease, 8 percent fewer heart attacks, and 3 percent fewer deaths. Even larger health benefits are projected for African Americans, who are more likely to have high blood pressure and whose blood pressure may be more sensitive to salt.

Among African Americans, new heart disease cases would be reduced by 10 percent, heart attacks by 13 percent and deaths by 6 percent. For years, ample evidence has linked salt intake to high blood pressure and heart disease. Yet, salt consumption among Americans has risen by 50 percent and blood pressure has risen by nearly the same amount since the 1970s, according to researchers.

Interesting7:  How do the many carnivorous animals of the Americas avoid competing for the same lunch, or becoming each other’s meal? A possible answer comes from a new study by a pair of researchers at the University of California, Davis. Their large-scale analysis shows that it’s not just chance that’s at play, but avoidance strategies themselves that have been a driving force in the evolution of many carnivores, influencing such factors as whether species are active daytime or nighttime, whether they inhabit forests or grasslands, or live in trees or on the ground. The Americas are home to more than 80 species of terrestrial carnivores, including cats, dogs, bears, weasels, skunks and raccoons. Commonly, 20 or more species can occupy the same region.

"For the most part, these overlapping species all share the same prey base — other animals — which includes each other," said Jennifer Hunter, who conducted the study for her Ph.D. dissertation in ecology. Hunter and co-author Tim Caro, professor of wildlife, fish and conservation biology, first plotted the known ranges of all of the American carnivores on one big digital map.

Assuming that wherever ranges overlapped, competition and predation between those species was possible, they then compared those animals’ behavioral characteristics, body sizes and coloration. By analyzing this huge matrix of information, they were able to tease out broad patterns of strategies employed by each family.

Interesting8:  Fossil remains of a huge and fearsome marine predator, dubbed "Predator X", have been discovered in Svalbard, a remote Arctic archipelago. About 15 meters long and weighing 45 tons, the creature is a new species of pliosaur, and ruled the Jurassic seas some 147 million years ago. Predator X had a head twice the size of Tyrannosaurus rex and its bite had four times the force, at around 33,000 pounds. Its teeth were each around 1 foot long. The remains were discovered in June 2008 during a two-week expedition led by Jørn Hurum of the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo.

Its anatomy, physiology and hunting strategy all point to it being the ultimate predator – the most dangerous creature to patrol the Earth’s oceans," according to the museum. The key find enabling the dimensions of the beast to be calculated was a spherical bone called the bassioccipital condyle, which connected the base of the skull to the spine. "The condyle we found measures 15 centimeters in diameter, the largest of any known pliosaur species," explains Hurum. "By comparison, the condyle of T. Rex measures just 8 centimeters, meaning that Predator X’s skull was at least double the size," he says.

In all, the team found 20,000 fragments of the creature’s skeleton, which is being assembled at the museum. Analyses of bones from the four flippers suggest that the animal cruised using just two fore-flippers – using the back pair for extra speed when pursuing and capturing prey. Predator X’s brain was of a similar type and size, proportionally, to that of today’s great white shark, the team says. The full details of the find are to be published later this year, and a documentary following the expedition will be shown around the world from May.

March 16-17, 2009 


Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Monday afternoon: 

Lihue, Kauai – 75
Honolulu, Oahu – 77
Kaneohe, Oahu – 78
Kahului, Maui – 79
Hilo, Hawaii – 73
Kailua-kona – 80

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Monday afternoon:

Kailua-kona – 79F
Lihue, Kauai – 71

Haleakala Crater    – missing  (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 27  (near 14,000 feet on the Big Island)

Precipitation Totals – The following numbers represent the largest precipitation totals (inches) during the last 24 hours on each of the major islands, as of Monday afternoon:

0.30 Kalaheo, Kauai
0.30 H-1 Kapiolani, Oahu
0.01 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
0.01 West Wailuaiki, Maui
0.57 Pali 2, Big Island

Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing a low pressure system located to the northeast of the islands, and moving away. This low has left a light wind producing trough over the islands. Our winds will be light and variable Tuesday, then strengthening trade winds will arrive later Wednesday or Thursday.

Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with the Infrared Satellite Image of the islands to see all the clouds around the state during the day and night. This next image is one that gives close images of the islands only during the daytime hours, and is referred to as a Close-up visible image. This next image shows a larger view of the Pacific…giving perspective to the wider ranging cloud patterns in the Pacific Ocean. Finally, here’s a looping IR satellite image, making viewable the clouds around the islands 24 hours a day. To help you keep track of where any showers may be around the islands, here’s the latest animated radar image. 

Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 foot Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is the Haleakala Crater, which is near 10,000 feet in elevation. These two webcams are available during the daylight hours here in the islands…and when there’s a big moon rising just after sunset for an hour or two! Plus, during the nights and early mornings you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise too…depending upon weather conditions.

 Aloha Paragraphs

   Nice sky reflection…on the Big Island
   Photo Credit: flickr.com

Light and variable winds will hold firm through mid-week, with trade winds rushing in by Thursday…continuing through the end of the week.  A low pressure center has opening up into a broad trough of low pressure, oriented southwest through northeast of the islands. Here’s a weather map so you can see this low pressure system Monday evening. Conditions have definitely become less windy now. The NWS is keeping a wind advisory up for the gusty winds atop the Haleakala Crater on Maui…and a high wind warning for the tall mountains on the Big Island. 

A new shower area will push into the state Tuesday into Wednesday…with the expected heaviest amounts over the Big Island, and maybe Maui. A trough of low pressure, what’s left of the recent low pressure centers, will keep our air mass shower prone for a few more days. The culprit for this new batch of showers will be a deep upper level disturbance…coming in from the southwest direction. This upper air feature will lead to a new round of localized showers, some that will likely become quite heavy. The NWS has issued a flash flood watch for the Big Island, starting Tuesday morning, and continuing into the evening. As the trade winds return after mid-week, the emphasis for showers will migrate back over to the windward coasts and slopes.

We’ve shifted into a convective weather pattern now…before ending up with the trade winds after mid-week.  We’re certainly not done with cloudy skies yet, as a new area of multi-canopied clouds arrives Monday night into Tuesday, poised to bring new showers into our area during the next couple of days…especially over and around the Big Island, and perhaps Maui. Here’s a satellite image, showing these clouds looming to the west and southwest of our islands. I’ll keep this looping radar image, around for rains that should start showing up by Tuesday morning. These showers will back off by Thursday, with a fairly normal trade wind weather pattern actualizing then.

It’s early Monday evening here in Kihie, Maui, as I begin writing this last part of today’s narrative. We seen a rapid change, between yesterday and today, in terms of what the computer models have been advertising. There was an initial prospect of light winds, with afternoon convective showers, which may still happen. The new twist however shows more organized showers and rain taking aim on the Big Island. As you might have read in one of the paragraphs above, the NWS forecast office in Honolulu has issued a flash flood watch for that southern most island in the chain. The fact that Maui is practically right next store, gives it a chance to have some serious precipitation as well. The rest of the state may see some showers, maybe even some generous ones, during the afternoon hours, and especially over the mountains through Wednesday.

Looking out the window here in Kihei, I see just a few lower level clouds, but a pretty good amount of high cirrus moving overhead. This will present the good chance for really nice sunset colors. Depending upon how thick the clouds are by Tuesday morning, we may or may not be in store for another colorful sunrise then. I’m ready to take the drive back upcountry, to Kula now. I’ll have a better chance to check out the weather on the way, so if anything catches my eye on the way home, I’ll come back online and share that with you. Otherwise, I’ll be back early Tuesday morning with your next new weather narrative from paradise. I know I shouldn’t let you know this, but I’m starting to get a little bit excited with the prospect of this next inclement weather event. By the way, I definitely expect more snow to fall over the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island, over the next couple of days, so I’ve add that link…so we can keep an eye on that near 14,000 peak. I hope you have a great Monday night, and that you will join me here again on Tuesday! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: Women nowadays are three times more likely than those born a century ago to do what men have done for millennia — follow their father’s footsteps into his line of work, a newly announced study finds. One way or another, fathers and daughters have been paying more attention to each other, and daughters picked up job cues or assistance from dads, as more and more women entered the labor force, the research suggests.

Just under 6 percent of women born from 1909 to 1915 worked in their father’s occupation, while around 20 percent of women born in the mid-1970s do so (they are in their early 30s now), the researchers found. Some of this increase is just a result of women’s increased participation in the work force — women’s labor force participation has tripled in the past century.

However, economists Melinda Morrill of North Carolina State University and Judith Hellerstein of the University of Maryland, College Park, also were able to statistically pull out the impact of dad’s work on a daughter’s career choice.

They found that a significant amount of the probability that a woman will follow in her father’s occupational footsteps can be attributed just to the increased transmission of "occupation-specific human capital" between fathers and daughters. (They didn’t focus on mothers’ impact on daughters’ career choice because for many of the older women in their sample, their mothers were not in the labor force, though that could be a factor in the future.)

Human capital just refers to skills and experiences that help someone career-wise. Here are some of the possible ways a dad could pass this to his daughter, Hellerstein and Morrill say: teaching a daughter his trade; paying for his daughter to be trained in his trade; spending more time with his daughter and thereby showing the value of working in his field; making referrals to help his daughter get a job or training for a job; giving a daughter a job at his office or company to see if she likes it.

What about dads and sons? No similar increase over time was found in the percentage of sons pursuing careers in the same field as their fathers. That’s because men’s tendency to work has been steady over time and, presumably, the typical father-son relationship hasn’t changed much in this respect.

Interesting2: Without their distinctive livery, lots of little reef fish would look much the same. Color differentiates them, not shape. The blue-striped fangblenny, found in coral reefs in Indonesia and Australia, is different. What marks it out from every other fish known to man is that it can change color at will. The default color is brown, but the fangblenny can switch to yellow or a range of other bright hues to deceive other fish.

"Their repertoire of disguises appears to prevent or reduce detection by potential victims," says Queensland University marine biologist Karen Cheney. "They may also escape from predators by hiding in a large shoal."Cheney’s work, published in The Proceedings of the Royal Society, is important because the fangblenny is one of a kind in the fish world. Lizards use the same technique to hunt or hide, but the fangblenny is the only fish so far found to have that ability.

Without the skills of a chameleon, the fangblenny would be hard pressed to live as it does. It nibbles the dead scales of larger reef fish – a diet made possible by deceiving other fish into thinking that’s not what it’s about. A particularly clever trick is morphing into the colors of a juvenile cleaner wrasse. The wrasse lives a charmed life. It helps larger fish avoid potentially deadly infestations by nipping off the parasites that cling to them. In return for this service, it is left alone by much bigger fish.

Interesting3:  Leatherback turtles, the most widely distributed reptiles on Earth, are threatened with extinction themselves, in large part due to the carelessness of humans. A Dalhousie University professor addresses the threat of plastics to this endangered species. They survived the extinction of the dinosaurs. They’re descendants of one of the oldest family trees in history, spanning 100 million years.

But today leatherback turtles, the most widely distributed reptiles on Earth, are threatened with extinction themselves, in large part due to the carelessness of humans. We’ve seen reference to the dangers plastic poses to marine life, garbage that we humans directly and indirectly deposit in the oceans, but how clearly have we received the message? Not well enough according to a recent article in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin co-authored by Dalhousie University’s Mike James.

