Fish Out Of Water! - Halfbrick Studios

Launch a daredevil group of fishy friends to the sky in Fish Out Of Water, an adventure across the sun, sand and surf!

This is a brand new mobile masterpiece from Halfbrick, creators of Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride!

Fish Out Of Water is the story of six feisty fish longing to soar above the ocean and see the world from a whole new perspective. To help them get airborne, players simply throw their fish of choice right out of the water and watch as it flies through the clouds and skips merrily along the waves. But there’s a lot more to this adventure under the surface!

Players will have to battle the elements and choose their throw wisely as the weather changes hourly. Expect the unexpected with crazy tsunamis, icebergs and even an immense jellyfish swarm!

After three throws, the Crab Crew will score your overall performance, and that’s where the competition really heats up! Players can compete in daily league score competitions with their friends and monitor their level progress. As different objectives are completed, players level up and unlock charms which can be crafted to unleash awesome bonus powers at the start of each game!

Fish Out Of Water is an easy choice for instant fun – a seaworthy search for the perfect 10!

View the original article here

Fish Out Of Water! - Halfbrick Studios

Launch a daredevil group of fishy friends to the sky in Fish Out Of Water, an adventure across the sun, sand and surf!

This is a brand new mobile masterpiece from Halfbrick, creators of Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride!

Fish Out Of Water is the story of six feisty fish longing to soar above the ocean and see the world from a whole new perspective. To help them get airborne, players simply throw their fish of choice right out of the water and watch as it flies through the clouds and skips merrily along the waves. But there’s a lot more to this adventure under the surface!

Players will have to battle the elements and choose their throw wisely as the weather changes hourly. Expect the unexpected with crazy tsunamis, icebergs and even an immense jellyfish swarm!

After three throws, the Crab Crew will score your overall performance, and that’s where the competition really heats up! Players can compete in daily league score competitions with their friends and monitor their level progress. As different objectives are completed, players level up and unlock charms which can be crafted to unleash awesome bonus powers at the start of each game!

Fish Out Of Water is an easy choice for instant fun – a seaworthy search for the perfect 10!

View the original article here

Astronomers Find Largest, Most Distant Reservoir of Water

This artist's concept illustrates a quasar, or feeding black hole, similar to APM 08279+5255, where astronomers discovered huge amounts of water vapor. Gas and dust likely form a torus around the central black hole, with clouds of charged gas above and below. Image credit: NASA/ESA
› Full image and caption July 22, 2011

Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. The water, equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world's ocean, surrounds a huge, feeding black hole, called a quasar, more than 12 billion light-years away.

"The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it's producing this huge mass of water," said Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times." Bradford leads one of the teams that made the discovery. His team's research is partially funded by NASA and appears in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

A quasar is powered by an enormous black hole that steadily consumes a surrounding disk of gas and dust. As it eats, the quasar spews out huge amounts of energy. Both groups of astronomers studied a particular quasar called APM 08279+5255, which harbors a black hole 20 billion times more massive than the sun and produces as much energy as a thousand trillion suns.

Astronomers expected water vapor to be present even in the early, distant universe, but had not detected it this far away before. There's water vapor in the Milky Way, although the total amount is 4,000 times less than in the quasar, because most of the Milky Way's water is frozen in ice.

Water vapor is an important trace gas that reveals the nature of the quasar. In this particular quasar, the water vapor is distributed around the black hole in a gaseous region spanning hundreds of light-years in size (a light-year is about six trillion miles). Its presence indicates that the quasar is bathing the gas in X-rays and infrared radiation, and that the gas is unusually warm and dense by astronomical standards. Although the gas is at a chilly minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 degrees Celsius) and is 300 trillion times less dense than Earth's atmosphere, it's still five times hotter and 10 to 100 times denser than what's typical in galaxies like the Milky Way.

Measurements of the water vapor and of other molecules, such as carbon monoxide, suggest there is enough gas to feed the black hole until it grows to about six times its size. Whether this will happen is not clear, the astronomers say, since some of the gas may end up condensing into stars or might be ejected from the quasar.

