Long Island beaches reopen to bathing

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Long Island beaches reopen to bathing Long Island beaches reopen to bathing

Updated: Tuesday, September 2 2014 10:08 AM EDT2014-09-02 14:08:19 GMT

Health officials say six Long Island beaches that were closed for one day have reopened to bathing. The Nassau County beaches were closed Monday due to storm water runoff that could negatively impact bacterial levels. The beaches were: Laurel Hollow Beach, Morgan Beach, North Hempstead Beach Park, Sea Cliff Village Beach, Tappen Beach and Theodore Roosevelt Beach.

Health officials say six Long Island beaches that were closed for one day have reopened to bathing. The Nassau County beaches were closed Monday due to storm water runoff that could negatively impact bacterial levels. The beaches were: Laurel Hollow Beach, Morgan Beach, North Hempstead Beach Park, Sea Cliff Village Beach, Tappen Beach and Theodore Roosevelt Beach.

Updated: Tuesday, September 2 2014 5:49 AM EDT2014-09-02 09:49:32 GMT

Reminder for drivers that as children head back to school in Nassau County so too, will the speed cameras in school zones.Officials say speed cams will be fully operational at 25 locations this week.That will more than double eventually.

Reminder for drivers that as children head back to school in Nassau County so too, will the speed cameras in school zones.Officials say speed cams will be fully operational at 25 locations this week.That will more than double eventually.

Updated: Monday, September 1 2014 8:13 PM EDT2014-09-02 00:13:34 GMT

Step through the doors of Hope's Land of Candy in Island Park, Long Island and you''ll be taking a trip back in time. There's no WIFI but they do have a Victrola piano. And then there's the candy.. lots and lots of it.

Step through the doors of Hope's Land of Candy in Island Park, Long Island and you''ll be taking a trip back in time. There's no WIFI but they do have a Victrola piano. And then there's the candy.. lots and lots of it.

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Long Island beaches reopen to bathing

Integrated cleaning of major beaches begins across Goa

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Panaji, Sep 2 (TNN):The integrated system of beach cleaning covering major beaches in the state began on Monday. The waste from the bins placed on the beaches will be collected on a daily basis in addition to combing of wet and dry sand.

Machines will be pressed into service as well as manual cleaning will be undertaken where necessary.

"With the increase in the number of tourists visiting Goa each year, there is a concern about the cleanliness of the beautiful seashores across the state. Goa tourism has taken the matter seriously as it recognizes and understands that every tourist is important and distinct which also means cleanliness is a priority for the state and the sector," said Pamela Mascarenhas, deputy director, department of tourism.

Bhumika Transport, Waste Handling Services, a Mumbai-led consortium will manage the North Goa stretch which includes Keri, Arambol, Mandrem, Morjim, Vagator, Ozrant, Anjuna, Baga, Calangute, Candolim, Sinquerim, Nerul, Miramar, Caranzalem, Siridao, Bambolim.

Ram Engineering and Construction Company, a Mumbai-led consortium will manage the South Goa stretch which includes Majorda, Baina, Bogmolo, Velsao, Arrosim, Utorda, Majorda, Betalbatim, Colva, Sernabatim, Benaulim, Zalor, Fatrade, Varca, Cavelossim, Agonda, Palolem, Patnem, Rajbag, Talpona, Galgibag.

The beach cleaning will be done through two agencies. "The initial work of placement of dustbins, building of compost pits, recruitment of manpower, purchasing vehicles, etc. is under way," said Mascarenhas.

Special arrangements will also be made to meet the intense demand of beaches after special events such as Ganpati immersion, Durga celebrations, beach weddings, film shootings or any other tourism-related events to ensure complete cleanliness of the beach within 24 hours after the day of the event.

The project will also ensure cleanliness of beaches from floating and other waste onto the beaches from tidal springs especially during the monsoon and high tides.

The beach cleaning will be done through two agencies Bhumika Transport, Waste Handling Services will manage North Goa and Ram Engineering and Construction Company will look after South Goa.

