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May 22 2007
Paula Abdul Breaks Nose in Dog Mishap
The Associated Press
May 22, 2007
Paula Abdul broke her nose over the weekend after she fell while trying
to avoid stepping on her Chihuahua, her publicist said Monday.
Abdul was recovering from the mishap and will appear on 'American Idol'
Tuesday and its season finale Wednesday, publicist David Brokaw said.
'She's a little sore, but is doing fine,' he said.
Abdul told the syndicated entertainment TV show 'Extra' she tore
cartilage in her nose and fractured her toe.
'I took a nasty fall ... trying not to hurt my dog. I bruised myself on
my arm ... my chest, my waist all the way down to my hip. All from my
little chubby Tulip,' Abdul said.
The dog was not hurt, Brokaw said.
A little
NASA Mars rover has come across soil that scientists said on Tuesday
suggests hot springs may have percolated long ago on the Martian
surface, providing an environment conducive to life.
The six-wheeled rolling robot Spirit, exploring the expansive Gusset
Crater just south of the Martian equator, detected a patch of
light-colored soil that was 90 percent pure silica, an indicator of the
past presence of water, they said.
"It was astonishing," Steve Squires of Cornell University in Ithaca, New
York, a senior scientist in the rover project, said in a telephone
interview. "We had never seen anything like this on Mars before."
Scientists using the rover to glean information about Mars -- the fourth
planet from the sun, after Earth -- said the discovery is the latest
strong piece of evidence that dusty and desolate Mars was once a wet and
wild.
Wondering whether life on Earth is unique in the cosmos, scientists are
eager to determine whether Mars was ever habitable, perhaps by microbial
life forms. Water is considered a vital ingredient for life.
Silica is found widely on Earth in several forms including quartz and
opal. It is a common sand component. And it often is deposited in places
like hot springs where scalding water interacts with rock.
Scientists are offering a couple of explanations for the Martian silica.
One is that it may have resulted from the interaction of soil with acid
vapors produced eons ago by volcanic activity in the presence of water.
Another more intriguing theory, they said, is that the silica was
spawned in hot springs like those seen at Yellowstone National Park,
straddling Wyoming, Montana and Idaho in the United States.
'POTENTIAL HABITAT FOR LIFE'
The fact that the soil was 90 percent silica got the scientists'
attention. "Typically on Earth, the only way you can achieve that level
of enrichment is by pumping water through rocks," Steve Ruff of Arizona
State University in Tempe, another scientist in the project, said by
telephone.
Scientists have amassed a lot of evidence of large deposits of water ice
at the Martian poles, signs of limited surface water elsewhere and
abundant evidence that large bodies of liquid water flowed freely on the
surface in the past.
"If indeed we are seeing a hydrothermal hot spring, these places on
Earth are great hosts for life," Ruff said. "We know that cyan bacteria
and various other bugs and life forms really thrive in these kind of hot
spring environments. If that's what we've found on Mars, we have
certainly found a potential habitat for life."
Spirit has been exploring Mars for three years, far longer than the
three-month mission for which it was intended.
Because one of its wheels no longer rotates, the rover scuffs up the
ground as it rolls through the mix of hard rock and loose soil on the
surface. Venturing through a low range of hills inside the crater, it
scraped up and exposed some bright soil that turned out to be the
silica.
FALLBROOK, Calif. - A golfer died Tuesday after his golf
cart plunged 75 feet off a cliff and crashed onto a road below,
authorities said.
The 65-year-old man teed off with three friends on the second hole of
the Pale Mesa Resort Golf Course about 50 miles north of San Diego at
around 10 a.m. and then got into his cart.
The vehicle veered off the concrete pathway, traveled down a 25-foot
embankment and went over the edge of the cliff, California Highway
Patrol spokesman Tom Kerns said.
The victim, a recently retired real estate agent from Irvine, was
ejected shortly before the cart hit the road beneath the cliff and died
on impact, Kerns said. His name was not immediately released.
