All WWE programming, talent names, images, likenesses, slogans, wrestling moves, trademarks, logos and copyrights are the exclusive property of WWE, Inc. and its subsidiaries. All other trademarks, logos and copyrights are the property of their respective owners. ? 2012 WWE, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This website is based in the United States. By submitting personal information to this website you consent to your information being maintained in the U.S., subject to applicable U.S. laws. U.S. law may be different than the law of your home country. WrestleMania XXIX (NY/NJ) logo TM & ? 2012 WWE. All Rights Reserved. The Empire State Building design is a registered trademark and used with permission by ESBC.
Now, at 12:02 PM (after the noon), Pilsner Winter Time, the astronomical spring is getting started. The axis of Earth's spin is orthogonal to the plane in which the Earth orbits the Sun i.e. both Southern and Northern Hemispheres are equally far from the Sun.
If you ignore the fact that the length of the day and the night may be "easily" measured just once a day, the day and the night are equally long right now.
What I find bizarre is that people keep on repeating wrong dates of the equinoxes and solstices.
If you check the table of the equinoxes, you will see that at least between 2010 and 2020, the Northward (spring) equinox always comes on March 20th. As kids, we would learn that the date was March 21st. Maybe the same is true for you, too.
These days, children ? at least in Europe ? should learn March 20th as the date when the spring begins. Is that the case?
Where does the discrepancy come from? Let's look at the times (in Greenwich mean [winter] time i.e. Universal Time which is delayed behind the Pilsner Winter Time by 1 hour) of the Spring equinoxes over a decade:
The date is always March 20th. What is the rule? You may see that every non-leap year, the precise moment is about 5 hours and 50 minutes, plus minus 5 minutes or so (the Earth just isn't as regular as you may expect ? the irregularities come from the disordered impact of the Moon, Jupiter, and others), after the moment we saw in the previous year.
On the leap years, the special moment takes place about 18 hours and 10 minutes, plus minus 5 minutes or so, before the moment we remember from the last year. Needless to say, the increments are roughly +6 hours and ?18 hours i.e. +1/4 and ?3/4 of the solar day. This agrees with the fact that the spacing between two spring equinoxes is about 365.25 solar days while the civic calendar records either 365 or 366 new dates during that interval. The difference between 365.25 on one side and 365 or 366 on the other side manifests itself as those +6 or ?18 hours.
Note that 18 hours and 10 minutes above is exactly one day minus 5 hours and 50 minutes; these numbers aren't independent.
But you may see that even after 4 years, the timing isn't quite periodic. For example, in 2016, the equinox will arrive 44 minutes earlier than in 2012. In 2020, it will be 40 minutes earlier than in 2016. In average, you may see that every 4 years, the equinox comes about 42 minutes earlier than 4 years earlier. In average, this drift gives you 10.5 minutes per year i.e. 1,050 minutes per century. Because the equinox will be at 3:50 am in 2020 and every 4 years, we will remove 42 minutes or so, 24 more years ? roughly in 2044 ? the date will jump to March 19th instead of March 20th, Greenwich Mean Time.
On the contrary, in 2011, the time was 23:21. So 4 years earlier, in 2007, it was probably 42 minutes later or so, in the morning of March 21st. If you return deeper to the 20th century, you may encounter many years in which the equinox occurred on March 21st.
I said that the drift gives you about 1050 minutes per century. That translates to about 18 hours per century. Why is this second-order discrepancy 18 hours? You may notice that it's 3/4 of a solar day again. And again, it's no accident. This new discrepancy arises because the year isn't quite 365.25 solar days. It's a little bit less than that. 365.24219 or so. We deal with this fact by stealing the leap year status from the years that are multiples of 100 (1700, 1800, 1900, 2100), even though they're multiples of four, but we restore the leap year status to multiples of 400 again (most prominently 2000), even though they're multiples of 100 as well.
This combined rule brings the average year to 365.2425 average solar days which is close enough. The remaining discrepancy accumulates to one day each 3,000 years or so, see my remarks about the leap years from January 1st, 2012.
