Skeptics of global warming should come to this Eskimo village on the Arctic Ocean, roughly 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle. It's hard to be complacent about climate change when you're in an area that normally is home to animals like polar bears and wolverines, but is now attracting robins. A robin even built its nest in town this year (there is no word in the local Inupiat Eskimo language for robins).
...
The Okpilak River valley was historically too cold and dry for willows, and in the Inupiat language "Okpilak" means "river with no willows." Yet a warmer, wetter climate means that now it's crowded with willows.
...
Alaska has warmed by eight degrees, on average, in the winter, over the last three decades, according to meteorological records.
...
In the hamlet of Deadhorse, I ran into an Arctic native named Jackson Snyder, who said that winters were getting "a lot warmer — doesn't get much below 50 below anymore."
...
That may not seem so bad. But while there will be benefits to a warmer Alaska (a longer growing season, ice-free ports), climate change can also lead to crop failures, spread tropical diseases and turn Bangladesh into tidal pools. The pace of warming may be far too fast for animals, humans or ecosystems to adjust. My advice is that if you're planning a dream home in New Orleans or on the Chesapeake, put it on stilts.
...
It predicted that in this century, the seas will rise 4 to 35 inches. Global warming is still an uncertain threat, but it may well become one of the major challenges of this century. Unless we act soon, we may find waves lapping the beaches of Ohio.

The Galileo spacecraft's 14-year odyssey came to an end on Sunday, Sept. 21, when the spacecraft passed into Jupiter's shadow then disintegrated in the planet's dense atmosphere at 11:57 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time. The Deep Space Network tracking station in Goldstone, Calif., received the last signal at 12:43:14 PDT. The delay is due to the time it takes for the signal to travel to Earth.

   
   
   

Currie Munce, vice president of research, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies in San Jose, Calif., inspects a new 4 Gigabyte Microdrive. The world's smallest hard disk drive weighs just 16 grams and is designed to store large quantities of high-resolution digital photos and video, MP3 music, electronic games and other large files. It can store a full-length DVD movie or about 75 hours of high-quality digital music. The matchbook-sized drive features breakthroughs in capacity and performance. (AP Photo / HO/Ken Love) August 22, 2003

After observing the Perseus galaxy cluster for 53 hours in August 2002, the Chandra X-ray Observatory revealed ripples in the hot gas that fills the cluster. These ripples appear to be sound waves that would register as a B flat if we could hear the deep tone.

The team that discovered the waves determined their frequency by calculating the speed of sound in that environment and measuring the distance between wave crests. The frequency is about one cycle (or wave) per 9.5 million years or so — corresponding to a B-flat note about 57 octaves below "middle C" on a piano.

Advocate Satish Maneshinde opined that the "charges were dropped because the judge felt that the main ingredients of section 304, part two to cause death intentionally or otherwise was missing in the case of Salman Khan. Because when he took to the wheels, even in that drunken state, he did not imagine that it could cause death - he did not have knowledge about that. The judge felt that it was a mere accident and that Salman, consciously or otherwise, did not want to cause death. Even the evidence collected by the prosecution so far did not make allegation prima facie provable in the court of law."
.
.
Advocate Mahesh Jethmalani was glad "we have judges like these who are right and spot on." He said, "Though I haven't read the judgement, I have always felt that this charge of culpable homicide against Salman is not right. For culpable homicide one requires mens rea, that is, a mental element or intention to cause death, which Salman did not have, or, a reckless disregard to the fact that it could cause death. Again, Salman did not know it could cause death of people. So, it was an accident. Motor vehicle cases are always cases of rash and negligent driving. Salman's is a case of negligent driving."

Protein-tannin interaction is the source of astringency, the mouth dryness sensation due to the complexation of the lubricant salivary proteins. It is often asked why very different feelings are perceived depending on wines. This may be linked to the specific type of interaction between tannins and proteins that may depend on tannins and protein nature and also to the stability and the lifetime of complexes. We have shown herein that the IB7 fragment from saliva protein can complex three B3 tannins and that the interaction occurs in the hydrophilic side of the peptide. The peculiar structure of the peptide can play an important role here. In the absence of tannins it appears very flexible and offers type II helices (proline-rich parts) for binding. Once complexed, the conformational freedom of the peptide, as well as that of the entire complex, appears much reduced. Is this phenomenon related to astringency? It is interesting trying to predict what would be the stoichiometry for B3 interacting with the entire IB7 human saliva protein. Because the IB714 sequence is almost con-tained three times in IB7, one could guess that a 1/9 complex could be stabilized. If this happened to be true, PRP proteins of the IB7 family could be called “tannin sponges”. Whereas the properties of PRP become unveiled, the specificity of the tannin counterpart is more subtle. It probably depends on its chemical nature (hydrolyzable, condensed, galloylated, etc.). Its molecular weight, 3D structure, ropensity to auto-associate, and water solubility may lead to noticeable differences in the protein-tannin complex formation. This explains, perhaps, the gustative differences noticed by enologists about tannin behavior in red wine such as drying, puckering, sour, astringent, bitter, or rough character. Of interest is the fact that the tannin binding sites appear to have different physicochemical properties. In our case the sites appear to have different dynamics. This might be linked to their lifetime that could modulate the time during which the proteins are complexed and therefore no longer available to lubricate the mouth.