Weight loss food supplements are waste of money and don’t help you lose weight – Metro

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TopNews United Kingdom (blog)
Weight loss food supplements are waste of money and don't help you lose weight
Metro
... sufficient evidence that any food supplement can be recommended for reducing body weight,' said experts from the Peninsula Medical School in Devon. ...
Weight loss pills do not work, say expertsTherapy Lounge News
Slimming supplements useless, research suggestsMirror.co.uk
Weight loss pills and supplements are fake, says a studyCelebrities With Diseases
TopNews United Kingdom (blog) -NutraIngredients.com -WebMD
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Study Finds Amazon Storm Killed Half a Billion Trees

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Trunks of living trees can be seen two years after a powerful 2005 storm toppled many neighboring trees, tearing open the ordinarily closed, green canopy of this stretch of Amazon forest near Manaus, Brazil - Larger image
A single, huge, violent storm that swept across the whole Amazon forest in 2005 killed half a billion trees, according to a original study funded by NASA and Tulane University, New Orleans.

While storms have long been predictable as a cause of Amazon tree loss, this study is the first to really quantify losses from a storm. And the losses are much greater than formerly suspected, say the study's authors, which comprise research scientist Sassan Saatchi of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The work suggests that storms may play a larger role in the dynamics of Amazon forests than previously recognized, they add.

Previous research had attributed a peak in tree humanity in 2005 solely to a severe drought that affected parts of the forest. The new study says that a single squall line (a long line of severe thunderstorms, the kind associated with lightning and heavy rainfall) had a significant role in the tree demise. Research suggests this type of storm might become more common in the future in the Amazon due to climate change, killing a higher number of trees and releasing more carbon to the atmosphere.

Tropical thunderstorms have long been suspected of wreaking havoc in the Amazon, but this is the first time researchers have intended how many trees a single thunderstorm can kill, says Jeffrey Chambers, a forest ecologist at Tulane University and one of the authors of the paper. The paper has been conventional for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Previous studies by a coauthor of this new paper, Niro Higuchi of Brazil's National Institute for Amazon Research (INPA), showed the 2005 tree mortality spike was the second largest recorded since 1989 for the Manaus region in the Central Amazon. Also in 2005, large parts of the Amazon forest experienced one of the harshest droughts of the last century. A study published in the journal Science in 2009 piercing to the drought as the single agent for a basin-wide increase in tree mortality. But a very large area with major tree loss (the region near Manaus) was not affected by the drought.

"We can't attribute [the increased] mortality to just drought in certain parts of the basin--we have solid confirmation that there was a strong storm that killed a lot of trees over a large part of the Amazon," Chambers says.

From Jan. 16 to 18, 2005, a squall line 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) long and 200 kilometers (124 miles) wide crossed the whole Amazon basin from southwest to northeast, causing numerous human deaths in the cities of Manaus, Manacaparu, and Santarem. The strong vertical winds connected with the storm, blowing up to 145 kilometers per hour (90 miles per hour), uprooted or snapped in half trees that were in their path. In many cases, the stricken trees took down some of their neighbors when they fell.

The researchers used a combination of Landsat satellite images, field-measured tree mortality, and modeling to decide the number of trees killed by the storm. By linking satellite data to observations on the ground, the researchers were able to take into description smaller tree blowdowns (less than 10 trees) that otherwise cannot be detected through satellite images.

Looking at satellite images for the area of Manaus from before and after the storm, the researchers detected changes in the reflectivity of the forest, which they supposed were indicative of tree losses. Undisturbed forest patches appeared as closed, green canopy in satellite images. When trees die and fall, a clearing opens, exposing wood, dead vegetation, and surface litter. This so-called "woody signal" only lasts for about a year in the Amazon. In a year, vegetation re-grows and covers the exposed wood and soil. This means the signal is a good indicator of recent tree deaths.

After seeing disturbances in the satellite images, the researchers established five field sites in one of the blowdown areas, and counted the number of trees that had been killed by the storm; researchers can typically tell what killed a tree from looking at it.

"If a tree dies from a drought, it generally dies standing. It looks very unlike from trees that die snapped by a storm," Chambers says.

In the most affected plots, near the centers of large blowdowns, up to 80 percent of the trees had been killed by the storm.

By comparing their field data and the satellite observations, the researchers determined that the satellite images were accurately pinpointing areas of tree death, and they intended that the storm had killed between 300,000 and 500,000 trees in the area of Manaus. The number of trees killed by the 2005 storm is equivalent to 30 percent of the annual deforestation in that same year for the Manaus region, which experiences relatively low rates of deforestation.