Fine. So those 1050 minutes or 18 hours per century occur exactly because once per century ? more precisely 3/4 times per century ? we remove one leap year i.e. one day (February 29th) again. The times must adjust themselves so that the timing is pretty much the same as 400 years ago. And this is exactly achieved by making the equinox 42+ minutes earlier than 4 years earlier, each four years, except for years like 2100 when it's 18 hours (minus 42+ minutes) later than four years earlier. These required 42+ minutes in 4 years exactly explain why the non-leap-to-the-following-leap-year annual shift was 18 hours and 10 minutes rather than just 18 hours. All these corrections are ultimately calculable from the number of solar days per year, 365.24219.
At any rate, if you're teaching this stuff to kids, you should tell them that the spring begins on March 20th, summer solstice occurs on June 21st (although 20th will be increasingly more often), autumn equinox is on September 22nd or 23rd (this will be almost 50-50), and winter mostly starts on December 21st. Those days will be "mostly OK" when these kids become adults.
Oops, I noticed that I wrote a blog entry about the same topic one year ago. Find the five differences. ;-)
Thirty-five years after its launch, Voyager 1 appears to have travelled beyond the influence of the Sun and exited the heliosphere, according to a new study appearing online today.
The heliosphere is a region of space dominated by the Sun and its wind of energetic particles, and which is thought to be enclosed, bubble-like, in the surrounding interstellar medium of gas and dust that pervades the Milky Way galaxy.
On August 25, 2012, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft measured drastic changes in radiation levels, more than 11 billion miles from the Sun. Anomalous cosmic rays, which are cosmic rays trapped in the outer heliosphere, all but vanished, dropping to less than 1 percent of previous amounts. At the same time, galactic cosmic rays ? cosmic radiation from outside of the solar system ? spiked to levels not seen since Voyager's launch, with intensities as much as twice previous levels.
The findings have been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
"Within just a few days, the heliospheric intensity of trapped radiation decreased, and the cosmic ray intensity went up as you would expect if it exited the heliosphere," said Bill Webber, professor emeritus of astronomy at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. He calls this transition boundary the "heliocliff."
In the GRL article, the authors state: "It appears that [Voyager 1] has exited the main solar modulation region, revealing [hydrogen] and [helium] spectra characteristic of those to be expected in the local interstellar medium."
However, Webber notes, scientists are continuing to debate whether Voyager 1 has reached interstellar space or entered a separate, undefined region beyond the solar system.
"It's outside the normal heliosphere, I would say that," Webber said. "We're in a new region. And everything we're measuring is different and exciting."
###
American Geophysical Union: http://www.agu.org
Thanks to American Geophysical Union for this article.
This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.
Researchers' new method may sharpen microscopic imagesPublic release date: 21-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Katherine Morales kxm109320@utdallas.edu 972-883-4321 University of Texas at Dallas
UT Dallas researchers are developing a new low-light imaging method that could improve a number of scientific applications, including the microscopic imaging of molecules in cancer research
UT Dallas researchers are developing a new low-light imaging method that could improve a number of scientific applications, including the microscopic imaging of single molecules in cancer research.
Electrical engineering professor Dr. Raimund Ober and his team recently published their findings in the journal Nature Methods. In the journal, they describe a method which minimizes the deterioration of images that can occur with conventional imaging approaches.
"Any image you take of an object is translated by the camera into pixels with added electronic noise," Ober said. "Any distortion of an image makes it harder to obtain accurate estimates of the quantities you're interested in."
This method could greatly enhance the accuracy with which quantities of interest, such as the location, size, and orientation of an object, are extracted from the acquired images.
Ober and his team tackled this problem by using the EMCCD camera (a standard low-light image detector) in a highly unconventional setting. Using this method, scientists can estimate quantities of interest from the image data with substantially higher accuracy than those made with conventional low-light imaging.
"We have figured out through rigorous theoretical developments that when you run an EMCCD camera in such a way that very few photons hit each of its pixels, the resulting image is minimally corrupted by the camera noise," he said. "Our method is about using the EMCCD camera to its fullest potential, beyond what is commonly believed to be possible by the scientific imaging community."
