(Press-News.org) NASA satellite data was an "eye opener" when it came to Tropical Cyclone 15S, now known as Guito in the Mozambique Channel today, Feb. 19, 2014. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Guito and visible imagery revealed a ragged eye had developed as the tropical cyclone intensified.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible image of Tropical Cyclone Guito on Feb. 19 at 1140 UTC/6:40 a.m. EST as it continued moving south through the Mozambique Channel. The image revealed a ragged-looking eye with a band of strong thunderstorms wrapping from the northwestern to the southeastern quadrants of the storm.
On Feb. 19 at 1500 UTC/10 a.m. EST, Tropical Cyclone Guito's maximum sustained winds near 60 knots/69 mph/111 kph. Guito was centered near 21.5 south latitude and 39.6 east longitude, about 405 nautical miles/466.1 miles/750.1 km west of Antananarivo, Madagascar. Guito has been moving to the south at 10 knots/11.5 mph/18.2 kph.
The Joint Typhoon Warning Center or JTWC noted that a mid-latitude trough (elongated area) of low pressure is approaching Guito from the southwest. That trough is expected to cause Guito to recurve southeastward as the storm transitions into an extra-tropical storm over the next couple of days.
INFORMATION:
Text credit: Rob Gutro
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
NASA satellite sees a ragged eye develop in Tropical Cyclone Guito
2014-02-19
[Attachments] See images for this press release:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Surveys find that despite economic challenges Malagasy fishers support fishing regulations
2014-02-19
Scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, and other groups have found that the fishing villages of Madagascar—a country with little history of natural resource regulation—are generally supportive of fishing regulations, an encouraging finding that bodes well for sustainable strategies needed to reduce poverty in the island nation.
Specifically, Malagasy fishers perceive restrictions on certain kinds of fishing gear as being beneficial for their livelihoods, according to the results of a survey conducted with ...
Kessler Foundation researchers study impact of head movement on fMRI data
2014-02-19
West Orange, NJ. February 19, 2014. Kessler Foundation researchers have shown that discarding data from subjects with multiple sclerosis (MS) who exhibit head movement during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) may bias sampling away from subjects with lower cognitive ability. The study was published in the January issue of Human Brain Mapping. (Wylie GR, Genova H, DeLuca J, Chiaravalloti N, Sumowski JF. Functional MRI movers and shakers: Does subject-movement cause sampling bias.) Glenn Wylie, DPhil, is associate director of Neuroscience in Neuropsychology & Neuroscience ...
Clouds seen circling supermassive black holes
2014-02-19
Astronomers see huge clouds of gas orbiting supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. Once thought to be a relatively uniform, fog-like ring, the accreting matter instead forms clumps dense enough to intermittently dim the intense radiation blazing forth as these enormous objects condense and consume matter, they report in a paper to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, available online now.
Video depicting the swirling clouds is posted to YouTube http://youtu.be/QA8nzRkjOEw
Evidence for the clouds comes from records collected ...
Better cache management could improve chip performance, cut energy use
2014-02-19
Computer chips keep getting faster because transistors keep getting smaller. But the chips themselves are as big as ever, so data moving around the chip, and between chips and main memory, has to travel just as far. As transistors get faster, the cost of moving data becomes, proportionally, a more severe limitation.
So far, chip designers have circumvented that limitation through the use of "caches" — small memory banks close to processors that store frequently used data. But the number of processors — or "cores" — per chip is also increasing, which makes cache management ...
When faced with a hard decision, people tend to blame fate
2014-02-19
Life is full of decisions. Some, like what to eat for breakfast, are relatively easy. Others, like whether to move cities for a new job, are quite a bit more difficult. Difficult decisions tend to make us feel stressed and uncomfortable – we don't want to feel responsible if the outcome is less than desirable. New research suggests that we deal with such difficult decisions by shifting responsibility for the decision to fate.
The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
"Fate is a ubiquitous supernatural ...
UK failing to harness its bioenergy potential
2014-02-19
The UK could generate almost half its energy needs from biomass sources, including household waste, agricultural residues and home-grown biofuels by 2050, new research suggests.
Scientists from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at The University of Manchester found that the UK could produce up to 44% of its energy by these means without the need to import.
The study, published in Energy Policy journal, highlights the country's potential abundance of biomass resources that are currently underutilised and totally overlooked by the bioenergy sector. Instead, ...
Making nanoelectronics last longer for medical devices, 'cyborgs'
2014-02-19
The debut of cyborgs who are part human and part machine may be a long way off, but researchers say they now may be getting closer. In a study published in ACS' journal Nano Letters, they report development of a coating that makes nanoelectronics much more stable in conditions mimicking those in the human body. The advance could also aid in the development of very small implanted medical devices for monitoring health and disease.
Charles Lieber and colleagues note that nanoelectronic devices with nanowire components have unique abilities to probe and interface with living ...
Gecko-inspired adhesion: Self-cleaning and reliable
2014-02-19
This news release is available in German. Geckos outclass adhesive tapes in one respect: Even after repeated contact with dirt and dust do their feet perfectly adhere to smooth surfaces. Researchers of the KIT and the Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, have now developed the first adhesive tape that does not only adhere to a surface as reliably as the toes of a gecko, but also possesses similar self-cleaning properties. Using such a tape, food packagings or bandages might be opened and closed several times. The results are published in the "Interface" journal of ...
Chemical leak in W.Va. shows gaps in research, policy
2014-02-19
The chemical leak that contaminated drinking water in the Charleston, W.Va., area last month put in sharp relief the shortcomings of the policies and research that apply to thousands of chemicals in use today. An article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly magazine of the American Chemical Society, delves into the details of the accident that forced 300,000 residents to live on bottled water for days.
A team of C&EN reporters and editors note that the main chemical that leaked into the water supply is an obscure one called 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol, or ...
Advance in energy storage could speed up development of next-gen electronics
2014-02-19
Electronics are getting smaller all the time, but there's a limit to how tiny they can get with today's materials. Researchers now say, however, that they have developed a way to shrink capacitors — key components that store energy — even further, which could accelerate the development of more compact, high-performance next-gen devices. The study appears in the journal ACS Nano.
Takayoshi Sasaki and colleagues point out that many recent improvements have already downsized capacitors significantly. But current technology has almost reached its limit in terms of materials ...