The team then extrapolated the results to the whole Amazon basin.

"We know that the storm was intense and went across the basin," Chambers says. "To quantify the possible basin-wide impact, we assumed that the whole area impacted by the storm had a similar level of tree mortality as the mortality observed in Manaus."

The researchers estimate that between 441 and 663 million trees were destroyed across the whole basin. This represents a loss equivalent to 23 percent of the expected mean annual carbon accumulation of the Amazon forest.

Squall lines that move from southwest to northeast of the forest, like the one in January 2005, are relatively rare and poorly studied, says Robinson Negron-Juarez, an atmospheric scientist at Tulane University, and lead author of the study. Storms that are similarly destructive but advance in the opposite direction (from the northeast coast of South America to the interior of the continent) occur up to four times per month. They can also generate large forest blowdowns (contiguous patches of wind-toppled trees), although it's infrequent that either of these two types of storms crosses the whole Amazon.

"We need to start measuring the forest perturbation caused by both types of squall lines, not only by the ones impending from the south," Negron-Juarez says. "We need that data to estimate total biomass loss from these natural events, which has never been quantified."

Chambers says that authors of preceding studies on tree mortality in the Amazon have diligently collected dead-tree tolls, but information on exactly what killed the trees is often lacking, or not reported.

"It's very important that when we collect data in the field, we do forensics on tree mortality," says Chambers, who has been studying forest ecology and carbon cycling in the Amazon since 1993. "Under a changing climate, some forecasts say that storms will increase in strength. If we start seeing increases in tree mortality, we need to be able to say what's killing the trees."

For more information visit http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-232

The Gadabout and the Phantom Corsair

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Well now this is interesting. Since discussing the plywood cars and hydraulic drive systems of Raymond Russell, we've been in contact with Russell's son, Raymond Benjamin Russell, who sent us a much better photograph of the Gadabout than we could find earlier. The gadabout is a remarkable car i

Exploring Mars from Home

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Cross-posted from the original on my NASA.gov blog

Under President Obama’s Open Government Initiative, NASA is exploring new ways to share with the public the exciting science we take part in every day. NASA has a long history of sharing its discoveries with the public, but figuring out how to present it in a way that is both easy to understand and simple to use frequently poses a challenge. By partnering with private industry, NASA has the opportunity to take advantage of existing technology innovations that can deliver science data in a format that is more publically consumable.

Yesterday, NASA and Microsoft unveiled the latest version of WorldWide Telescope, featuring the highest resolution and most complete map of Mars images ever released. Over 13,000 images from NASA’s HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, each with a resolution of about 100 times that of a 10 megapixel point-and-shoot camera, have been mapped onto a 3D globe of the Martian surface. They offer unparalleled views of spectacular surface features, including imagery of the Mars Phoenix Lander site and Olympus Mons – the highest peak in our solar system.

Soaring above Mars in WorldWide Telescope

Bringing all of these incredible images to user’s desktop computers is not an easy feat. With hundreds of terabytes of data available, the images must be made available “on demand” as users fly across the Martian surface, only loading terrain data when necessary. To accomplish this, the intelligent robotics group at Ames Research Center turned to NASA’s Nebula cloud computing platform. Nebula provides flexible and efficient science-class compute and storage services that easily scale to meet the needs of NASA scientists and researchers. Nebula was one of three Flagship Initiatives in NASA’s Open Government Plan and is one of the primary tools that is enabling NASA to more easily collaborate with private industry, academia and engage with the public in ways never before possible.

Nebula is located in modular shipping containers.
Nebula is located in modular shipping containers at NASA Ames Research Center.

Nebula turned the 13,000 images from HiRISE into half a billion smaller images that can be served in real-time to a broadband connection. Creating this huge mosaic took two weeks of number crunching on 114 of Nebula’s central processing units. The project demonstrated the powerful capabilities of Nebula, which has been utilized in situations as diverse as hosting federal spending data on USAspending.gov to providing a mechanism for amateur astronomers across the globe to upload their images of the LCROSS impact on the lunar south pole.

Technology innovations like Nebula are integral in NASA’s efforts to partner with industry to create products and services that make NASA’s data more easily consumable to public audiences. As we move forward in creating an environment of even greater transparency and participation at NASA, we hope to deliver even more engaging experiences that provide the American public with better insight into the cosmos, planet earth, and the work going on at NASA.

To learn more and download WorldWide Telescope, visit http://www.worldwidetelescope.org.

Thanks to Gretchen Curtis for providing input on this post!