By increasing the magnification of the image to reduce the number of photons detected in each image pixel, they were able to significantly reduce the camera noise and considerably lessen the deteriorative effect of pixilation.
In fact, the team managed to attain particle localization accuracy that was twofold higher than those obtained with conventional EMCCD imaging.
Ober and his team applied UAIM (Ultrahigh Accuracy Imaging Modality) to the live-cell tracking of a standard protein marker for breast cancer. By being able to accurately follow the movement of the marker, valuable insights on the biology of breast cancer could be gained.
"The tracking of individual proteins represents an important way to study cancer and other diseases at the molecular level," Ober said. "The applications of UAIM for diagnostics and research are promising."
###
The research team included Jerry Chao and Sripad Ram, post-doctoral researchers at UT Dallas, and Dr. Sally Ward, professor of immunology at UT Southwestern Medical Center.
The work was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Researchers' new method may sharpen microscopic imagesPublic release date: 21-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Katherine Morales kxm109320@utdallas.edu 972-883-4321 University of Texas at Dallas
UT Dallas researchers are developing a new low-light imaging method that could improve a number of scientific applications, including the microscopic imaging of molecules in cancer research
UT Dallas researchers are developing a new low-light imaging method that could improve a number of scientific applications, including the microscopic imaging of single molecules in cancer research.
Electrical engineering professor Dr. Raimund Ober and his team recently published their findings in the journal Nature Methods. In the journal, they describe a method which minimizes the deterioration of images that can occur with conventional imaging approaches.
"Any image you take of an object is translated by the camera into pixels with added electronic noise," Ober said. "Any distortion of an image makes it harder to obtain accurate estimates of the quantities you're interested in."
This method could greatly enhance the accuracy with which quantities of interest, such as the location, size, and orientation of an object, are extracted from the acquired images.
Ober and his team tackled this problem by using the EMCCD camera (a standard low-light image detector) in a highly unconventional setting. Using this method, scientists can estimate quantities of interest from the image data with substantially higher accuracy than those made with conventional low-light imaging.
"We have figured out through rigorous theoretical developments that when you run an EMCCD camera in such a way that very few photons hit each of its pixels, the resulting image is minimally corrupted by the camera noise," he said. "Our method is about using the EMCCD camera to its fullest potential, beyond what is commonly believed to be possible by the scientific imaging community."
By increasing the magnification of the image to reduce the number of photons detected in each image pixel, they were able to significantly reduce the camera noise and considerably lessen the deteriorative effect of pixilation.
In fact, the team managed to attain particle localization accuracy that was twofold higher than those obtained with conventional EMCCD imaging.
Ober and his team applied UAIM (Ultrahigh Accuracy Imaging Modality) to the live-cell tracking of a standard protein marker for breast cancer. By being able to accurately follow the movement of the marker, valuable insights on the biology of breast cancer could be gained.
"The tracking of individual proteins represents an important way to study cancer and other diseases at the molecular level," Ober said. "The applications of UAIM for diagnostics and research are promising."
###
The research team included Jerry Chao and Sripad Ram, post-doctoral researchers at UT Dallas, and Dr. Sally Ward, professor of immunology at UT Southwestern Medical Center.
The work was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Large chunks of an ancient tectonic plate that slid under North America millions of years ago are still present under parts of central California and Mexico, according to new research led by Brown University geophysicists.
Around 100 million years ago, the Farallon oceanic plate lay between the converging Pacific and North American plates, which eventually came together to form the San Andreas fault. As those plates converged, much of the Farallon was subducted underneath North America and eventually sank deep into the mantle. Off the west coast of North America, the Farallon plate fragmented, leaving a few small remnants at the surface that stopped subducting and became part of the Pacific plate.
But this new research suggests that large slabs from Farallon remain attached to these unsubducted fragments. The researchers used seismic tomography and other data to show that part of the Baja region and part of central California near the Sierra Nevada mountains sit atop "fossil" slabs of the Farallon plate.