“We wanted to see if plastics ingestion in leatherbacks was hype or reality,” says Dr. James, senior species at risk biologist for Fisheries and Oceans Canada and adjunct professor with Dalhousie’s Department of Biology. “It was a monumental effort that looked back at necropsies over the last century from all over the world,” he explains. (Necropsies are post-mortem examinations performed on animals.)

“After reviewing the results of 371 necropsies since 1968, we discovered over one third of the turtles had ingested plastic.” Since leatherbacks prefer eating jellyfish, it’s widely believed they mistake bags or other plastics for their meals. Since jellyfish and marine debris concentrate where ocean water masses meet, leatherbacks feeding in these areas are vulnerable to ingesting plastic.

Once leatherbacks ingest plastic, thousands of spines lining the throat and esophagus make it nearly impossible to regurgitate. The plastic can lead to partial or even complete obstruction of the gastrointestinal tract, resulting in decreased digestive efficiency, energetic and reproductive costs and, for some, starvation. “Plastics ingestion doesn’t always cause death, but there are clearly health risks to the turtles,” says Dr. James. Fascinated by reptiles as a child, Dr. James developed a lifelong interest in turtles, from raising them as a kid, to his PhD research and now as a biologist and conservationist. He says there are simple ways to stop these ongoing threats.

“The frustrating, yet hopeful aspect is that humans can easily begin addressing the solution, without major lifestyle changes,” says Dr. James. “It’s as simple as reducing packaging and moving towards alternative, biodegradable materials and recycling.” Leatherback turtles are classified as critically endangered world-wide. The true population size is not precisely known, as only adult females come ashore for nesting in remote tropical locations. During the summer and fall, Canadian waters support the highest density of foraging leatherbacks in the North Atlantic.

Interesting4:  A herd of young birdlike dinosaurs met their death on the muddy margins of a lake some 90 million years ago, according to a team of Chinese and American paleontologists that excavated the site in the Gobi Desert in western Inner Mongolia. The Sudden sudden death of the herd in a mud trap provides a rare snapshot of social behavior. Composed entirely of juveniles of a single species of ornithomimid dinosaur (Sinornithomimus dongi), the herd suggests that immature individuals were left to fend for themselves when adults were preoccupied with nesting or brooding.

"There were no adults or hatchlings," said Paul Sereno, professor at the University of Chicago and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. "These youngsters were roaming around on their own," remarked Tan Lin, from the Department of Land and Resources of Inner Mongolia. Within an exquisite pair of the skeletons, prepared for display in Sereno’s lab and airlifted back to China in late February, preserve stomach stones and the animal’s’ last meals are preserved.

Sereno, Tan and Zhao Xijin, professor in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led the 2001 expedition that found the fossils. Team members also included David Varricchio of Montana State University (MSU), Jeffrey Wilson of the University of Michigan and Gabrielle Lyon of Project Exploration. "Finding a mired herd is exceedingly rare among living animals," said Varricchio, an assistant professor of paleontology at MSU. "The best examples are from hoofed mammals," such as water buffalo in Australia or feral horses in the American West, he said.

The first bones from the dinosaur herd were spotted by a Chinese geologist in 1978 at the base of a small hill in a desolate, windswept region of the Gobi Desert. Some 20 years later, a Sino-Japanese team excavated the first skeletons, naming the dinosaur Sinornithomimus ("Chinese bird mimic").

Interesting5:  Someone in the developing world – particularly in rural Africa – dies from a rabid dog bite every 10 minutes. But global elimination of this horrific disease appears to be possible, according to a team which includes scientists from McMaster University, Britain and the United States. In a paper in the current issue of PLoS Biology, they report their analysis of data on rabies transmission in two districts of rural Tanzania (Serengeti and Ngorongoro) and suggest that with "sustained, international commitment, global elimination of rabies from domestic dog populations, the most dangerous vector to humans, is a realistic goal."

Jonathan Dushoff, an assistant professor of biology at McMaster University, and a member of the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research, analyzed the data. "The paper provides important evidence that the elimination of canine rabies may be possible." Rabies is an acute viral encephalitis that is spread through the saliva of infected animals.

Human rabies deaths from domestic dogs are rare in North America, but the disease causes over 24,000 deaths a year in Africa, mostly in poor rural communities and, most often, in children. Globally, 55,000 people die annually from canine rabies.

During a rabies outbreak in northern Tanzania, the team of scientists was able to directly trace case-to-case transmission of rabies. From this data, they generated a detailed analysis of rabies transmission biology and found evidence for surprisingly low levels of transmission. The scientists also analyzed outbreak data from around the world and found the transmission of canine rabies has been inherently low throughout its global historic range, explaining the success of control efforts in developed countries.

Interesting6:  National Research Council claims US agencies and political leaders not getting the right information or guidance. America is woefully unprepared for climate change, and the government agencies charged with delivering the latest science to decision makers are not up to the task, a new report said today. The National Research Council, a policy advice centre that is part of the US National Academy of Sciences, said that government agencies and political leaders, concerned more than ever about climate change, were not getting the information or the guidance they needed.

"Many decision makers are experiencing or anticipating a new climate regime and are asking questions about climate change and potential responses to it that federal agencies are unprepared to answer," the council said in its report, Restructuring Federal Climate Research to Meet the Challenges of Climate Change. "Robust and effective responses to climate change demand a vastly improved body of scientific knowledge."

Interesting7:  The northeastern U.S. coast is likely to see the world’s biggest sea level rise from man-made global warming, a new study predicts. However much the oceans rise by the end of the century, add an extra 8 inches or so for New York, Boston and other spots along the coast from the mid-Atlantic to New England. That’s because of predicted changes in ocean currents, according to a study based on computer models published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

An extra 8 inches – on top of a possible 2 or 3 feet of sea rise globally by 2100 – is a big deal, especially when nor’easters and hurricanes hit, experts said. "It’s not just waterfront homes and wetlands that are at stake here," said Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, who wasn’t part of the study. "Those kinds of rises in sea level when placed on top of the storm surges we see today, put in jeopardy lots of infrastructure, including the New York subway system."

For years, scientists have talked about rising sea levels due to global warming – both from warm water expanding and the melt of ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica. Predictions for the average worldwide sea rise keep changing along with the rate of ice melt. Recently, more scientists are saying the situation has worsened so that a 3-foot rise in sea level by 2100 is becoming a common theme.

Interesting8:  People with companion animals are like people with companion humans: happier, healthier and longer-lived, says Melbourne researcher Tim Rogers. While the standard logic is that pet owners get out more, and so are fitter because they take more exercise, Rogers says it has more to do with the quality of the outing than simply the cardiovascular benefits of being at one end of a leash.

"Most researchers are now converging on the idea that it’s the sense of emotional closeness and support that pets provide that is behind their stress-busting power," he said. "It now appears that animal companions benefit our lives in much the same way as do human companions."

Simone Maher, a veterinarian with animal welfare group Royal Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), also has evidence that dogs can indeed be our best friends. Recent RSPCA research in Australia found that more than a third of people would sooner dump their partner than their pet.

"An astounding 86.8 per cent said they would choose their pet over their friends or flat-mate," Maher said. Only one third of 200 respondents to the survey said their partner understood them better than their pet did. "In fact, almost a quarter of respondents wished their partner was like their pet," she said.

Interesting9:  The International Space Station may be moved on Monday to avoid a possible collision with a piece of debris from a Russian satellite, NASA says. The danger comes just days after space station crew members took refuge in a docked Soyuz spacecraft due to the close pass of another piece of space junk.

Tracking data suggests the debris is a 10-centimetre portion of Russia’s Cosmos 1275, a military navigation satellite that was launched in 1981, says Gene Stansbery, NASA’s orbital debris program manager. Pieces of the satellite, which broke up not long after reaching orbit, have progressively lost altitude due to the drag of Earth’s atmosphere, so that they now come within the space station’s altitude, Stansbery says.

The Cosmos 1275 chunk will make its closest approach to the station at 0314 EDT (0714 GMT) on Tuesday. If there is a greater than 0.01% chance that debris will come within an imaginary box around the station that measures 25 by 25 by 0.75 km (with the 0.75 km being altitude), the space station will likely be moved to avoid it, says NASA spokesperson Kylie Clem.

The debris from Cosmos 1275 may pass within 0.8 kilometers of the station, according to US Strategic Command, a Department of Defense program that tracks orbital debris spanning at least 10 centimeters across and routinely calculates the risk of collisions with the space station. That is far closer than last week’s event, when a 13-centimetre-wide piece of debris from a spent satellite motor was predicted to come within about 4.5 km of the station.

But the probability of the debris making such a close approach is still unclear, because it is difficult to determine the exact orbits of space debris. If a maneuver is deemed necessary, the engines aboard the docked Soyuz capsule will be used to move the station to a lower altitude, beginning at 2154 EDT on Monday.

March 15-16, 2009 


Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Sunday afternoon: 

Lihue, Kauai – 74
Honolulu, Oahu – 78
Kaneohe, Oahu – 78
Kahului, Maui – 73
Hilo, Hawaii – 77
Kailua-kona – 83

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Sunday afternoon:

Kailua-kona – 80F
Molokai airport – 73

Haleakala Crater    – 34  (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 25  (near 14,000 feet on the Big Island)

Precipitation Totals – The following numbers represent the largest precipitation totals (inches) during the last 24 hours on each of the major islands, as of Sunday afternoon:

0.30 Kokee, Kauai
1.21 Ahuimanu Loop, Oahu
1.49 Molokai
0.12 Lanai
0.79 Kahoolawe
3.88 Puu Kukui, Maui
0.20 South Point, Big Island

Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing low pressure systems located to the northwest and north, which will open up into a light wind producing trough over the islands through Tuesday. Our winds gradually shift from the current south, to light and variable during this time frame.

Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with the Infrared Satellite Image of the islands to see all the clouds around the state during the day and night. This next image is one that gives close images of the islands only during the daytime hours, and is referred to as a Close-up visible image. This next image shows a larger view of the Pacific…giving perspective to the wider ranging cloud patterns in the Pacific Ocean. Finally, here’s a looping IR satellite image, making viewable the clouds around the islands 24 hours a day. To help you keep track of where any showers may be around the islands, here’s the latest animated radar image. 

Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 foot Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is the Haleakala Crater, which is near 10,000 feet in elevation. These two webcams are available during the daylight hours here in the islands…and when there’s a big moon rising just after sunset for an hour or two! Plus, during the nights and early mornings you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise too…depending upon weather conditions.

 Aloha Paragraphs

   Rocky…along the south Maui coast
   Photo Credit: flickr.com

A shower and wind producing low is giving way to a trough near Kauai…with the recent gusty Kona winds shifting to light and variable breezes. The low pressure center that moved by to our north this weekend, is opening up into an elongated trough of low pressure. Here’s a weather map so you can check out the location of that low pressure system to our NW. Conditions are becoming less and windy, and definitely more sunny. The NWS has pared back its notices across the marine environment Sunday evening. The only two left, which apply to the mountainous areas, are a wind advisory for the gusty winds atop the Haleakala Crater on Maui…and a high wind warning for the tall mountains on the Big Island. Winds will become light and variable, or lightly from the southeast during the first half of the upcoming work week, with trade winds returning Wednesday.