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Integrated cleaning of major beaches begins across Goa

Dont turn your back on our beaches residents urged to join in Great British Beach Clean

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DIRTY beaches get spruces up at events across the county over the weekend of September 19 to 22 with the Marine Conservation Society hoping for a record turnout.

The society is urging residents to take part in the Great British Beach Clean and there are plenty of coves and bays in Dorset to choose from.

There are events at Baiter Park, Bournemouth, Durdle Door, Friars Cliff Beach, Hengistbury Head, Holes Bay at Poole, Lulworth Cove, Whitley Lake, Knoll Beach, Ham Common and Worbarrow among others.

Our domestic habits over the last 50 years or so have resulted in dirty beaches, said Tom Bell, campaigns manager.

We throw more stuff away than ever. Plastic in the marine environment may take hundreds of years to break down and it washes up or is blown on to beaches in bits from micro pieces to larger chunks.

We flush stuff down the loo we shouldnt, and that ends up in our waterways and then our beaches.

We want to see people turning out to clean up their favourite or local beach during our Great British Beach Clean weekend please dont turn your back on our beaches.

To find dates and times and register go to mcsuk.org/ greatbritishbeachclean.

Alternatively, call 01989 567807 for information.

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Dont turn your back on our beaches residents urged to join in Great British Beach Clean

San Diego beaches had 570,000+ visitors over Labor Day weekend

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Ocean Beach

Photo by Chase Cain

Story Published: Sep 2, 2014 at 8:19 AM PDT

Story Updated: Sep 2, 2014 at 9:49 AM PDT

SAN DIEGO (CNS) - Beaches in the city of San Diego saw about 570,000 visitors over the Labor Day weekend, 162 of whom had to be rescued by lifeguards, a spokesman for the city agency said.

Beach attendance on Saturday was around 156,100, and 190,400 on Sunday, according to the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department. About 227,500 people hit the beaches on Monday.

In addition to the rescues, lifeguards provided medical aid to 182 beachgoers, Lee Swanson, spokesman for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department said.

Lifeguards also performed 7,823 preventative acts, including warning beach visitors of hazardous conditions, Swanson said. A National Weather Service rip current alert was issued by the over the weekend for all San Diego beaches and remained in affect until 8 p.m. Monday.

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San Diego beaches had 570,000+ visitors over Labor Day weekend

Zeitraffer Wettbewerb 2014 – This is my story of my hobby: Astronomy – Video

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Zeitraffer Wettbewerb 2014 - This is my story of my hobby: Astronomy
Dieses Video wurde mit LRTimelapse http://lrtimelapse.com fr den Zeitraffer-Wettbewerb auf http://gwegner.de erstellt. Nikon 5100,Nikon 7000 Nikkor AF-S 10-24 Nikkor AF-S 18-200 LRTimelapse...

By: timlapse99

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Zeitraffer Wettbewerb 2014 - This is my story of my hobby: Astronomy - Video

Alien Astronomy – Alien’s View of the Solar System – Are we being Watched? – Trans-Neptunian Region – Video

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Alien Astronomy - Alien #39;s View of the Solar System - Are we being Watched? - Trans-Neptunian Region
Courtesy of and Credit: NASA #39;s Goddard Space Flight Center Dust ground off icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt, the cold-storage zone that includes Pluto and millions of other objects, creates a...

By: The Kepler Telescope Channel

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Alien Astronomy - Alien's View of the Solar System - Are we being Watched? - Trans-Neptunian Region - Video

Looking at the stars

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Hawaii is perfect for astronomy, according to astronomy instructor Geoff Mathews, but the Mnoa campus didnt have any undergraduate degrees in astronomy and astrophysics until now.

And UH of all places with its great telescope on Big Island and Maui, good research institute for astronomy and a strong physics and astronomy department, its just obvious and its timely that we (Mnoa) should have such a program, said Pui Lam, Department of Physics and Astronomy chairman.