"Many had assumed that these pieces would have broken off quite close to the surface," said Brown geophysicist Donald Forsyth, who led the research with Yun Wang, a former Brown graduate student now at the University of Alaska. "We're suggesting that they actually broke off fairly deep, leaving these large slabs behind."
The findings are published today (March 18, 2013) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Geologists had known for years about a "high velocity anomaly" in seismic tomography data near the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. Seismic tomography measures the velocity of seismic waves deep underground. The speed of the waves provides information about the composition and temperature of the subsurface. Generally, slower waves mean softer and hotter material; faster waves mean stiffer and cooler material.
The anomaly in California, known as the Isabella anomaly, indicated that a large mass of relatively cool and dehydrated material is present at a depth of 100 to 200 kilometers below the surface. Just what that mass was wasn't known, but there were a few theories. It was often explained by a process called delamination. The crust beneath the eastern part of the mountains is thin and the mantle hot, indicating that part of the lithospheric plate under the mountains had delaminated?broken off. The anomaly, scientists thought, might be the signature of that sunken hunk of lithosphere, which would be cooler and dryer than the surrounding mantle.
But a few years ago, scientists detected a new anomaly under the Mexico's Baja Peninsula, due east of one of the known coastal remains of the Farallon plate. Because of its proximity to the Farallon fragment, Forsyth and Wang thought it was very likely that the anomaly represented an underground extension of the fragment.
A closer look at the region showed that there are high-magnesium andesite deposits on the surface near the eastern edge of the anomaly. These kinds of deposits are volcanic rocks usually associated with the melting of oceanic crust material. Their presence suggests that the eastern edge of the anomaly represents the spots where Farallon finally gave way and broke off, sending andesites to the surface as the crust at the end of the subducted plate melted.
That led Forsyth and his colleagues to suspect that perhaps the Isabella anomaly in California might also represent a slab still connected to an unsubducted fragment of the Farallon plate. So they re-examined the tomography data along the entire West Coast. They compared the Baja and Isabella anomalies to anomalies associated with known Farallon slabs underneath Washington and Oregon.
The study found that all of the anomalies are strongest at the same depth ? right around 100 kilometers. And all of them line up nearly due east of known fragments from Farallon.
"The geometry was the kicker," Forsyth said. "The way they line up just makes sense."
The findings could force scientists to re-examine the tectonic history of western North America, Forsyth said. In particular, it forces a rethinking of the delamination of the Sierra Nevada, which had been used to explain the Isabella anomaly.
"However the Sierra Nevada was delaminated," Forsyth said, "it's probably not in the way that many people had been thinking."
His research colleague asnd co-author Brian Savage of the University of Rhode Island agrees. "This work has radically changed our understanding of the makeup of the west coast of North America," Savage said. "It will cause a thorough rethinking of the geological history of North America and undoubtedly many other continental margins."
###
Brown University: http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau
Thanks to Brown University for this article.
This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.
NEW YORK (AP) ? A subway construction worker was stuck in mud for hours in an underground tunnel in New York City before being rescued.
Fire officials say the worker was pulled out shortly after 12:30 a.m., about four hours after he became stuck up to his chest in the tunnel 75 feet below ground. Authorities say he was treated for hypothermia and is in serious but stable condition at a hospital.
More than 150 firefighters responded to the site on Manhattan's Upper East Side, where the Second Avenue subway line is under construction. Three firefighters have suffered non-life threatening injuries. A Consolidated Edison vacuum truck helped remove debris.
It happened at around 8:30 p.m. Tuesday.
In September, a controlled blast at the subway construction site sent rocks flying into the streets.
![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uEKcnPbfetm2G5uYvOrv93E5qAsW6OHBJFS3RAW5ks8aQE7HLuJMMu4aMuMvws9mPsHd-KUplQ2QVqAv4tBGBdTsD79oDfwx8rUnATB4I=s0-d){kind=small}
Public release date: 21-Mar-2013
Share ]