Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / February 13-14, 2009

~~~ I’m about to leave Kihei for Kahului now, where I’ll head over to the Kaahumanu Center theatre, for a new film. This time around I’m going to see Taken (2009) starring Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, among others. Taken is described as an action, adventure, art, foreign, drama and thriller…I like all these words! The critics have been rather spare with their praise for this film, giving it a luke warm C as an average grade. The Yahoo! Users are giving it a more upbeat A-. I’m willing to be taken into this film, carried away into another world, swept from my rather mild mannered, Maui weatherman existence. The main thrust of this film is about a father who goes to Paris to find his daughter, who has been kidnapped by some criminals. As he hunts her down, there’s lots of violence along the way. I’ll be sure to let you know my impression of this film, when I come back online Saturday morning with your next new weather narrative. Here’s a trailer of this film, although its a pretty rough and tumble piece of work. I hope you have a great Friday night until then! Aloha for now…Glenn

Interesting2:  Raw fruits and vegetables are good for you but may also send you to the doctor, according to research published today by Cambridge University Press in the journal Epidemiology and Infection. A review article in the journal, written by several experts in their field, has highlighted the fact that fresh fruits and vegetables are increasingly recognized as a source of food poisoning outbreaks in many parts of the world. In Europe, recent outbreaks have revealed new and unexplained links between some bacteria and viruses that cause food poisoning and imported baby corn, lettuces, and even raspberries. In the USA, recent outbreaks of E Coli infections have been linked to bagged baby spinach, and Salmonella to peppers, imported cantaloupe melons and tomatoes as well. Professor Norman Noah, Editor-in-Chief of the journal says:

"This research confirms that raw fruit and vegetables can cause food poisoning.
To obtain raw fruit and vegetables out of season, as many countries now do, they are transported many thousands of miles from growing areas, and outbreaks can affect many widely dispersed countries simultaneously. Some outbreaks undoubtedly go unrecognized, and the scale of the problem is as yet unknown. "Identifying the source of contamination in any outbreak requires a careful assessment of potential exposures. Further work needs to be done to fully understand fully where the organisms that causes the poisoning comes from, and at which point in the journey from field to fork." In the journal, the links between raw produce and food poisoning have been compared with other foods that are now well-recognized sources of infection with particular bacteria, such as eggs with salmonella and beef mince with E Coli.

Interesting3:  A team of MIT undergraduate students has invented a shock absorber that harnesses energy from small bumps in the road, generating electricity while it smoothes the ride more effectively than conventional shocks. The students hope to initially find customers among companies that operate large fleets of heavy vehicles. They have already drawn interest from the U.S. military and several truck manufacturers. Senior Shakeel Avadhany and his teammates say they can produce up to a 10 percent improvement in overall vehicle fuel efficiency by using the regenerative shock absorbers. The company that produces Humvees for the army, and is currently working on development of the next-generation version of the all-purpose vehicle, is interested enough to have loaned them a vehicle for testing purposes. The project came about because "we wanted to figure out where energy is being wasted in a vehicle," senior Zack Anderson explains. Some hybrid cars already do a good job of recovering the energy from braking, so the team looked elsewhere, and quickly homed in on the suspension.

They began by renting a variety of different car models, outfitting the suspension with sensors to determine the energy potential, and driving around with a laptop computer recording the sensor data. Their tests showed "a significant amount of energy" was being wasted in conventional suspension systems, Anderson says, "especially for heavy vehicles."  Once they realized the possibilities, the students set about building a prototype system to harness the wasted power. Their prototype shock absorbers use a hydraulic system that forces fluid through a turbine attached to a generator. The system is controlled by an active electronic system that optimizes the damping, providing a smoother ride than conventional shocks while generating electricity to recharge the batteries or operate electrical equipment. In their testing so far, the students found that in a 6-shock heavy truck, each shock absorber could generate up to an average of 1 kW on a standard road — enough power to completely displace the large alternator load in heavy trucks and military vehicles, and in some cases even run accessory devices such as hybrid trailer refrigeration units.

Interesting4:  There may be a reason teenagers eat more burgers and fries than fruits and vegetables: their parents. In a new policy brief released today by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, researchers found that adolescents are more likely to eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables a day if their parents do. Contrarily, teens whose parents eat fast food or drink soda are more likely to do the same. Every day, more than 2 million California adolescents (62 percent) drink soda and 1.4 million (43 percent) eat fast food, but only 38 percent eat five or more servings of fruits and vegetables, according to the policy brief, "Teen Dietary Habits Related to Those of Parents." The cause of the deficit of healthy foods in teen diets has been attributed in part to the high concentration of fast food restaurants in certain cities and neighborhoods and other environmental factors. The new research is a reminder, however, that "good dietary habits start at home," according to center research scientist Susan H. Babey, a co-author of the policy brief. "If parents are eating poorly, chances are their kids are too." Nearly one-third (30 percent) of California’s teenagers are overweight or obese. Poor dietary habits, along with environmental and other factors, are strongly linked to obesity.

Interesting5:  Imagine you live in the suburbs of Chicago and you must commute hundreds of miles to a job in Iowa just to put food on the table. Magellanic penguins living on the Atlantic coast of Argentina face a similar scenario, and it is taking a toll. The penguins’ survival is being challenged by wide variability in conditions and food availability, said Dee Boersma, a University of Washington biology professor and a leading authority on Magellanic penguins. For example, while one parent incubates eggs on the nest the other must go off to find food. But these days, Boersma said, penguins often must swim 25 miles farther to find food than they did just a decade ago. "That distance might not sound like much, but they also have to swim another 25 miles back, and they are swimming that extra 50 miles while their mates are back at the breeding grounds, sitting on a nest and starving," she said.