The Board of Regents approved the launch of these two degrees at its Aug. 21 meeting.

Comprised of 62 credit hours, the astrophysics degree program is intended for students who want to study the origin of the universe and how solar systems are created, Lam said. According to David Sanders, astronomy graduate program chairman at the Institute for Astronomy, astrophysics is more of a professional science degree for someone going on to graduate school.

In other words, an undergraduate degree in astrophysics is almost a necessity if youre going to go on to graduate work and get a Ph.D. in the field because astronomy is basically a subset of physics. Its just physics applied to stars and galaxies, Sanders said. So it requires a pretty good background in physics, math, and then depending on what branch of astrophysics, you could have some biology and chemistry as well, but in terms of undergraduate degrees, the easiest thing to say is it requires more credit hours and the hard sciences.

The astronomy program, which requires 48 credits, is intended for students who are interested in how stars are formed in the historical way, rather than the physics behind it.

Both programs require courses in astronomy, physics, math and chemistry.

PROGRAMS WORTH WAITING FOR

According to Lam, the process to create these degrees started more than two years ago, but it really began in the 1960s when the then-physics department became the department of physics and astronomy.

During that time, a group of astronomers had been hired into the department and later established the research astronomy institute. Some taught introductory astronomy courses but there was no full program.

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Looking at the stars

Radio Telescopes Settle Controversy Over Distance to Pleiades

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Image Caption: Optical image of the Pleiades. Credit: NOAO/AURA/NSF

Dave Finley, National Radio Astronomy Observatory

Astronomers have used a worldwide network of radio telescopes to resolve a controversy over the distance to a famous star cluster a controversy that posed a potential challenge to scientists basic understanding of how stars form and evolve. The new work shows that the measurement made by a cosmic-mapping research satellite was wrong.

The astronomers studied the Pleiades, the famous Seven Sisters star cluster in the constellation Taurus, easily seen in the winter sky. The cluster includes hundreds of young, hot stars formed about 100 million years ago. As a nearby example of such young clusters, the Pleiades have served as a key cosmic laboratory for refining scientists understanding of how similar clusters form. In addition, astronomers have used the measured physical characteristics of Pleiades stars as a tool for estimating the distance to other, more distant, clusters.

Until the 1990s, the consensus was that the Pleiades are about 430 light-years from Earth. However, the European satellite Hipparcos, launched in 1989 to precisely measure the positions and distances of thousands of stars, produced a distance measurement of only about 390 light-years.

That may not seem like a huge difference, but, in order to fit the physical characteristics of the Pleiades stars, it challenged our general understanding of how stars form and evolve, said Carl Melis, of the University of California, San Diego. To fit the Hipparcos distance measurement, some astronomers even suggested that some type of new and unknown physics had to be at work in such young stars, he added.

To solve the problem, Melis and his colleagues used a global network of radio telescopes to make the most accurate possible distance measurement. The network included the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a system of 10 radio telescopes ranging from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands; the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia; the 1,000-foot-diameter William E. Gordon Telescope of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico; and the Effelsberg Radio Telescope in Germany.

Using these telescopes working together, we had the equivalent of a telescope the size of the Earth, said Amy Miouduszewski, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). That gave us the ability to make extremely accurate position measurements the equivalent of measuring the thickness of a quarter in Los Angeles as seen from New York, she added.

The astronomers used this system to observe several Pleiades stars over about a year and a half to precisely measure the apparent shift in each stars position caused by the Earths rotation around the Sun. Seen at opposite ends of the Earths orbit, a star appears to move slightly against the backdrop of more-distant cosmic objects. Called parallax, the technique is the most accurate distance-measuring method astronomers have, and relies on simple trigonometry.

The result of their work is a distance to the Pleiades of 443 light-years, accurate, the astronomers said, to within one percent. This is the most accurate and precise measurement yet made of the Pleiades distance.