No one else was involved in the crash.
Investigators will inspect the golf cart for mechanical failures, Kerns
said. Drugs or alcohol were not thought to have been factors in the
crash.
Do you think Seattle is the rainiest city in the United
States? Well, think again.
Mobile, Alabama, actually topped a new list of soggiest cities, with
more than 5 feet of rainfall annually, according to a study conducted by
San Francisco-based Weather Bill, Inc.
The Southeast dominated the most rainy list, while the Pacific Northwest
never enters the list until Olympia, Washington pops up at number 24.
The 10 rainiest cities in the U.S. by amount of annual rainfall include:
Mobile, Alabama--67 inches average annual rainfall; 59 average annual
rainy days Pensacola, Florida--65 inches average annual rainfall; 56
average annual rainy days New Orleans, Louisiana--64 inches average
annual rainfall; 59 average annual rainy days West Palm Beach,
Florida--63 inches average annual rainfall; 58 average annual rainy days
Lafayette, Louisiana--62 inches average annual rainfall; 55 average
annual rainy days Baton Rouge, Louisiana--62 inches average annual
rainfall; 56 average annual rainy days Miami, Florida--62 inches average
annual rainfall; 57 average annual rainy days Port Arthur, Texas--61
inches average annual rainfall; 51 average annual rainy days
Tallahassee, Florida--61 inches average annual rainfall; 56 average
annual rainy days Lake Charles, Louisiana--58 inches average annual
rainfall; 50 average annual rainy days
The study ranked 195 cities by the amount of rainfall they received
annually over a 30-year period, although Olympia actually had the most
rainy days on average across the three decades (63) of all the cities in
the study. Mobile came in second on the latter scale, with 59 average
annual rainy days.
Southeastern cities are so prevalent on the list because the warm waters
of the Gulf of Mexico fuel storms that frequently soak the region,
particularly between June and November.
The study also found that in the past 30 years, the East and Southeast
seemed to be getting wetter, while the West got drier. Florida,
Louisiana and Alabama were the wettest states, while California,
Montana, Nevada and Arizona were the driest (Las Vegas took the top spot
for driest city).
Average rainfall was highest in the United States between July and
September and lowest between January and March.
Air pollution from vehicles, industry and the burning of
plant material can choke off the formation of precipitation in some
semi-arid mountainous areas, threatening critical water sources, a new
study finds.
Aerosols, or tiny particles suspended in the air, could potentially
affect the climate by reflecting light back to space and therefore
cooling the surface below or altering the formation process of clouds
and precipitation.
Because aerosol measurements have only been collected reliably more
recently, scientists have been unable to conclusively demonstrate the
effects of aerosols on precipitation, but this new study did just that
using meteorological data extending back to the 1950s and collected on a
mountain in central China.
How it works
Clouds form over mountains when air is pushed upward against one side of
the mountain and subsequently cools, causing the water vapor in it to
condense. As the air descends on the other side of the mountain, it
warms and the clouds evaporate.
Water vapor forms cloud droplets by condensing onto aerosols. These
droplets collide until they form large droplets and eventually become
heavy enough to fall as rain. Because there is only a certain amount of
water vapor in the air, when the air is loaded with more small
particles, less water condenses onto each particle and it takes longer
for them to collide into a big enough droplet to form rain.
"The smaller they are, the longer it takes for them to coalesce into
raindrops," said Daniel Rosenfeld of The Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Because the clouds are short-lived, evaporating as they descend the
mountain, the tiny droplets evaporate before they can become rain.
Rosenfeld and his colleagues quantified this effect on Mt. Hua in
Central China, where meteorological observations have been maintained
for the past 50 years. The scientists inferred aerosol amounts from the
visibility measured there (the more particles in the air, the lower the
visibility is--the shorter the distance you can see clearly).