Boersma has recently published research documenting some of the serious challenges faced by Magellanic penguins in a colony at Punta Tombo, Argentina, which she has studied for more than 25 years. She discusses her research Thursday (Feb. 12) during a news briefing and Friday during a symposium at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago. The Punta Tombo colony has declined more than 20 percent in the last 22 years, leaving just 200,000 breeding pairs, Boersma said. There are several reasons for the decline, including oil pollution and overharvesting of fish by humans. Climate variation also is a major problem, she found. Longer trips for food during a given breeding season lessen the chances that a given penguin pair will successfully reproduce. Some younger penguins move to colonies that are closer to food one year but might be farther away from food the following year. Increased ocean variability means penguins often return to their breeding grounds later and are in poorer condition to breed.

Interesting6:  Out in the deep waters of Monterey Bay, gray whales will be swimming home later this month after a brief winter vacation in Baja California. Whale watchers and marine scientists say these whales have been delaying their southern sojourns and point to climate change as the culprit. Rising sea temperatures have disrupted the animals’ home habitat in the waters between Alaska and Russia, said Wayne Perryman, a researcher at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla. Because of these changes, the whales are spending more time in the north before they start their yearly swim south. The scientists at the center have observed the whales for more than 20 years as they pass through Monterey Bay.

Compared to two decades ago, Perryman said, the animals are reaching the bay a week later. "This isn’t trivial," Perryman said. "It’s a significant change." Richard Ternullo, a boat captain for Monterey Bay Whale Watch in Monterey, said the whales’ yearly arrival in the bay fluctuates, but he has noticed on average it has drifted about 10 days later into the year. "Last year, they were considerably late," Ternullo said. "But this year they seem to be on time." Every year, gray whales undertake a 12,000-mile round-trip swim from the frigid Bering Sea to the warm waters off Baja California. Scientists don’t fully understand what motivates this epic migration — the longest for any mammal — but believe the animals may leave their homes to avoid predators such as killer whales, which feed on gray whale calves.

Interesting7:  Fourteen gharials fitted with radio tags have been released into the Rapti River in Nepal in an attempt to identify the reasons for the alarming decline in population of this critically endangered member of the crocodile family. The tagging, carried out by Nepal’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation in collaboration with WWF-Nepal, is also intended to study the movement pattern of the gharials, to assess its survival rate and find out about its preferred habitat in Nepal. The gharial, which mostly inhabits deep, fast-flowing rivers, is characterized by its long and slender snout whose fragile jaws render it incapable of devouring any large animal including human beings. Its name derives from the pro-truberance at the end of the adult male’s snout that resembles a Ghara, an earthen pot common to India and Nepal. The gharial is the first crocodilian species to be re-categorized as Critically Endangered on the 2007 IUCN Red List. With an inferred population of 5,000 to 10,000 in the 1940s, its numbers plummeted due to organized hunting for skin in the 1950s and 1960s, which led to a scattered and isolated population in India, Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Although hunting is no longer a threat, the construction of dams, barrages, irrigation canals, sand-mining and riverside agriculture have all resulted in the irreversible loss of habitat for the gharial.

Between 1981-2008, 691 gharials were released in the Narayani, Rapti, Karnali, Babai, Koshi and Kali Gandaki rivers but numbers continue to dwindle. A 2008 survey found just 81 individuals in the various rivers of Nepal, the number probably boosted by the release of captive-bred gharials. The gharial is now considered to be confined to the river systems of the Brahmaputra (India and Bhutan), the Indus (Pakistan), the Ganges (India and Nepal), and the Mahanadi (India), with small populations in the Kaladan and the Irrawady in Myanmar. The 14 gharials released into the River Rapti this week had transmitters attached to the scutes on their tails and each gharial has been given a different number and radio frequency. They will be monitored by Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology by a team from Chitwan National Park. WWF’s Country Representative to Nepal, Anil Manandhar, said: “The study will help diagnose the causes of decline in the gharial population. It will also help us better understand the gharial’s habitat use, knowledge that is crucial for saving the most threatened crocodile in the world.”

Interesting8:  Her eyes are wide as they stare into yours. You wrap your arm around her waist and pull her in close. She touches your face and you lean in, tilt your head—to the right, of course—and your lips connect. The rushing sensation leaves you little room to wonder, “Why the hell am I doing this anyway?” Of course, the simplest answer is that humans kiss because it just feels good. But there are people for whom this explanation isn’t quite sufficient. They formally study the anatomy and evolutionary history of kissing and call themselves philematologists. So far, these kiss scientists haven’t conclusively explained how human smooching originated, but they’ve come up with a few theories, and they’ve mapped out how our biology is affected by a passionate lip-lock. A big question is whether kissing is learned or instinctual. Some say it is a learned behavior, dating back to the days of our early human ancestors. Back then, mothers may have chewed food and passed it from their mouths into those of their toothless infants. Even after babies cut their teeth, mothers would continue to press their lips against their toddlers’ cheeks to comfort them. Supporting the idea that kissing is learned rather than instinctual is the fact that not all humans kiss. Certain tribes around the world just don’t make out, anthropologists say.