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Radio Telescopes Settle Controversy Over Distance to Pleiades

Researchers awarded $1.5 million to develop software to process solar astronomy data on larger scale

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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

2-Sep-2014

Contact: LaTina Emerson lemerson1@gsu.edu 404-413-1353 Georgia State University

ATLANTAResearchers in Georgia State University's new Astroinformatics program have been awarded $1.5 million from the National Science Foundation to develop software tools that can process large sets of solar astronomy data and allow scientists to perform analyses on scales and detail levels that have not been possible.

Dr. Rafal Angryk of the Department of Computer Science is the principal investigator and and Dr. Petrus Martens of the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Dr. Katharine Reeves of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics are the co-principal investigators. They are working to improve tools that were designed by an international consortium, the Solar Dynamics Observatory Feature Finding Team, funded by NASA and led by Petrus Martens, that sort through large volumes of solar imaging data and identify features and phenomena of interest to solar researchers.

The improvements would allow the solar community to pursue a wide range of research projects that previously would have taken an excessive time to complete. Solar physics and space weather communities could use the software tools to perform large-scale data-driven discovery and analyses of the relationships between different types of solar activity on scales and detail levels that are unprecedented.

"There is no doubt that we are in the era of Big Data, or as I like to refer to it as 'The Data Deluge,'" said Dr. Rajshekhar Sunderraman, chair of the Department of Computer Science at Georgia State. "Traditional approaches to dealing with data fail miserably with the volume of data being generated, and we need innovative algorithms and software tools to analyze the data and infer new knowledge in a timely manner. Even though this project specifically targets solar data, the methods and tools devised would be applicable to a wide range of other domains. We are excited to be part of the project and hope for important breakthroughs to be made."

In 2010, the launch of NASA's space-based Solar Dynamics Observatory brought massive data to solar physics. The ground-based Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, under construction in Maui, will provide even larger volumes of solar imaging and magnetic field data.

This project will provide easy access to a scalable and high-end tracking and analytics toolkit for solar events and build and publicize large-scale solar data products that are easy to download and understand. It will strengthen the basic science needed to meet the goals of the national space weather programs, which are designed to develop the diagnostic tools to forecast conditions in the near space environment that can affect communication satellites, navigation systems, power grids, and space and air travels.

The software could also benefit other scientific areas that register and analyze data in the forms of spatial objects that evolve over time, such as terrestrial weather, climate-related research and analyses of migration dynamics.

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Researchers awarded $1.5 million to develop software to process solar astronomy data on larger scale

GAMA Welcomes Mahindra Aerospace and Hutchinson North America as New Members

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The Executive Committee and the Board of Directors of the General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA) have approved Mahindra Aerospace and Hutchinson North America as new members of the association. GAMA now has 89 members.

Mahindra Aerospace is the aircraft and aerostructures manufacturing business of the Mahindra Group, a $16.5 billion diversified multinational headquartered in India. Mahindras utility aircraft business is based in Australias Latrobe Valley and operates through a global network of reputed general aviation aircraft dealers and customer care. Its facility near Melbourne produces the Airvan 8, an eight-seat utility airplane currently certified in 38 countries. In addition, Mahindra is launching the Airvan 10, a 10-seat turboprop utility airplane, and is working with Indias National Aerospace Laboratories to co-develop the C-NM5, a five-seat, low-wing aircraft. The companys aerostructures manufacturing business includes facilities in Melbourne and Bangalore, India.

Headquartered in Burbank, California, Hutchinson North America, a subsidiary of Hutchinson Aerospace, is a multi-faceted company that supports numerous manufacturers in the areas of anti-vibration and noise reduction systems and Barry mounts and isolators. Hutchinson Aerospace is a recognized world leader in the design, manufacture and application of products and systems technology for the control of vibration, mechanical shock and structure-borne noise, and is a leading supplier of aircraft vibration isolators and cabin noise reduction systems internationally. Hutchinson Aerospace currently works with multiple GAMA member companies, including Airbus Helicopters, Bell Helicopter, Bombardier Aerospace, Dassault Falcon, Textron Aviation, and UTC Aerospace Systems.