A rather abrupt clearing took place Sunday afternoon, as the low pressure system lost its influence on our islands. This low will be losing its influence further going into Monday. It will however leave a trailing trough of low pressure, keeping our air mass somewhat shower prone into the new week. We’ll stop seeing the gusty Kona winds however, which will be replaced with lighter breezes. These daytime breezes Monday, aided by the daytime heating of the islands…will spark afternoon cloudy periods. These convective cumulus clouds will most effectively gather over the mountains…leading to localized showers. As the trade winds return by mid-week, the emphasis for showers will migrate back over to the windward coasts and slopes.

We’re shifting out of the influence of the Kona low, and edging into a convective weather pattern…before ending up with the trade winds later this coming week.  Our precipitation pattern has brought us showers the last several days, carried our way on the locally strong and gusty Kona winds. Here’s a satellite image, so you can see what’s left in terms of the clouds around the state. While we’re looking at these types of pictures, here’s a looping radar image, so you can keep track of where the showers are falling across the Aloha state overnight into Monday. There’s a large pool of showers to the southeast of the Big Island…which may move up over that Island.

It’s early Sunday evening here in Kula, Maui, as I begin writing this last part of today’s narrative. What a big difference we saw in our weather this afternoon! The low pressure system finally let us off the hook, so to speak. I just got back from a nice sunny walk with my neighbors. They are so friendly, and wave their hands to almost anyone driving or walking by. I’m learning from them, as I’m not so naturally friendly. I like people, but often just keep my head down when a car drives by, rather than glancing at them and saying hi. At any rate, it’s so nice out there, that I want to get back out and enjoy the warm end of the day. I may come back later and give my final opinion of today’s weather, which was great! ~~~ Actually, before I forget to tell you, it was one of my favorite days up here in a long time!  It was foggy, showery, with cool breezes. I just hung-out and looked out my windows like crazy, soaking in the adorable grayness. Don’t get me wrong, I love the sunny days too, it’s just that I’m often at work when these particularly winterized (tropically speaking) days happen…I miss many of them. Now then, I’m going out to see the sun, to listen to the wind chimes, to maybe practice being more friendly! ~~~ I’m about ready to bed down, get warm and read for a little while before dozing off. I just looked at the statistics for this website, according to the google adsense report, there have been 19,951 page impressions Sunday, and an incredible 424 clicks on the google ads for this website, wow! I want to thank all of you who are in support of my weather efforts here in the Hawaiian Islands, those numbers are as of 745pm Sunday evening. Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: With origins dating back over 4,000 years, green tea has long been a popular beverage in Asian culture, and is increasingly gaining popularity in the United States. And while ancient Chinese and Japanese medicine believed green tea consumption could cure disease and heal wounds, recent scientific studies are beginning to establish the potential health benefits of drinking green tea, especially in weight loss, heart health, and cancer prevention.

A study recently published in the Journal of Periodontology, uncovered yet another benefit of green tea consumption. Researchers found that routine intake of green tea may also help promote healthy teeth and gums. The study analyzed the periodontal health of 940 men, and found that those who regularly drank green tea had superior periodontal health than subjects that consumed less green tea.

"It has been long speculated that green tea possesses a host of health benefits," said study author Dr. Yoshihiro Shimazaki of Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan. "And since many of us enjoy green tea on a regular basis, my colleagues and I were eager to investigate the impact of green tea consumption on periodontal health, especially considering the escalating emphasis on the connection between periodontal health and overall health."

Male participants aged 49 through 59 were examined on three indicators of periodontal disease: periodontal pocket depth (PD), clinical attachment loss (CAL) of gum tissue, and bleeding on probing (BOP) of the gum tissue. Researchers observed that for every one cup of green tea consumed per day, there was a decrease in all three indicators, therefore signifying a lower instance of periodontal disease in those subjects who regularly drank green tea.

Green tea’s ability to help reduce symptoms of periodontal disease may be due to the presence of the antioxidant catechin. Previous research has demonstrated antioxidants’ ability to reduce inflammation in the body, and the indicators of periodontal disease measured in this study, PD, CAL and BOP, suggest the existence of an inflammatory response to periodontal bacteria in the mouth.

By interfering with the body’s inflammatory response to periodontal bacteria, green tea may actually help promote periodontal health, and ward off further disease. Periodontal disease is a chronic inflammatory disease that affects the gums and bone supporting the teeth, and has been associated with the progression of other diseases such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Interesting2:  An analysis of the engineering and economics for a solar water-heating system shows it to have a payback period of just two years, according to researchers in India. They report, in the International Journal of Global Energy Issues, on the success of the 1000-liter system operating at a university hostel. The current focus in the developed world is on advanced technological approaches to alternative energy sources, such as photovoltaic cells for solar power and harnessing wind and wave with elaborate systems to generate electricity.

However, the cost of such systems may be prohibitive for some applications in the developing world. They also often ignore the fact that a mundane process such as heating water might best be carried out using direct heat from the sun rather than including a waste energy-conversion step.

Vivek Khambalkar, Sharashchandra Gadge, and Dhiraj S. Karale at the Dr Panjabrao Deshmukh Agricultural University, in Maharashtra, India, explain how they have evaluated the various costs and benefits involved in solar hot-water production. They have compared solar hot-water production per liter with electrical energy approaches and found that solar heating is 57 percent of the internal rate of return.

"Solar energy is the only renewable energy source that has wide range of uses with commercial viability. Solar energy provide water heating, air heating and electricity through various modes of applications. The use of solar energy for thermal purposes is the most cost-effective way of utilizing the resource. A solar water heating system satisfies the need of warm water," the researchers explain.

Importantly, the payback time for the initial investment in equipment and installation is just two years. This compares very well to a photovoltaic system used for electricity generation if it were only being used to heat water. Photovoltaics have a payback period of several at least a decade and sometimes double that.

Interesting3:  A new University of Florida study could help resolve a long-standing debate in shark paleontology: From which line of species did the modern great white shark evolve? For the last 150 years, some paleontologists have concluded the great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias, is a smaller relative of the line that produced Carcharodon megalodon, the largest carnivorous fish known.

Other paleontologists disagree, arguing the great white shark evolved instead from the broad-toothed mako shark. The second group contends megalodon, which grew to a length of 60 feet, should have its genus name switched to Carcharocles to reflect its different ancestry.

The study in the March 12 issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology falls squarely into the mako camp. It concludes megalodon and modern white sharks are much more distantly related than paleontologists initially believed.

"I think that this specimen will clarify things," said lead author Dana Ehret, a vertebrate paleontology graduate student at the Florida Museum of Natural History located on the UF campus. "When we only have isolated teeth to describe, it’s very hard to come to a definitive conclusion."

The study is based on a remarkably well preserved 4- to 5-million-year-old fossil from Peru of an early white shark species: a complete jaw with 222 teeth intact and 45 vertebrae. Most ancient shark species are known only from isolated teeth. Based on tooth size and analysis of growth rings within the vertebrae, the shark was about 20 years old and 17 to 18 feet long, a size in the range of modern white sharks.

Having the teeth in place allows researchers to see important distinguishing characteristics that help determine a fossil’s genus and species, such as whether a tooth curves toward the outside of the jaw or its midline, Ehret said. He believes the fossil belongs to a white shark species closely related to Isurus hastalis, a broad-toothed mako shark that probably grew to 27 feet long and lived 9 million to 10 million years ago.

Interesting4:  Dust blown off the continents and deposited in the open ocean is an important source of nutrients for marine phytoplankton, the tiny algae that are the foundation of the ocean food web. But new findings show that some sources of dust also carry toxic elements that can kill marine phytoplankton. Researchers discovered the toxic effects during a study of how phytoplankton respond to atmospheric aerosols deposited in the northern Red Sea.

The results will be published in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) the week of March 9, 2009. "This is the first time that toxicity from atmospheric aerosols has been reported for the ocean system," said first author Adina Paytan, an associate researcher in the Insitute of Marine Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"Oceanographers have always thought of dust deposition as good for phytoplankton, because it provides nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and iron. But we know air pollution has negative effects on the terrestrial side, and we need to think about the effects of pollutants that may be deposited in the oceans," she said.

Paytan and her coworkers collected aerosols on filters, incubated the samples with seawater, and observed the responses of phytoplankton. They found that the results depended on the wind direction. Aerosols collected from air masses originating over Europe stimulated phytoplankton growth, whereas aerosols from air originating over Africa, which carried dust from the Sahara Desert, had the opposite effect.

Aerosols from both sources supplied key nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, but the Sahara sources also contained high concentrations of copper. "When we added the Sahara dust, the phytoplankton died within 24 hours," Paytan said. "We found that copper was really high in those samples, so we suspected that copper was causing the toxicity."

Interesting5:  A new dating method has found that "Peking Man" is around 200,000 years older than previously thought, suggesting he somehow adapted to the cold of a mild glacial period. A dating method developed by a Purdue University researcher allowed a more accurate determination of the age of the Zhoukoudian, China, site of remains of Homo erectus, commonly known as "Peking Man." The site was found to be 680,000-780,000 years old.

Earlier estimates put the age at 230,000-500,000 years old. Darryl Granger, the Purdue professor of earth and atmospheric sciences who developed the dating method, co-led the study with Guanjun Shen of China’s Nanjing Normal University. They analyzed four stone tools and six sediment samples from the site.

"This was the first dating of this kind to be used in an early hominid site in China," Granger said. "Many of the existing data methods rely on the availability of volcanic rock, which the Zhoukoudian site does not have. This method provides a new tool to provide insight into places where dating was previously limited."

Susan C. Antón, associate professor in the Center for the Study of Human Origins at New York University said this discovery indicates "Peking Man" was somehow behaviorally able to cope with the cold environment. "There is evidence that Homo erectus had physically adapted to the cold, but they probably also had to be doing something in terms of behavior to handle the cold of a glacial period in northern China," she said.

"There isn’t good evidence of fire or any kind of skins or clothing, but evidence of such things doesn’t last long and wouldn’t be recorded particularly well in the archeological record. It doesn’t mean they didn’t have them, but we don’t have a definitive answer."Homo erectus is considered to be the ancestor species to humans and the first species that left Africa and moved into Asia. The "Peking Man" site, discovered in the late 1920s, was among the first found for Homo erectus and shaped the thoughts on the age and behavior of the species, Antón said.

Interesting6:  Almost 800 years after farmers in the village of Gouda in Holland first brought a creamy new cheese to market, scientists in Germany say they have cracked the secret of Gouda’s good taste. They have identified the key protein subunits, or peptides, responsible for the complex, long-lasting flavor of the popular cheese. That discovery could lead to development of more flavorful cheeses and other dairy products.

Their study is in the current issue of ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a bi-weekly publication. Thomas Hofmann, Simone Toelstede and Andreas Dunkel note that the scientists have tried for years to pinpoint the natural molecules responsible for the long-lasting taste and wonderful texture of Gouda cheese.