Bradford's team made their observations starting in 2008, using an instrument called "Z-Spec" at the California Institute of Technology's Submillimeter Observatory, a 33-foot (10-meter) telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Follow-up observations were made with the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy (CARMA), an array of radio dishes in the Inyo Mountains of Southern California.

The second group, led by Dariusz Lis, senior research associate in physics at Caltech and deputy director of the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory, used the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps to find water. In 2010, Lis's team serendipitously detected water in APM 8279+5255, observing one spectral signature. Bradford's team was able to get more information about the water, including its enormous mass, because they detected several spectral signatures of the water.

Other authors on the Bradford paper, "The water vapor spectrum of APM 08279+5255," include Hien Nguyen, Jamie Bock, Jonas Zmuidzinas and Bret Naylor of JPL; Alberto Bolatto of the University of Maryland, College Park; Phillip Maloney, Jason Glenn and Julia Kamenetzky of the University of Colorado, Boulder; James Aguirre, Roxana Lupu and Kimberly Scott of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Hideo Matsuhara of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Japan; and Eric Murphy of the Carnegie Institute of Science, Pasadena.

Funding for Z-Spec was provided by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Research Corporation and the partner institutions.

Caltech manages JPL for NASA. More information about JPL is online at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov .

Whitney Clavin/Alan Buis 818-354-4673/818-354-0474
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov / alan.buis@jpl.nasa.gov

2011-223

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Water Hit With Young Star's Best Shot

A jet of gas firing out of a very young star can be seen ramming into a wall of material in this infrared Spitzer image. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA
› Full image and caption September 18, 2008

Water is being blasted to pieces by a young star's laser-like jets, according to new observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

The discovery provides a better understanding of how water -- an essential ingredient for life as we know it -- is processed in emerging solar systems.

"This is a truly unique observation that will provide important information about the chemistry occurring in planet-forming regions, and may give us insights into the chemical reactions that made water and even life possible in our own solar system," said Achim Tappe, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.

A young star forms out of a thick, rotating cloud of gas and dust. Like the two ends of a spinning top, powerful jets of gas emerge from the top and bottom of the dusty cloud. As the cloud shrinks more and more under its own gravity, its star eventually ignites and the remaining dust and gas flatten into a pancake-like disk, from which planets will later form. By the time the star ignites and stops accumulating material from its cloud, the jets will have died out.

Tappe and his colleagues used Spitzer's infrared eyes to cut through the dust surrounding a nascent star, called HH 211-mm, and get a better look at its jets. These particular jets are exceptionally young at 1,000 years old, and they are some of the most collimated, or focused, known. An instrument on Spitzer called a spectrometer analyzed light from one of the jets, revealing information about its molecules.

To the astronomers' surprise, Spitzer picked up the signature of rapidly spinning fragments of water molecules, called hydroxyl, or OH. In fact, the hydroxyl molecules have absorbed so much energy (through a process called excitation) that they are rotating around with energies equivalent to 28,000 Kelvin (27,700 degrees Celsius). This far exceeds normal expectations for gas streaming out of a stellar jet. Water, which is abbreviated H2O, is made up of one oxygen atom and two hydrogens; hydroxyl, or OH, contains one oxygen and one hydrogen atom.

The results reveal that the jet is ramming its head into a wall of material, vaporizing ice right off the dust grains it normally coats. The jet is hitting the material so fast and hard that a shock wave is also being produced.

"The shock from colliding atoms and molecules generates ultraviolet radiation, which will break up water molecules, leaving extremely hot hydroxyl molecules," said Tappe.

Tappe said this same process of ice being vaporized off dust occurs in our own solar system, when the sun vaporizes ice in approaching comets. In addition, the water that now coats our world is thought to have come from icy comets that vaporized as they rained down on a young Earth.

Tappe is the lead author of a paper on this topic, which was published in a recent issue of the Astrophysical Journal. Co-authors on the paper include Charlie Lada, and August Muench, also of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; and J. H. Black, of the Chalmers University of Technology, in Onsala, Sweden.