The team then compared rainfall at the mountaintop to that in nearby
lowland areas, and found that the lower the visibility (or the more
aerosols), the less rain fell in the mountainous area. In fact, they
found that the average precipitation decreased by 20 percent in the last
50 years. The research is detailed in the March 9 issue of the journal
Science.
The effects
In this area of China, mountain rains are a major source of waters for
rivers, like the Yellow River (the second longest river in China and the
seventh longest river in the world), which local people use for
irrigation; as pollution increases and causes precipitation to decrease,
it will be "compromising a major water source," Rosenfeld said.
This effect has been seen in polluted portions of other mountainous
areas, such as the Sierra Nevada range (though not in more pristine
parts of the Rockies, such as Oregon). But it is particularly important
in Asian countries like India and China because of their rapid
industrialization and potable water shortages.
Israel has had problems with precipitation decreases in areas that feed
the Jordan River, Rosenfeld said. To combat the problem, the country has
been seeding clouds since 1961.
Seeding works by dumping aerosols into clouds to encourage the growth of
raindrops. But these aerosols are larger and more hydroscopic, or more
eager to grab up water vapor, so cloud droplets grow bigger faster and
can turn into rain.
"The precipitate ability of the cloud is quite sensitive to what we put
into [it]," Rosenfeld said. "The sensitivity is double-sided."
Opposite effect
Paradoxically, air pollution can have the opposite effect in what are
called convective clouds and can cause them to produce more rain.
Convective clouds form when solar radiation warms the air and causes it
to rise, which in turn causes it to cool and the water vapor in it to
condense.
Convective clouds are larger than clouds formed by lifting over
mountains-- aerosols still cause smaller cloud droplets to form, but
this allows the cloud to persist for longer as raindrops are driven
further up into the clouds by updrafts, allowing them to grow more.
"The whole cloud system can become invigorated," Rosenfeld said.
Pollution from Asia has been observed to have this effect on storms over
the North Pacific.
Solar power should become a mainstream energy choice in
three or four years as companies raise output of a key ingredient used
in solar panels and as China emerges as a producer of them, according to
a report by an environmental research group.
"We are now seeing two major trends that will accelerate the growth of
photovoltaic: the development of advanced technologies, and the
emergence of China as a low-cost producer," Janet Swain, a senior
researcher at the World watch Institute and an author of report, said in
a statement.
Investors have flocked to solar and other renewable energy sources amid
worries about the high costs of oil and natural gas and greenhouse gas
emissions. Solar is the fastest growing energy source, but still
provides less than 1 percent of the world's electricity, in part because
its power can cost homeowners twice as much as power from the grid.
But costs could fall 40 percent in the next few years as polysilicon
becomes more available, Swain said,
More than a dozen companies in Europe, China, Japan, and the United
States will boost production over the next few years of purified
polysilicon, which helps panels convert sunlight into electricity, and
is the main ingredient in semiconductor computer chips, according to the
report.
Polysilicon's feedstock is abundantly available sand. But a downturn in
silicon refining after the high-tech bubble collapse in the late 1990s
has constrained the panel market.
In some of the world's sunniest places, like California, electricity
from solar panels costs the same as power from the grid. A drop in solar
panel prices could expand that to places that only get average sunlight,
making solar more of a mainstream choice, Swain said in an e-mail.
Last year, China passed the United States to become the world's third
largest producer of solar panels, trailing only Germany and Japan.
"To say that Chinese PV producers plan to expand production rapidly in
the year ahead would be an understatement," Travis Bradford, president
of the Prometheus Institute, a Massachusetts-based group that promotes
renewable, said in a release.
"They have raised billions from international IPO's to build capacity
and increase scale with the goal of driving down costs," said Bradford,
who helped write the report.
Many companies are producing thin-film solar technologies that cut the
amount of silicon used in panels. Thin-film could grab a 20 percent
share of the market by 2010, up from 7 percent of the market in 2006,
the report said.
It's almost June -- time for our annual quest for the
perfect summer. Family memories, the perfect tan, a few weeks on a
secluded island? Sounds great, but what if this is also the year when
you're trying to keep a close rein on your expenses?