It develops during the aging or ripening stage, with aged Gouda more full and complex, with longer-lasting flavor, than the younger version. Cheese lovers prize this characteristic taste, known as the "kokumi sensation." The scientists solved the age-old mystery by applying a molecular sensory science approach.

It combined mass spectroscopy and other high-tech analytical instruments and sophisticated sensory tools to identify six gamma-glutamyl peptides that appear to be mainly responsible for the kokumi sensation in Gouda. This knowledge could be used to enhance the flavor of dairy products by technological means, the researchers say.

Interesting7:  The advent of modern appliances such as washing machines and refrigerators had a profound impact on 20th Century society, according to a new Université de Montréal study. Plug-in conveniences transformed women’s lives and enabled them to enter the workforce, says Professor Emanuela Cardia, from the Department of Economics. Within a short time-span, household technology became accessible to the majority.

In the late 1910s, a refrigerator sold for $1,600 and 26 years later such appliances could be purchased for $170. Access to electric stoves, washing machines and vacuum cleaners was also generalized. "These innovations changed the lives of women," says Professor Cardia.

"Although it wasn’t a revolution per se, the arrival of this technology in households had an important impact on the workforce and the economy." Professor Cardia based her research on more than 3,000 censuses conducted between 1940 and 1950, from thousands of American households, across urban and rural areas.

"We calculated that women who loaded their stove with coal saved 30 minutes everyday with an electric stove," says Cardia. "The result is that women flooded the workforce. In 1900, five percent of married women had jobs. In 1980, that number jumped to 51 percent." In 1913, the vacuum cleaner became available, in 1916 it was the washing machine, in 1918 it was the refrigerator, in 1947 the freezer, and in 1973 the microwave was on the market.

All of these technologies had an impact on home life, but none had a stronger impact than running water. "We often forget that running water is a century-old innovation in North America, and it is even more recent in Europe. Of all innovations, it’s the one with the most important impact," says Cardia.

In 1890, 25 percent of American households had running water and eight percent had electricity. In 1950, 83 percent had running water and 94% had electricity. According to Cardia, in 1900, a woman spent 58 hours per week on household chores. In 1975, it was 18 hours.

Interesting8:  The moon has been hiding the scars of its violent, asteroid-filled past. Most surveys of lunar impact craters have used photos, but Herbert Frey of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, wanted to know if there were any old craters buried beneath younger ones. So he studied elevation mapping data from the Clementine mission in the 1990s. He also used simulations to identify impact signatures, such as a roughly circular crater with a thin crust and a thicker rim.

This approach uncovered 150 craters more than 300 kilometers wide instead of 45. Frey is now trying to work out the age of the newly found craters. If they are the same age as the others, this would support the idea that asteroids bombarded the inner solar system for a particularly intense period about 4 billion years ago. Some researchers think that life may have existed before this bombardment, but if so, its survival now seems less likely, says Andrew Valley of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

"The probability that early primitive life, if it existed, could find refuge, even in sediments beneath the ocean would be reduced," he says. Other researchers, however, disagree, arguing that life could have survived the barrage of impacts deep underground. Frey, who will present the work at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Woodlands, Texas, later this month, expects more subtle features to be discovered when the Asian lunar probes release further data and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter launches in May.

March 14-15, 2009 


Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Saturday afternoon: 

Lihue, Kauai – 71
Honolulu, Oahu – 73
Kaneohe, Oahu – 75
Kahului, Maui – 71
Hilo, Hawaii – 79
Kailua-kona – 82

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 5 p.m. Saturday evening:

Hilo, Hawaii – 75F
Molokai airport – 68

Haleakala Crater    – 36  (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 25  (near 14,000 feet on the Big Island)

Precipitation Totals – The following numbers represent the largest precipitation totals (inches) during the last 24 hours on each of the major islands, as of Saturday afternoon:

0.89 Kokee, Kauai
4.72 Maunawili, Oahu
0.53 Molokai
0.22 Lanai
0.47 Kahoolawe
0.95 Puu Kukui, Maui
0.07 Kahua Ranch, Big Island

Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing high pressure systems located to the northwest and northeast of the islands. Meanwhile, we have a low pressure system located just to the north of Kauai, moving southward into the area west of that island. Our winds will be southwest to south Saturday night and Sunday…locally strong and gusty.

Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with the Infrared Satellite Image of the islands to see all the clouds around the state during the day and night. This next image is one that gives close images of the islands only during the daytime hours, and is referred to as a Close-up visible image. This next image shows a larger view of the Pacific…giving perspective to the wider ranging cloud patterns in the Pacific Ocean. Finally, here’s a looping IR satellite image, making viewable the clouds around the islands 24 hours a day. To help you keep track of where any showers may be around the islands, here’s the latest animated radar image. 

Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 foot Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is the Haleakala Crater, which is near 10,000 feet in elevation. These two webcams are available during the daylight hours here in the islands…and when there’s a big moon rising just after sunset for an hour or two! Plus, during the nights and early mornings you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise too…depending upon weather conditions.

 Aloha Paragraphs

   Talking about guys, petting a dog, or splitting the sandwichs, whatever…Waikiki
   Photo Credit: flickr.com

A counterclockwise rotating low pressure system is just to the northwest of Kauai Saturday night…which will move to the west of that island into Sunday. As a result of the close proximity, and influence of this low, we have several NWS issued advisories active. We have a small craft wind advisory in force over all coastal and channel waters. We have a high surf advisory for the north facing shores of all the islands…as rough seas pound those beaches. Finally, the strong and gusty winds atop the mountains on the Big island and Maui, keep a wind advisory alive up there. The winds this Saturday night into Sunday will vary in strength, depending on location…coming in from the southwest to southerly Kona direction. Here’s a weather map so you can check out the location of that Kona low pressure system. Winds will become light and variable during the first half of the upcoming work week, with trade winds returning around Thursday or Friday.

This unusual low pressure system, will have an unsettled influence on our local weather, particularly from Kauai to Maui…and less so over the Big Island. Cloudy areas brought in on the gusty Kona winds, generated by this low, will bring showers at times to all the islands, although as mentioned, due to the greater distance from the low…less so for the Big Island. The cold air aloft, associated with the upper parts of this low pressure area, have destabilized our overlying atmosphere. This has lead to a few heavier showers…with even a thunderstorm developing here and there. This low pressure system will depart after the weekend, but leave a trailing trough of low pressure behind, keeping our air mass shower prone into the new week…mostly during the afternoon hours.

The atmosphere continues to be ripe for showers, some of which will continue to be rather generous…especially on Kauai, Oahu and Maui.  The lion’s share of rainfall continues to be focused along the leeward sides of the islands, which is typical when we have southwest to south Kona winds blowing. Here’s a satellite image, so you can see what’s happening in terms of the clouds around the state. While we’re looking at these types of pictures, here’s a looping radar image, so you can keep track of where showers are falling across the Aloha state going into Sunday.

It’s early Saturday evening here in Kula, Maui, as I begin writing this last part of today’s narrative. Besides all the locally gusty Kona winds, and the periodic showers, the other place that we’ll find inclement conditions, will be along our north shores. The large surf generated by this low pressure system, have been really giving a good pounding to those beaches. As mentioned in the first paragraph above, a high surf advisory remains in effect Saturday night. Please be careful when going near the ocean in these areas! This very rough surf will gradually be dropping as we move into Sunday. By the way, the other shores, those on the leeward south and west facing beaches, are seeing locally gusty onshore Kona winds, with rough and choppy ocean conditions there too!

Looking ahead into the new week ahead, we’ll have a whole new set of weather conditions to contend with…with lighter winds and a overlying trough of low pressure. We will find light and variable winds taking their place over the islands as we begin the new week, as soon as this low pressure system dissipates. The resultant weather conditions are often called a convective weather pattern. We typically find clear and cool mornings, giving way to locally cloudy and showery conditions during the afternoon hours…especially over the upcountry sections of the islands. This would be enhanced the most over the larger islands of Maui and the Big Island starting Monday through mid-week or Thursday. The trade winds are expected back in our area by about Friday, which would bring us a more typical trade wind weather pattern, with showers falling along the windward coasts and slopes again then.

I went to see a new film Friday evening after work, called Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009). This film didn’t get all that favorable of reviews from the critics, something like C+ at the best. This film is based on a popular video game franchise, in which a female fighter embarks on a quest for justice. Some of the key words used to describe this film are: action adventure and science fiction fantasy. We find warriors converging on the streets of Bangkok…preparing for the ultimate battle of terror versus beauty, light versus darkness, and good versus evil. I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this film, which I must say, didn’t surprise me all that much. I seem to be rather easily swayed to the positive side, when there’s lots of macho action being displayed. The theatre was anything but full, with just a handful of couples sitting there huddled together, but I’m sure rather enjoying the action. Here’s a trailer for Street Fighter, just in case you might have some curiosity about what kind of film that draws me in on a Friday night…at least last night.

It’s been a windy day upcountry, here on Maui, as it has been in other areas Saturday! This was caused by the southwest to southerly winds revolving around the southern side of this near-by low pressure system. We call these Kona winds, because they bring showers and gusty winds to the leeward sections. Kona is a polynesian word meaning leeward, south and west facing sides. My wind chimes have been sounding off loudly all day, and remain in motion Saturday evening. Looking out the windows of my weather tower I see all kinds of showery clouds down towards Kihei, and Lahaina. Here in Kula, we’ve had a few light sprinkles, but nothing heavy at all. It wouldn’t surprise me to see some of those showers spreading further up the slopes of the Haleakala Crater as the sun gets lower, and into the night. ~~~ I was just outside on my weather deck sipping on a glass of Schramsberg Mirabelle, brut rose. A brief light shower forced me back into the tower, where I decided to come back online and say hi once more today. I hope you have a great Saturday night, wherever that is, and whatever you happen to be doing with it. ~~~ Just for some overview in terms of numbers Saturday, according to adsense, there have been 20,153 page impressions on this site, with 297 clicks on those small google ads, that some of you check out when visiting HWT. This numberical report is brought to you as of 845pm Saturday evening. ~~~ The point that I want to make is that I greatly appreciate your readership, this is a wonderful tool that we’ve put together. With your reading interest in the weather, and my interest in writing, well, it’s perfect!  Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: With origins dating back over 4,000 years, green tea has long been a popular beverage in Asian culture, and is increasingly gaining popularity in the United States. And while ancient Chinese and Japanese medicine believed green tea consumption could cure disease and heal wounds, recent scientific studies are beginning to establish the potential health benefits of drinking green tea, especially in weight loss, heart health, and cancer prevention.

A study recently published in the Journal of Periodontology, uncovered yet another benefit of green tea consumption. Researchers found that routine intake of green tea may also help promote healthy teeth and gums. The study analyzed the periodontal health of 940 men, and found that those who regularly drank green tea had superior periodontal health than subjects that consumed less green tea.

"It has been long speculated that green tea possesses a host of health benefits," said study author Dr. Yoshihiro Shimazaki of Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan. "And since many of us enjoy green tea on a regular basis, my colleagues and I were eager to investigate the impact of green tea consumption on periodontal health, especially considering the escalating emphasis on the connection between periodontal health and overall health."

