The colorful images chronicle the seasonal stirrings of our salty world: Pulses of freshwater gush from the Amazon River’s mouth; an invisible seam divides the salty Arabian Sea from the fresher waters of the Bay of Bengal; a large patch of freshwater appears in the eastern tropical Pacific in the winter. These and other changes in ocean salinity patterns are revealed by the first full year of surface salinity data captured by NASA’s Aquarius instrument.
“With a bit more than a year of data, we are seeing some surprising patterns, especially in the tropics,” said Aquarius Principal Investigator Gary Lagerloef, of Earth & Space Research in Seattle. “We see features evolve rapidly over time.” (more…)
Award-winning journalist, activist, and author Charlayne Hunter-Gault told a packed audience at Yale that lessons learned from the civil rights movement still have relevance for current and future generations.
Hunter-Gault delivered a lecture titled “Social Justice, Equity, and Public Health” during a Branford College master’s tea on Feb. 5. (more…)
Former U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan predicted during a campus visit that the civil war in Syria will become even more tragic before the international community takes action to help resolve the conflict, but said he is optimistic about the political and economic prospects for Africa in the years ahead. (more…)
Insight Public Sector selected to deliver licensing agreement aimed at reducing IT costs while offering advanced mobility, collaboration and cloud computing capabilities to personnel.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Jan. 4, 2013 — In an effort to modernize technology infrastructure, reduce costs and foster new levels of cross-agency collaboration, the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) are expanding access to Microsoft solutions by entering into a transformative three-year Joint Enterprise Licensing Agreement for enterprise licenses and software assurance. The agreement provides all three organizations with a single vehicle for accessing the latest Microsoft technologies in support of top IT priorities around datacenter consolidation, collaboration, cybersecurity, mobility, cloud computing and big data.
This is the most comprehensive licensing agreement Microsoft Corp. has ever established with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), covering nearly 75 percent of all DoD personnel. The net new contract was awarded to Insight Public Sector, a division of Insight Enterprises Inc., one of the largest global Microsoft Large Account Resellers. (more…)
Researchers have discovered what may be the earliest dinosaur, a creature the size of a Labrador retriever, but with a five foot-long tail, that walked the Earth about 10 million years before more familiar dinosaurs like the small, swift-footed Eoraptor and Herrerasaurus.
The findings mean that the dinosaur lineage appeared 10 million to 15 million years earlier than fossils previously showed, originating in the Middle Triassic rather than in the Late Triassic period. (more…)
Doctoral student studies energy poverty in Ghana, Africa
In the United States, electricity is a creature comfort many citizens take for granted. Yet for more than a billion people across the globe, particularly in developing regions, electrification is the exception, not the norm.
Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, is the least electrified region in the world. It has the lowest generation capacity behind eastern South Asia and few programs that provide access to modern forms of energy. (more…)
Workshop helps to define the human right to benefit from science
Conscience. Expression. Property. Fair trial. Peaceful assembly. And science?
Yes, says the University of Delaware’s Tom Powers, the international community has declared that there is an inalienable human right to science.
In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees in Article 27 “the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”
The same right was reaffirmed by the U.N. General Assembly in Article 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1966. (more…)
A new species of plant-eating dinosaur with tiny, 1-inch-long jaws has come to light in South African rocks dating to the early dinosaur era, some 200 million years ago.
This “punk-sized” herbivore is one of a menagerie of bizarre, tiny, fanged plant-eaters called heterodontosaurs, or “different toothed reptiles,” which were among the first dinosaurs to spread across the planet. (more…)