If it is, I'm here to offer my annual set of tips. Just like last year,
when I offered up four great ways to indulge without overspending (and
they are all still cool ideas, so check them out too), here are four new
ways to indulge with restraint:
1. Become a vineyard insider
Envy your friends their pricey country club memberships? Don't worry,
you can join an exclusive club too, one that makes you feel like the
ultimate insider somewhere for not that much money -- and get great wine
too.
If you live anywhere within driving distance of a wine-growing region
(and that is pretty much anywhere nowadays), join the wine club at your
favorite vineyard. Not only can you have wine sent to your home, but you
also gain instant access to special winemakers' dinners, discounts and
reserve tasting privileges.
For example, in Northern California's El Dorado region, friends there
rave about the clubs at the small boutique Fenton Harriett and the
larger Perry Creek Vineyards. Or outside of Chicago, in Roselle,
Illinois, you can join the wine club at the Lyn Fred Winery.
Or, if the boutique vineyard experience and wine club "perks" aren't so
important, try one of the larger commercial wine clubs like the
California Reds Wine Club.
2. Make the shore come to you
Nothing says "summer's here" like the taste of fresh seafood. If you
can't make it to the shore this summer, the shore might come to you for
far less money. Several online companies specialize in sending you the
makings of a summer seafood feast.
Gorton's "Maine Lobster Party for 2" starts at $116.99 (the total price
depends on the weight you choose) and includes two live lobsters, a tub
of lobster bisque, a 19-quart lobster pot, two shell crackers and picks,
and two bibs and cloth napkins to keep you tidy while you enjoy your
affordably indulgent meal. A lobster dinner for four starts at $199.99,
why not get together a group of friends and split the cost of a classic
summertime feast?
Craving crab instead of lobster? Chesapeake Bay Crab Cakes & More is
celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, as well as being named to
Oprah's "O" list of favorite things. The company ships its famous
product anywhere. You can get four crab cakes for as little as $54, or
splurge for the higher-end offerings like Jumbo Soft Shell Crabs at $74.
3. Boating for less
Boats cost money to own and maintain. The late socialite Pat Buckley
once said that "No one is rich enough to have a boat over 14 feet long."
We'll take her word for it and rent one for the afternoon when the mood
strikes.
Seattleites can indulge their inner Jay Gatsby with a wooden boat from
the Center for Wooden Boats. For the rest of us, living anywhere near a
recreational lake it isn't hard to find a powerboat or even a sailboat
rental. You might pay anywhere from $70 to $140 per hour depending on
the boat or the location -- but, hey, that's a lot cheaper than buying
and maintaining a boat, not to mention getting it to the lake.
If you're willing to indulge a bit more, consider a charter. Available
mainly in coastal areas and the Caribbean, you can charter a good-size
vessel for $1,500 and upward per week. Not dirt cheap -- but again, a
heck of a lot easier than owning, and a heck of a lot of fun. A Google
search on "yacht charter" will get you out of port and on your way.
4. Free outdoor music
Even better than affordable, why not have fun for free? In cities big
and small all over the country summer is a time when you can find free
outdoor music events. Famed opera companies such as the San Francisco
Opera and the New York Metropolitan Opera Company even mount free
outdoor recitals and performances to reward fans and entice new ones.
The New York Met performs several concerts throughout the New York/New
Jersey region in summer, beginning June 12 in Central Park (see
schedule). If you are in the Midwest, Chicago's free Grant Park Music
Festival goes on all summer long, beginning with Beethoven and Brahms on
June 13.
And this doesn't even scratch the surface of outdoor "pops" concerts
everywhere. To find events in your community, keep an eye on the paper,
on the Web sites of your favorite ensembles and the local arts council
or parks and recreation department sites.
Even if this year's list doesn't work for you, you get the idea. Good
summer fun is available all around -- without spending thousands on
expensive, crowded summer destinations.
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