Male participants aged 49 through 59 were examined on three indicators of periodontal disease: periodontal pocket depth (PD), clinical attachment loss (CAL) of gum tissue, and bleeding on probing (BOP) of the gum tissue. Researchers observed that for every one cup of green tea consumed per day, there was a decrease in all three indicators, therefore signifying a lower instance of periodontal disease in those subjects who regularly drank green tea.

Green tea’s ability to help reduce symptoms of periodontal disease may be due to the presence of the antioxidant catechin. Previous research has demonstrated antioxidants’ ability to reduce inflammation in the body, and the indicators of periodontal disease measured in this study, PD, CAL and BOP, suggest the existence of an inflammatory response to periodontal bacteria in the mouth.

By interfering with the body’s inflammatory response to periodontal bacteria, green tea may actually help promote periodontal health, and ward off further disease. Periodontal disease is a chronic inflammatory disease that affects the gums and bone supporting the teeth, and has been associated with the progression of other diseases such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Interesting2:  An analysis of the engineering and economics for a solar water-heating system shows it to have a payback period of just two years, according to researchers in India. They report, in the International Journal of Global Energy Issues, on the success of the 1000-liter system operating at a university hostel. The current focus in the developed world is on advanced technological approaches to alternative energy sources, such as photovoltaic cells for solar power and harnessing wind and wave with elaborate systems to generate electricity.

However, the cost of such systems may be prohibitive for some applications in the developing world. They also often ignore the fact that a mundane process such as heating water might best be carried out using direct heat from the sun rather than including a waste energy-conversion step.

Vivek Khambalkar, Sharashchandra Gadge, and Dhiraj S. Karale at the Dr Panjabrao Deshmukh Agricultural University, in Maharashtra, India, explain how they have evaluated the various costs and benefits involved in solar hot-water production. They have compared solar hot-water production per liter with electrical energy approaches and found that solar heating is 57 percent of the internal rate of return.

"Solar energy is the only renewable energy source that has wide range of uses with commercial viability. Solar energy provide water heating, air heating and electricity through various modes of applications. The use of solar energy for thermal purposes is the most cost-effective way of utilizing the resource. A solar water heating system satisfies the need of warm water," the researchers explain.

Importantly, the payback time for the initial investment in equipment and installation is just two years. This compares very well to a photovoltaic system used for electricity generation if it were only being used to heat water. Photovoltaics have a payback period of several at least a decade and sometimes double that.

Interesting3:  A new University of Florida study could help resolve a long-standing debate in shark paleontology: From which line of species did the modern great white shark evolve? For the last 150 years, some paleontologists have concluded the great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias, is a smaller relative of the line that produced Carcharodon megalodon, the largest carnivorous fish known.

Other paleontologists disagree, arguing the great white shark evolved instead from the broad-toothed mako shark. The second group contends megalodon, which grew to a length of 60 feet, should have its genus name switched to Carcharocles to reflect its different ancestry.

The study in the March 12 issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology falls squarely into the mako camp. It concludes megalodon and modern white sharks are much more distantly related than paleontologists initially believed.

"I think that this specimen will clarify things," said lead author Dana Ehret, a vertebrate paleontology graduate student at the Florida Museum of Natural History located on the UF campus. "When we only have isolated teeth to describe, it’s very hard to come to a definitive conclusion."

The study is based on a remarkably well preserved 4- to 5-million-year-old fossil from Peru of an early white shark species: a complete jaw with 222 teeth intact and 45 vertebrae. Most ancient shark species are known only from isolated teeth. Based on tooth size and analysis of growth rings within the vertebrae, the shark was about 20 years old and 17 to 18 feet long, a size in the range of modern white sharks.

Having the teeth in place allows researchers to see important distinguishing characteristics that help determine a fossil’s genus and species, such as whether a tooth curves toward the outside of the jaw or its midline, Ehret said. He believes the fossil belongs to a white shark species closely related to Isurus hastalis, a broad-toothed mako shark that probably grew to 27 feet long and lived 9 million to 10 million years ago.

Interesting4:  Dust blown off the continents and deposited in the open ocean is an important source of nutrients for marine phytoplankton, the tiny algae that are the foundation of the ocean food web. But new findings show that some sources of dust also carry toxic elements that can kill marine phytoplankton. Researchers discovered the toxic effects during a study of how phytoplankton respond to atmospheric aerosols deposited in the northern Red Sea.

The results will be published in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) the week of March 9, 2009. "This is the first time that toxicity from atmospheric aerosols has been reported for the ocean system," said first author Adina Paytan, an associate researcher in the Insitute of Marine Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"Oceanographers have always thought of dust deposition as good for phytoplankton, because it provides nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and iron. But we know air pollution has negative effects on the terrestrial side, and we need to think about the effects of pollutants that may be deposited in the oceans," she said.

Paytan and her coworkers collected aerosols on filters, incubated the samples with seawater, and observed the responses of phytoplankton. They found that the results depended on the wind direction. Aerosols collected from air masses originating over Europe stimulated phytoplankton growth, whereas aerosols from air originating over Africa, which carried dust from the Sahara Desert, had the opposite effect.

Aerosols from both sources supplied key nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, but the Sahara sources also contained high concentrations of copper. "When we added the Sahara dust, the phytoplankton died within 24 hours," Paytan said. "We found that copper was really high in those samples, so we suspected that copper was causing the toxicity."

Interesting5:  A new dating method has found that "Peking Man" is around 200,000 years older than previously thought, suggesting he somehow adapted to the cold of a mild glacial period. A dating method developed by a Purdue University researcher allowed a more accurate determination of the age of the Zhoukoudian, China, site of remains of Homo erectus, commonly known as "Peking Man." The site was found to be 680,000-780,000 years old.

Earlier estimates put the age at 230,000-500,000 years old. Darryl Granger, the Purdue professor of earth and atmospheric sciences who developed the dating method, co-led the study with Guanjun Shen of China’s Nanjing Normal University. They analyzed four stone tools and six sediment samples from the site.

"This was the first dating of this kind to be used in an early hominid site in China," Granger said. "Many of the existing data methods rely on the availability of volcanic rock, which the Zhoukoudian site does not have. This method provides a new tool to provide insight into places where dating was previously limited."

Susan C. Antón, associate professor in the Center for the Study of Human Origins at New York University said this discovery indicates "Peking Man" was somehow behaviorally able to cope with the cold environment. "There is evidence that Homo erectus had physically adapted to the cold, but they probably also had to be doing something in terms of behavior to handle the cold of a glacial period in northern China," she said.

"There isn’t good evidence of fire or any kind of skins or clothing, but evidence of such things doesn’t last long and wouldn’t be recorded particularly well in the archeological record. It doesn’t mean they didn’t have them, but we don’t have a definitive answer."Homo erectus is considered to be the ancestor species to humans and the first species that left Africa and moved into Asia. The "Peking Man" site, discovered in the late 1920s, was among the first found for Homo erectus and shaped the thoughts on the age and behavior of the species, Antón said.

Interesting6:  Almost 800 years after farmers in the village of Gouda in Holland first brought a creamy new cheese to market, scientists in Germany say they have cracked the secret of Gouda’s good taste. They have identified the key protein subunits, or peptides, responsible for the complex, long-lasting flavor of the popular cheese. That discovery could lead to development of more flavorful cheeses and other dairy products.

Their study is in the current issue of ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a bi-weekly publication. Thomas Hofmann, Simone Toelstede and Andreas Dunkel note that the scientists have tried for years to pinpoint the natural molecules responsible for the long-lasting taste and wonderful texture of Gouda cheese.

It develops during the aging or ripening stage, with aged Gouda more full and complex, with longer-lasting flavor, than the younger version. Cheese lovers prize this characteristic taste, known as the "kokumi sensation." The scientists solved the age-old mystery by applying a molecular sensory science approach.

It combined mass spectroscopy and other high-tech analytical instruments and sophisticated sensory tools to identify six gamma-glutamyl peptides that appear to be mainly responsible for the kokumi sensation in Gouda. This knowledge could be used to enhance the flavor of dairy products by technological means, the researchers say.

Interesting7:  The advent of modern appliances such as washing machines and refrigerators had a profound impact on 20th Century society, according to a new Université de Montréal study. Plug-in conveniences transformed women’s lives and enabled them to enter the workforce, says Professor Emanuela Cardia, from the Department of Economics. Within a short time-span, household technology became accessible to the majority.

In the late 1910s, a refrigerator sold for $1,600 and 26 years later such appliances could be purchased for $170. Access to electric stoves, washing machines and vacuum cleaners was also generalized. "These innovations changed the lives of women," says Professor Cardia.

"Although it wasn’t a revolution per se, the arrival of this technology in households had an important impact on the workforce and the economy." Professor Cardia based her research on more than 3,000 censuses conducted between 1940 and 1950, from thousands of American households, across urban and rural areas.

"We calculated that women who loaded their stove with coal saved 30 minutes everyday with an electric stove," says Cardia. "The result is that women flooded the workforce. In 1900, five percent of married women had jobs. In 1980, that number jumped to 51 percent." In 1913, the vacuum cleaner became available, in 1916 it was the washing machine, in 1918 it was the refrigerator, in 1947 the freezer, and in 1973 the microwave was on the market.

All of these technologies had an impact on home life, but none had a stronger impact than running water. "We often forget that running water is a century-old innovation in North America, and it is even more recent in Europe. Of all innovations, it’s the one with the most important impact," says Cardia.

In 1890, 25 percent of American households had running water and eight percent had electricity. In 1950, 83 percent had running water and 94% had electricity. According to Cardia, in 1900, a woman spent 58 hours per week on household chores. In 1975, it was 18 hours.

Interesting8:  The moon has been hiding the scars of its violent, asteroid-filled past. Most surveys of lunar impact craters have used photos, but Herbert Frey of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, wanted to know if there were any old craters buried beneath younger ones. So he studied elevation mapping data from the Clementine mission in the 1990s. He also used simulations to identify impact signatures, such as a roughly circular crater with a thin crust and a thicker rim.

This approach uncovered 150 craters more than 300 kilometers wide instead of 45. Frey is now trying to work out the age of the newly found craters. If they are the same age as the others, this would support the idea that asteroids bombarded the inner solar system for a particularly intense period about 4 billion years ago. Some researchers think that life may have existed before this bombardment, but if so, its survival now seems less likely, says Andrew Valley of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

"The probability that early primitive life, if it existed, could find refuge, even in sediments beneath the ocean would be reduced," he says. Other researchers, however, disagree, arguing that life could have survived the barrage of impacts deep underground. Frey, who will present the work at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Woodlands, Texas, later this month, expects more subtle features to be discovered when the Asian lunar probes release further data and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter launches in May.

March 13-14, 2009 


Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Friday afternoon: 

Lihue, Kauai – 69
Honolulu, Oahu – 76
Kaneohe, Oahu – 75
Kahului, Maui – 76
Hilo, Hawaii – 69
Kailua-kona – 76

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Friday afternoon:

Honolulu, Oahu – 75F
Hilo, Hawaii – 64

Haleakala Crater    – 43  (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 27  (near 14,000 feet on the Big Island)

Precipitation Totals – The following numbers represent the largest precipitation totals (inches) during the last 24 hours on each of the major islands, as of Friday afternoon:

0.81 Kokee, Kauai
0.23 Schofield Barracks, Oahu
0.08 Molokai
0.00 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
2.16 Kaupo Gap, Maui
0.93 Pahala, Big Island

Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing high pressure systems located to the northwest and northeast of the islands. Meanwhile, we have a low pressure system to the northwest. Our winds will be NW to west Saturday and Sunday.

Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with the Infrared Satellite Image of the islands to see all the clouds around the state during the day and night. This next image is one that gives close images of the islands only during the daytime hours, and is referred to as a Close-up visible image. This next image shows a larger view of the Pacific…giving perspective to the wider ranging cloud patterns in the Pacific Ocean. Finally, here’s a looping IR satellite image, making viewable the clouds around the islands 24 hours a day. To help you keep track of where any showers may be around the islands, here’s the latest animated radar image. 

Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 foot Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is the Haleakala Crater, which is near 10,000 feet in elevation. These two webcams are available during the daylight hours here in the islands…and when there’s a big moon rising just after sunset for an hour or two! Plus, during the nights and early mornings you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise too…depending upon weather conditions.

 Aloha Paragraphs

   Birds eye view of Waikiki Beach
   Photo Credit: flickr.com

The northwest winds associated with a low pressure system to our north…will gradually turn more westerly this weekend. A small craft wind advisory remains in force over all coastal and channel waters. We have a high surf warning for the north and east facing shores from Kauai to Maui, with a high surf advisory for the Big Island…as rough seas will pound those beaches. These heavy seas will cause surges to enter into the Kahului and Hilo harbors. Finally, the breezy winds atop the mountains on the Big island, make a wind advisory necessary until Sunday at 6am. The winds this weekend will vary in strength and direction, coming in from a more unusual NW or even west to WSW direction. Winds will become light and variable during the first half of the upcoming work week, with trade winds returning thereafter.

The rather deep, late winter low pressure system is now north of the islands, keeping our overlying atmosphere unsettled…with off and on showers locally. This low pressure area, which exists both aloft and at the surface, is capable of bringing us a few showers. If the cold air aloft, associated with this upper low pressure cell, arrive as expected we could find a few heavier showers…or even a thunderstorm developing here and there into Saturday. This low pressure system will depart after the weekend, but leave a trailing trough of low pressure behind…keeping our air mass unsettled into the new week.

As the winds become more NW and westerly and get lighter…or weather will warm up, at least compared to the chilly conditions that the recent northerly winds brought us. Shower activity dropped off after yesterday’s cold front dropped to the south of the Big Island. The main influence, behind the front, as been the northwest breezes, which will continue a while longer, before dropping off. Here’s a satellite image, so you can see what’s happening in terms of the clouds around the state. While we’re looking at stuff, here’s a looping radar image, so you can keep track of where showers are falling across the Aloha state.

The low pressure system, which will be moving by to the north, and ending up to the northwest of Kauai, will keep showers in our forecast for the next few days. We should see periods of showers rotating around the low, bringing precipitation to us at times. There’s still a question as to how much moisture that the low will have to work with…in terms of its shower producing capabilities. It appears that due to the relatively close proximity of the low pressure system to Kauai, and Oahu as well, those two islands have the best chance for showers going forward. The other islands could see some showers falling at times too, as they rotate around the low pressure system to our north and NW.

It’s early Friday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last part of today’s narrative. I’m looking forward to experiencing the weather here in the islands, as we head into the weekend. This low pressure system will cool our upper atmosphere as it gets close in now. This in turn will add a degree of instability to our overlying air mass. This kind of thing can at times, cause towering cumulus clouds, and even a cumulonimbus cloud could form. These are the types of clouds that can drop locally heavy showers, especially over the Kauai end of the chain. Perhaps the biggest weather news Saturday will be the very large and rough waves breaking along our north and east facing beaches. this will be dangerously large surf, so that everyone should be extra careful when going near the ocean on those north facing beaches!

As we move into the new week ahead, the cooler than normal north and NW winds will be gone. We will find light and variable winds taking their place. The resultant weather conditions are often called a convective weather pattern. We typically find clear and cool mornings, giving way to cloudy and showery conditions during the afternoon hours…especially over the interior sections of the islands. This would be enhanced the most over the larger islands of Maui and the Big Island starting Monday through mid-week. The trade winds are expected back in our area later next week, which would bring back a more typical trade wind weather pattern, with showers falling along the windward coasts and slopes again then.

I’m about ready to leave Kihei, for the drive over to Kahului, where I’ll take in a few film. I must admit that I’m not too excited about this film, but it looks good enough lets say. At any rate, I’m going to see Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009). This action film is based on a popular video game franchise, in which a female fighter embarks on a quest for justice. Some of the key words used to describe this film are: action adventure, science fiction fantasy – where warriors converge on the streets of Bangkok…preparing for the ultimate battle of terror versus beauty, light versus darkness, and good versus evil. Here’s a trailer for Street Fighter. I’ll be sure to let you know what I though about this film Saturday morning when I come back online with your next weather narrative. I hope you have a great Friday night and Saturday morning until then! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting: With origins dating back over 4,000 years, green tea has long been a popular beverage in Asian culture, and is increasingly gaining popularity in the United States. And while ancient Chinese and Japanese medicine believed green tea consumption could cure disease and heal wounds, recent scientific studies are beginning to establish the potential health benefits of drinking green tea, especially in weight loss, heart health, and cancer prevention.

A study recently published in the Journal of Periodontology, uncovered yet another benefit of green tea consumption. Researchers found that routine intake of green tea may also help promote healthy teeth and gums. The study analyzed the periodontal health of 940 men, and found that those who regularly drank green tea had superior periodontal health than subjects that consumed less green tea.

"It has been long speculated that green tea possesses a host of health benefits," said study author Dr. Yoshihiro Shimazaki of Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan. "And since many of us enjoy green tea on a regular basis, my colleagues and I were eager to investigate the impact of green tea consumption on periodontal health, especially considering the escalating emphasis on the connection between periodontal health and overall health."

Male participants aged 49 through 59 were examined on three indicators of periodontal disease: periodontal pocket depth (PD), clinical attachment loss (CAL) of gum tissue, and bleeding on probing (BOP) of the gum tissue. Researchers observed that for every one cup of green tea consumed per day, there was a decrease in all three indicators, therefore signifying a lower instance of periodontal disease in those subjects who regularly drank green tea.

Green tea’s ability to help reduce symptoms of periodontal disease may be due to the presence of the antioxidant catechin. Previous research has demonstrated antioxidants’ ability to reduce inflammation in the body, and the indicators of periodontal disease measured in this study, PD, CAL and BOP, suggest the existence of an inflammatory response to periodontal bacteria in the mouth.

By interfering with the body’s inflammatory response to periodontal bacteria, green tea may actually help promote periodontal health, and ward off further disease. Periodontal disease is a chronic inflammatory disease that affects the gums and bone supporting the teeth, and has been associated with the progression of other diseases such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Interesting2:  An analysis of the engineering and economics for a solar water-heating system shows it to have a payback period of just two years, according to researchers in India. They report, in the International Journal of Global Energy Issues, on the success of the 1000-liter system operating at a university hostel. The current focus in the developed world is on advanced technological approaches to alternative energy sources, such as photovoltaic cells for solar power and harnessing wind and wave with elaborate systems to generate electricity.

However, the cost of such systems may be prohibitive for some applications in the developing world. They also often ignore the fact that a mundane process such as heating water might best be carried out using direct heat from the sun rather than including a waste energy-conversion step.

Vivek Khambalkar, Sharashchandra Gadge, and Dhiraj S. Karale at the Dr Panjabrao Deshmukh Agricultural University, in Maharashtra, India, explain how they have evaluated the various costs and benefits involved in solar hot-water production. They have compared solar hot-water production per liter with electrical energy approaches and found that solar heating is 57 percent of the internal rate of return.

"Solar energy is the only renewable energy source that has wide range of uses with commercial viability. Solar energy provide water heating, air heating and electricity through various modes of applications. The use of solar energy for thermal purposes is the most cost-effective way of utilizing the resource. A solar water heating system satisfies the need of warm water," the researchers explain.

Importantly, the payback time for the initial investment in equipment and installation is just two years. This compares very well to a photovoltaic system used for electricity generation if it were only being used to heat water. Photovoltaics have a payback period of several at least a decade and sometimes double that.

Interesting3:  A new University of Florida study could help resolve a long-standing debate in shark paleontology: From which line of species did the modern great white shark evolve? For the last 150 years, some paleontologists have concluded the great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias, is a smaller relative of the line that produced Carcharodon megalodon, the largest carnivorous fish known.

Other paleontologists disagree, arguing the great white shark evolved instead from the broad-toothed mako shark. The second group contends megalodon, which grew to a length of 60 feet, should have its genus name switched to Carcharocles to reflect its different ancestry.

The study in the March 12 issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology falls squarely into the mako camp. It concludes megalodon and modern white sharks are much more distantly related than paleontologists initially believed.

"I think that this specimen will clarify things," said lead author Dana Ehret, a vertebrate paleontology graduate student at the Florida Museum of Natural History located on the UF campus. "When we only have isolated teeth to describe, it’s very hard to come to a definitive conclusion."

The study is based on a remarkably well preserved 4- to 5-million-year-old fossil from Peru of an early white shark species: a complete jaw with 222 teeth intact and 45 vertebrae. Most ancient shark species are known only from isolated teeth. Based on tooth size and analysis of growth rings within the vertebrae, the shark was about 20 years old and 17 to 18 feet long, a size in the range of modern white sharks.

Having the teeth in place allows researchers to see important distinguishing characteristics that help determine a fossil’s genus and species, such as whether a tooth curves toward the outside of the jaw or its midline, Ehret said. He believes the fossil belongs to a white shark species closely related to Isurus hastalis, a broad-toothed mako shark that probably grew to 27 feet long and lived 9 million to 10 million years ago.

Interesting4:  Dust blown off the continents and deposited in the open ocean is an important source of nutrients for marine phytoplankton, the tiny algae that are the foundation of the ocean food web. But new findings show that some sources of dust also carry toxic elements that can kill marine phytoplankton. Researchers discovered the toxic effects during a study of how phytoplankton respond to atmospheric aerosols deposited in the northern Red Sea.

The results will be published in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) the week of March 9, 2009. "This is the first time that toxicity from atmospheric aerosols has been reported for the ocean system," said first author Adina Paytan, an associate researcher in the Insitute of Marine Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"Oceanographers have always thought of dust deposition as good for phytoplankton, because it provides nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and iron. But we know air pollution has negative effects on the terrestrial side, and we need to think about the effects of pollutants that may be deposited in the oceans," she said.

Paytan and her coworkers collected aerosols on filters, incubated the samples with seawater, and observed the responses of phytoplankton. They found that the results depended on the wind direction. Aerosols collected from air masses originating over Europe stimulated phytoplankton growth, whereas aerosols from air originating over Africa, which carried dust from the Sahara Desert, had the opposite effect.

Aerosols from both sources supplied key nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, but the Sahara sources also contained high concentrations of copper. "When we added the Sahara dust, the phytoplankton died within 24 hours," Paytan said. "We found that copper was really high in those samples, so we suspected that copper was causing the toxicity."