GAMA is an international trade association representing over 80 of the world's leading manufacturers of general aviation airplanes and rotorcraft, engines, avionics, components and related services. GAMA's members also operate repair stations, fixed based operations, pilot and maintenance training facilities and manage fleets of aircraft. For more information, visit GAMA's website at http://www.GAMA.aero.

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GAMA Welcomes Mahindra Aerospace and Hutchinson North America as New Members

Site Last Updated 1:36 am, Tuesday

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PUTRAJAYA: Aerospace Malaysia Innovation Centre (AMIC) aims to play a major role in countrys aerospace research and technology (R&T) activities with the establishment of its physical centre within Asia Aerospace City (AAC) in Subang by 2016.

AMIC chief executive officer, Shamsul Kamar Abu Samah, said with the establishment of AAC, Malaysia is getting closer to realising its vision of becoming a major player in the global aerospace market.

With the research facility in place, it would further enhance AMICs initiative in marshalling value-added research activities and developing technologies that could be readily adopted by the industry, he said.

In AAC, we will be looking into the various activities for advanced testing on aerospace products, including the development and production of virtual reality system as well as robotic system to support the aerostructure manufacturing activities, he told Bernama.

Shamsul said AMIC planned to place up to 20 technical personnel within the facility from various organisations, both from its local and international research partners.

He said the RM4 million Virtual Reality project, which would be ready by next three years, was set up in collaboration with Airbus Group, AMIC, M-Aerotech, Universiti Malaya, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur Malaysian Institute of Aviation Technology and Kolej Kemahiran Tinggi MARA, Melaka.

Shamsul said the project was expected to serve the industrys needs for advanced training system such as CTRM Aero Composites and Spirit AeroSystems Malaysia.

In the next two years we want to see results for the system integration and in the last one year the adoption of the system in the aerospace manufacturing training modules and validation, he said.

He said in order to move forward in this lucrative industry, AMIC, as an industry-driven aerospace research centre, aimed to enrich the research and development activities based on future needs in global industry.

This would also become one of the main highlights in the new National Aerospace Blueprint 2015-2030 currently being formulated by Malaysian Industry-Government Group For High Technology (MIGHT), he said.

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Fuzzy, Sweet, Sexy: How Man Shapes Peach

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Chinese scientists recently revealed the history of domesticated peach.

The fuzzy fruit has been one of mankinds favourite treats for thousands of years. Today, the world produces 23 million tons of peaches and nectarines a year. China accounts for over half of global production, while Italy grows the most in Europe (1.5 million tons).

In 2013, the US produced one million tons of peaches, according to the Department of Agriculture. Georgia, the Peach State, is the third-largest producer (35,250 tons) grows half as much as South Carolina (69,650 tons).

But by far the largest producer is California (648,000 tons of fruit), where peach growers create 3,240 jobs and contribute $374 million to the states annual economy.

Peaches (CC BY 2.0: skyseeker / https://flic.kr/p/2MynV)

Peach and its close relatives stony fruits such as almonds, apricots, cherries and plums are important agricultural crops, providing vitamins and antioxidants in many diets. For example, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health found that eating two peaches a week reduces the relative risk of breast cancer.

The fuzzy fruit is clearly valuable to our health and wealth. And by asking questions about its genetics, scientists are revealing why peaches are so appealing to us.

Where Do Peaches Come From?

According to historical records, domesticated peach originated in China and is at least 4,000 years old, although archaeological evidence suggests humans were eating wild fruits up to 7,000 years ago. Ornamental peach trees first appeared about 2,000 years ago. Peach spread to the West along the Silk Road and was once thought to have come from Persia, hence its scientific name, Prunus persica.

DNA is now providing further details of how peach was domesticated, and why its evolution continues to be shaped by man.

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Fuzzy, Sweet, Sexy: How Man Shapes Peach