Interesting5:  A new dating method has found that "Peking Man" is around 200,000 years older than previously thought, suggesting he somehow adapted to the cold of a mild glacial period. A dating method developed by a Purdue University researcher allowed a more accurate determination of the age of the Zhoukoudian, China, site of remains of Homo erectus, commonly known as "Peking Man." The site was found to be 680,000-780,000 years old.

Earlier estimates put the age at 230,000-500,000 years old. Darryl Granger, the Purdue professor of earth and atmospheric sciences who developed the dating method, co-led the study with Guanjun Shen of China’s Nanjing Normal University. They analyzed four stone tools and six sediment samples from the site.

"This was the first dating of this kind to be used in an early hominid site in China," Granger said. "Many of the existing data methods rely on the availability of volcanic rock, which the Zhoukoudian site does not have. This method provides a new tool to provide insight into places where dating was previously limited."

Susan C. Antón, associate professor in the Center for the Study of Human Origins at New York University said this discovery indicates "Peking Man" was somehow behaviorally able to cope with the cold environment. "There is evidence that Homo erectus had physically adapted to the cold, but they probably also had to be doing something in terms of behavior to handle the cold of a glacial period in northern China," she said.

"There isn’t good evidence of fire or any kind of skins or clothing, but evidence of such things doesn’t last long and wouldn’t be recorded particularly well in the archeological record. It doesn’t mean they didn’t have them, but we don’t have a definitive answer."Homo erectus is considered to be the ancestor species to humans and the first species that left Africa and moved into Asia. The "Peking Man" site, discovered in the late 1920s, was among the first found for Homo erectus and shaped the thoughts on the age and behavior of the species, Antón said.

Interesting6:  Almost 800 years after farmers in the village of Gouda in Holland first brought a creamy new cheese to market, scientists in Germany say they have cracked the secret of Gouda’s good taste. They have identified the key protein subunits, or peptides, responsible for the complex, long-lasting flavor of the popular cheese. That discovery could lead to development of more flavorful cheeses and other dairy products.

Their study is in the current issue of ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a bi-weekly publication. Thomas Hofmann, Simone Toelstede and Andreas Dunkel note that the scientists have tried for years to pinpoint the natural molecules responsible for the long-lasting taste and wonderful texture of Gouda cheese.

It develops during the aging or ripening stage, with aged Gouda more full and complex, with longer-lasting flavor, than the younger version. Cheese lovers prize this characteristic taste, known as the "kokumi sensation." The scientists solved the age-old mystery by applying a molecular sensory science approach.

It combined mass spectroscopy and other high-tech analytical instruments and sophisticated sensory tools to identify six gamma-glutamyl peptides that appear to be mainly responsible for the kokumi sensation in Gouda. This knowledge could be used to enhance the flavor of dairy products by technological means, the researchers say.

Interesting7:  The advent of modern appliances such as washing machines and refrigerators had a profound impact on 20th Century society, according to a new Université de Montréal study. Plug-in conveniences transformed women’s lives and enabled them to enter the workforce, says Professor Emanuela Cardia, from the Department of Economics. Within a short time-span, household technology became accessible to the majority.

In the late 1910s, a refrigerator sold for $1,600 and 26 years later such appliances could be purchased for $170. Access to electric stoves, washing machines and vacuum cleaners was also generalized. "These innovations changed the lives of women," says Professor Cardia.

"Although it wasn’t a revolution per se, the arrival of this technology in households had an important impact on the workforce and the economy." Professor Cardia based her research on more than 3,000 censuses conducted between 1940 and 1950, from thousands of American households, across urban and rural areas.

"We calculated that women who loaded their stove with coal saved 30 minutes everyday with an electric stove," says Cardia. "The result is that women flooded the workforce. In 1900, five percent of married women had jobs. In 1980, that number jumped to 51 percent." In 1913, the vacuum cleaner became available, in 1916 it was the washing machine, in 1918 it was the refrigerator, in 1947 the freezer, and in 1973 the microwave was on the market.

All of these technologies had an impact on home life, but none had a stronger impact than running water. "We often forget that running water is a century-old innovation in North America, and it is even more recent in Europe. Of all innovations, it’s the one with the most important impact," says Cardia.

In 1890, 25 percent of American households had running water and eight percent had electricity. In 1950, 83 percent had running water and 94% had electricity. According to Cardia, in 1900, a woman spent 58 hours per week on household chores. In 1975, it was 18 hours.

Interesting8:  The moon has been hiding the scars of its violent, asteroid-filled past. Most surveys of lunar impact craters have used photos, but Herbert Frey of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, wanted to know if there were any old craters buried beneath younger ones. So he studied elevation mapping data from the Clementine mission in the 1990s. He also used simulations to identify impact signatures, such as a roughly circular crater with a thin crust and a thicker rim.

This approach uncovered 150 craters more than 300 kilometers wide instead of 45. Frey is now trying to work out the age of the newly found craters. If they are the same age as the others, this would support the idea that asteroids bombarded the inner solar system for a particularly intense period about 4 billion years ago. Some researchers think that life may have existed before this bombardment, but if so, its survival now seems less likely, says Andrew Valley of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

"The probability that early primitive life, if it existed, could find refuge, even in sediments beneath the ocean would be reduced," he says. Other researchers, however, disagree, arguing that life could have survived the barrage of impacts deep underground. Frey, who will present the work at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Woodlands, Texas, later this month, expects more subtle features to be discovered when the Asian lunar probes release further data and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter launches in May.

March 12-13, 2009 


Air Temperatures – The following maximum temperatures were recorded across the state of Hawaii Thursday afternoon: 

Lihue, Kauai – 70
Honolulu, Oahu – 76
Kaneohe, Oahu – 72
Kahului, Maui – 71
Hilo, Hawaii – 76
Kailua-kona – 79

Air Temperatures ranged between these warmest and coolest spots near sea level – and on the highest mountains…at 4 p.m. Thursday afternoon:

Kailua-kona – 75F
Hilo, Hawaii – 64

Haleakala Crater    – 34  (near 10,000 feet on Maui)
Mauna Kea summit – 30  (near 14,000 feet on the Big Island)

Precipitation Totals – The following numbers represent the largest precipitation totals (inches) during the last 24 hours on each of the major islands, as of Thursday afternoon:

2.69 Kokee, Kauai
1.98 Makaha Stream, Oahu
0.75 Molokai
0.14 Lanai
0.00 Kahoolawe
1.40 West Wailuaiki, Maui
1.22 Honokaa, Big Island

Weather Chart – Here’s the latest (automatically updated) weather map showing high pressure systems located to the northwest and northeast of the islands. Meanwhile, we have a developing storm low pressure system to the north. Our winds will be north to NW, gusty and cool into Saturday.

Satellite and Radar Images: To view the cloud conditions we have here in Hawaii, please use the following satellite links, starting off with the Infrared Satellite Image of the islands to see all the clouds around the state during the day and night. This next image is one that gives close images of the islands only during the daytime hours, and is referred to as a Close-up visible image. This next image shows a larger view of the Pacific…giving perspective to the wider ranging cloud patterns in the Pacific Ocean. Finally, here’s a looping IR satellite image, making viewable the clouds around the islands 24 hours a day. To help you keep track of where any showers may be around the islands, here’s the latest animated radar image. 

Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live webcam on the summit of near 14,000 foot Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The tallest peak on the island of Maui is the Haleakala Crater, which is near 10,000 feet in elevation. These two webcams are available during the daylight hours here in the islands…and when there’s a big moon rising just after sunset for an hour or two! Plus, during the nights and early mornings you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise too…depending upon weather conditions.

 Aloha Paragraphs

   Hanging loose…Hawaii
   Photo Credit: flickr.com

Thursday was an especially cool day here in the islands, with breezy north winds keeping a chill in the air. The NWS forecast office in Honolulu has issued a small craft wind advisory for all coastal and channel waters…across the entire state. We now find a high surf advisory for the north and east facing shores, as rough seas will pound those beaches. These heavy seas will cause surges to enter into the Kahului and Hilo harbors. Finally, the north winds atop the mountains on the Big island will be strong enough to have initiated a wind advisory. The winds this coming weekend are still a little up in the air as far as direction goes, although will likely be somewhat lighter, and may be coming from a more unusual NW or even westerly direction then.

The fast moving cold front, which swept down through the island chain Thursday, bringing showers along with it…is now passing south of the Big Island. The bulk of the showers have fallen along the north facing coasts and slopes, and in the mountains…although some leeward areas got wet too. A low pressure system will arrive in the area north of our islands Friday into the weekend. As this low gets into place, we’ll see unsettled weather popping-up at times. Depending upon where the low ends up, will help determine where its showers will be falling…there remains some uncertainty about that now.

The cold front spoken of in the paragraph above, had passed over Kauai, Oahu and Molokai Thursday morning…then Maui and the Big Island during the afternoon hours. Shower activity will drop off with the passing of the front, with drier air flooding into the island area in the wake of the front’s passage. The main influence, behind the front, will be the chilly north winds, which will continue into Friday. Here’s a satellite image, so you can see where the ragged leading edge is…and the still cloudy skies behind it too.

The big question continues to be where the low pressure system, that will move to the north of Hawaii…will eventually end up this weekend. There’s a good chance that it will just stall to our north, which will cause our north winds to calm down. We could see periods of showers rotating around the low, bringing rainfall to us at times. If on the other hand, it were to move further west, to the west of Kauai, then that could prompt heavier rains. This is still up in the air, and we will have to wait another day or two before this gets resolved…stay tuned. 

It’s early Thursday evening here in Kihei, Maui, as I begin writing this last part of today’s narrative.  The fast paced cold front has moved past the Big island at this time. Here’s a looping radar image, so you can see the leftover showers riding along in the more or less northto NNW wind flow. The main thing today has been the cloudy skies, and the chilly winds. Those winds were locally very gusty today, with the strongest that I saw occurring at Barking Sands, on Kauai…where was 44 mph during the afternoon hours. At the moment, at 515pm, the strongest I see is 42 mph on the small island of Kahoolawe. Air temperatures are anything but warm at the moment, with the range being 75F degrees at Kailual-kona, with a cooler 64 degrees on the other end of the island chain, at Lihue, Kauai. This is winter, tropical style, which I must say I’m enjoying very much. I know that it won’t be long before we’re back in a regular old warm weather pattern, so I’m finding it unique and very interesting.

I’m heading up to Kula, in the upcountry area here on Maui now. Here in Kihei, it’s partly cloudy and breezy. I’m pretty sure that I’ll be putting my windshield wipers on before I get home. I’ll come back online when I get back, and let you know what the temperature is up there. I’ll also let you know what the weather is like at home too. I’m sure, as I did this morning, that I’ll be putting my rain jacket on, before heading out for what could be a wet walk. ~~~ Hi again, just before leaving Kihei my friend, who is having the health issues, asked if I could stop by on the way home. It’s now 815pm, and I just got home. It’s freezing, well not exactly, but sure it’s sure cold for this early, 52F degrees…and lightly misting outside. I’m going to jump underneath my down comforter now, and do some reading, and get warm, before I go to sleep. I’ll meet you here early Friday morning, when I’ll pry myself out of bed, and prepare your next new weather narrative. It will be fun to get back on the computer, and for sure I’ll let you know what the air temperature is again then. Aloha for now…Glenn.

One more thing, if you have left me a response in the reply box, down the page from here, and you can’t find it…or my answer, here’s what to do: go to the left hand margin of this page, and find where it says "Other Useful Links", and from there scroll down to where it says Archived Narratives. If you click there, you can go back to the previous day, where you’ll find what you wrote, and what I wrote back at the bottom of that page. By the way, from there you can go back and find any narrative that I’ve written, over the last almost three years! This includes all the interesting news articles (like the ones below) that I have posted over the last several months, and more…too.

Interesting: As California officials see it, global warming is happening so there’s no time to waste in figuring out what to do. California’s interagency Climate Action Team on Wednesday issued the first of 40 reports on impacts and adaptation, outlining what the state’s residents must do to deal with the floods, erosion and other effects expected from rising sea levels.

Hundreds of thousands of people and billions of dollars of Golden State infrastructure and property would be at risk if ocean levels rose 55 inches by the end of the century, as computer models suggest, according to the report. The group floated several radical proposals: limit coastal development in areas at risk from sea rise; consider phased abandonment of certain areas; halt federally subsidized insurance for property likely to be inundated; and require coastal structures to be built to adapt to climate change.

"Immediate action is needed," said Linda Adams, secretary for environmental protection. "It will cost significantly less to combat climate change than it will to maintain a business-as-usual approach." Few topics are likely to be more contentious than coastal development. But along the state’s 2,000-mile shoreline the effects would be acute, particularly in San Mateo and Orange counties, where more than 100,000 people would be affected, according to the 99-page state-commissioned report by the Oakland-based Pacific Institute.

Detailed maps of the coastline, published on the institute’s website, show that residential neighborhoods in Venice and Marina Del Rey could find themselves in a flood zone. Water could cover airports in San Francisco and Oakland, parts of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, and large swaths of Huntington Beach and Newport Beach.

Interesting2:  Seventeen of the world’s most active volcanoes have been supplied with monitoring equipment from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden to measure their emission of sulphur dioxide. The measurement results will be used to make it easier to predict volcano eruptions, and they can also be used to improve today’s climate models.

One of the Chalmers researchers who developed the monitoring equipment is Mattias Johansson, who recently defended his doctoral dissertation in the subject. The most active volcanoes in the world have special observatories that monitor them in order to be able to sound the alarm and evacuate people in the vicinity if an eruption threatens.

These observatories keep track of several parameters, primarily seismic activity. Now 17 observatories have received a new parameter that facilitates their work – the volcanoes’ emissions of sulphur dioxide. “Increasing gas emissions may indicate that magma is rising inside the volcano,” says Mattias Johansson at the Department of Radio and Space Science at Chalmers.

“If this information is added to the other parameters, better risk estimates can be made at the observatories.” The equipment he has been working with measures the total amount of gas emitted, whereas most other methods for metering gas can only indicate the gas concentration at a particular point. This is made possible by placing two or more metering instruments in different places around the volcano and then aggregating the information they gather.

Interesting3:  Anthropogenic, or human generated, sounds have the potential to significantly affect the lives of aquatic animals – from the individual animal’s well-being, right through to its reproduction, migration and even survival of the species. According to a new study marine animals could suffer detrimental effects ranging from a loss of hearing to increased stressed levels as a result of environmental noise – in ways not dissimilar to humans and land animals.

The study also describes some recent well-controlled experimental studies while highlighting areas for future study. "Human generated sounds in the marine environment may result in only small shifts in behavior for some animals, but immediate death in others. With the vast increase in production of sound in the marine environment due to human activity such as oil exploration, shipping and construction, the effect of human-generated sounds on the aquatic life becomes a growing issue", said Dr. Arthur Popper from the University of Maryland, USA.

Marine animals use sounds to communicate and to glean information about their environment. Unlike the "visual scene" developed by the animal’s sense of sight, the "auditory scene" derived from sounds provides marine animals with a three dimensional view of the world and extends far beyond the visual scene.

Interesting4:  Microbiologists tested 14 hand-hygiene agents — everything from soap and alcohol rubs to plain old tap water — against hardy bacteria and viruses applied to the hands of 62 volunteers. The study found that soap and water did the best job of removing germs. Just 10 seconds of washing soap and water was enough to knock off more than 90 percent of microbes. Nothing works better at getting rid of disease-causing viruses than simply washing one’s hands with old-fashioned soap and water.

That advice comes from the largest and most comprehensive scientific study ever done to compare the effectiveness of hand hygiene products. The study showed that after a short exposure time of 10 seconds, nearly all the hand hygiene products reduced 90 percent of bacteria on the hands. But waterless alcohol-based hand wipes only removed about 50 percent of bacteria from the subjects’ hands.

Interesting5:  Tiny, ubiquitous particles in the atmosphere may play a profound role in regulating global climate. But the scientists who study these particles — called aerosols — have long struggled to accurately measure their composition, size, and global distribution. A new detection technique and a new satellite instrument developed by NASA scientists, the Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor (APS), should help ease the struggle.

Some types of small aerosols — such as black carbon from motor vehicle exhaust and biomass burning — promote atmospheric warming by absorbing sunlight. Others, such as sulfates from coal-fired power plants, exert a cooling effect by reflecting incoming solar radiation back into space. Overall, aerosols present one of the greatest areas of uncertainty in understanding what drives climate change.

But quantifying the influence of aerosols on the atmosphere and climate has been hampered by difficulties in measuring the aerosols themselves. The problem is especially acute over land, where the glare from sunlight reflecting off Earth’s surface overwhelms the passive imaging instruments scientists typically use to detect aerosols.

In recent years, however, researchers from NASA Goddard’s Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City have developed new remote-sensing techniques to more accurately measure aerosols over land.

Interesting6:  Several well-known universities are organizing the ISCCC to address outstanding issues leading up to the UN-sponsored climate summit, including the likely costs of inaction, and the threat to global security and world poverty posed by dramatic climate change. The real concern now being voiced by the majority of climate scientists is that the UN IPCC Fourth Assessment Report is already out-of-date. Recent studies suggest that the pace of climate disruption has quickened, so that we may already be too late to stop changes that scientists warned of just five years ago.

In fact, the most recent IPCC report failed to adequately account for several climatic tipping points ? like methane released from a thawing tundra, and decreased albedo from a melting arctic ? which are happening earlier than predicted. The concern now is that climate change could accelerate so quickly that humanity will unable to slow the outcome.

The conference will synthesize the latest climate change science and publish a master document for negotiators heading to Copenhagen in December. Katherine Richardson, a marine biologist at the University of Copenhagen, said the synthesis would make direct calls on policy-makers to respond. "This is not a regular scientific conference," she says.

"This is a deliberate attempt to influence policy." Dr. Richardson’s quote could become fodder for the Rush Limbaughs of the world, who contend that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by climatologists greedy for research funding, but I’m impressed that a scientist would lay it on the line in such vivid and concrete terms.

Interesting7:  You might never have to fear for your car’s paintwork again if a new kind of polyurethane that is able to heal its own surface scratches makes it to market. Small scratches to the surface of the material close up in only a few minutes when the material is exposed to the ultraviolet light in sunlight.

This life-like healing occurs because the damaged polymer molecules around the edges of a scratch use the energy from the UV to form new cross-links and recreate the network that makes up the material. The material could make a good top coat for an automobile, says Marek Urban, a polymer scientist at the University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, who led the study.

Previous self-healing materials have mostly used some form of liquid epoxy that is encapsulated in spheres or fibres, or delivered by an engineered vascular system. When the material is damaged, the epoxy is released into the fissure and sets when it contacts a hardening agent in the material.

Taking a different approach with their new self-healing polymer, Urban and his team combined polyurethane with a molecule made up of chitosan, a carbohydrate found in the shells of crustaceans like crabs and lobsters. The researchers modified the chitosan slightly with the addition of the structures composed of four carbon atoms called oxetane rings.

It is the oxetane rings that give the material its ability to heal, says Urban. When a scratch is made, some of the rings are broken, leaving chemically reactive free ends. However, while he has worked out which bonds are involved in the reaction, the exact details of the chemical process are so far unknown. Exposure to UV light creates reactive spots on sections of the chitosan molecules which then combine with the broken oxetane rings to form new chemical cross links that close up the damage.

The process appears to begin at the bottom of a scratch, pulling it closed like a zipper. Urban says that scratches about 10 micrometers wide and 50 deep – just visible with the naked eye – heal over after 30 minutes of exposure to UV light. The fact the process starts at the bottom the two sides of a scratch are closest together suggests it will work for larger scratches, too, he adds.

Interesting8: Human society is already, in small but significant ways, being shaped by global warming. So, said a climatologist at the climate change congress in Copenhagen, Denmark, on Thursday. Jean Palutikof of the University of East Anglia, UK, pointed to numerous studies warning that climate change is going to deeply transform our society, by increasing the death rate, for example, or changing the way we grow food.

If you look in the right places, says Palutikof, it is already possible to see our behavior changing. Models and observations tell us which parts of the planet are most likely to feel the heat of climate change – so these "hotspots" are a good place to start looking for such changes. Palutikof focused on two locations: the maize fields of the US Midwest, and south-east Australia.

Quoting figures from the published literature, Palutikof showed that over the past few decades, the US Midwest has gradually become warmer. At the same time, agricultural surveys show that farmers have been putting their first maize seed in the ground earlier and earlier in the year.While Palutikof can not rule out that this apparent adaptation is a coincidence, she points out that it would make little sense for farmers to plant seeds earlier in the year if there were no advantage to it.

Interesting9:  If Friday the 13th is unlucky, then 2009 is an unusually unlucky year. This week’s Friday the 13th is one of three to endure this year. The first came last month. The next is in November. Such a rare triple-threat occurs only once every 11 years.

The origin of the link between bad luck and Friday the 13th is murky. The whole thing might date to Biblical times (the 13th guest at the Last Supper betrayed Jesus). By the Middle Ages, both Friday and 13 were considered bearers of bad fortune. In modern times, the superstition permeates society.

Here are five of our favorite Friday-the-13th facts:

1. Fear of Friday the 13th — one of the most popular myths in science — is called paraskavedekatriaphobia as well as friggatriskaidekaphobia. Triskaidekaphobia is fear of the number 13.

2. Many hospitals have no room 13, while some tall buildings skip the 13th floor and some airline terminals omit Gate 13.

3. President Franklin D. Roosevelt would not travel on the 13th day of any month and would never host 13 guests at a meal. Napoleon and President Herbert Hoover were also triskaidekaphobic, with an abnormal fear of the number 13.

4. Mark Twain once was the 13th guest at a dinner party. A friend warned him not to go. "It was bad luck," Twain later told the friend. "They only had food for 12." Superstitious diners in Paris can hire a quatorzieme, or professional 14th guest.

5. The number 13 suffers from its position after 12, according to numerologists who consider the latter to be a complete number — 12 months in a year, 12 signs of the zodiac, 12 gods of Olympus, 12 labors of Hercules, 12 tribes of Israel, 12 apostles of Jesus, 12 days of Christmas and 12 eggs in a dozen.