Media contact: Whitney Clavin/JPL
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-0850

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Powerpot turns heat and water into electricity

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Goosefish capture small puffins over deep water of Northwest Atlantic

NEFSC researcher Larry Alade holds a tagged goosefish, or monkfish, prior to release during a cooperative monkfish migration study with commercial fishermen in 2009 and 2010. See related links below for more information. Credit: Pasha Ivanov

(Phys.org) —A recent study has shown that bottom-dwelling goosefish, also known as monkfish, prey on dovekies, a small Arctic seabird and the smallest member of the puffin family. To understand how this deep-water fish finds a shallow-feeding bird in offshore waters, researchers looked at when, where, and how these animals were most likely to be in the same place at the same time.

Remains of fourteen dovekie were recovered from the stomachs of 14 goosefish caught during the winters between 2007 and 2010. The goosefish were captured in gillnets deployed at depths between 275 and 495 feet in waters 65 to 95 miles south of Chatham, Mass. The Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen's Association collected the specimens and provided them for the research study.

Researchers from NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) in Woods Hole, Mass. and the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Md., wanted to know how the birds could be captured so far from shore by a fish that lives on the ocean bottom in deep water. Their findings, recently published online in the Northeastern Naturalist, suggest that it is all a matter of timing.

Goosefish (Lophius americanus) are highly opportunistic predators. Distributed from the Gulf of Maine to Cape Hatteras, N.C., the fish are typically partially buried on soft bottom habitats and attract a variety of prey by using a modified dorsal fin ray that resembles a fishing pole and lure.

Dovekies, a small black and white puffin species, breed along the Arctic coast and head south in the winter, typically as far as New England. The dovekie (Alle alle), also known as little auk, is the smallest of the auks. It lives in the open ocean and can dive to depths o more than 100 feet to prey on small fish, crustaceans, and zooplankton.

Enlarge

A goosefish or monkfish (Lophius americanus) is measured at sea. Credit: NOAA

Study co-author Anne Richards of the NEFSC says tagging studies that she and colleagues have conducted reveal that goosefish swim considerable vertical distances from the bottom to near the surface, especially during their spring and fall migrations onshore and offshore in response to water temperatures and related factors.

Goosefish leave the bottom to use the currents during migration periods or to spawn at the surface. If prey items are encountered during their vertical movements, the goosefish take advantage. Hence, timing may be the key factor in bringing dovekies and goosefish together in the same place.

"Given the common name 'goosefish', it is not surprising to find birds in goosefish stomachs, but it is surprising to find that this predation occurs over deep water, "Richards said. "Goosefish do not actively seek out the dovekies, but when such tasty morsels are available in the water column, the fish are going to consume them."

Another source of data used in the study is the NOAA NEFSC food-habits database, which contains decades of predation information collected from the stomachs of fish that are caught during regular research vessel surveys. While not a particularly good measure of how often or how many birds are eaten by fish, these data confirm that not only goosefish, but also spiny dogfish, Atlantic herring, pollock, Atlantic cod, red hake, and fourspot flounder will eat birds.

Lead author Matthew Perry, a research wildlife biologist at the USGS Patuxtent Wildlife Research Center, says he became interested in goosefish predation when he learned from a sea scalloper on Nantucket that Chatham gillnetters were finding birds inside goosefish stomachs.

"I was studying long-tailed ducks and thought, to avoid being eaten, these birds fly 30 to 50 miles to Nantucket Sound each night and return to the ocean in the morning," said Perry, who studies several species of seaducks. "People ask why don't dovekies fly to Nantucket Sound at night like the long-tailed ducks to avoid goosefish? My explanation is that dovekies have small wings and can't make the routine flight."

"One thing we know is that dovekies cannot dive to the bottom in 300 to 400 feet of water," Perry said. "Goosefish probably come up from the ocean bottom to within 10 to 20 feet of the water surface at night. As dovekies dive for amphipods, small crustaceans, in the morning at first light, goosefish seize the opportunity and might use their 'fishing lure' to simulate one of these prey species by attracting the dovekies with their typical 'sit and wait' behavior."

The magnitude of fish predation on seabirds is poorly understood. Perry says most food habit studies for goosefish have been conducted during summer when the dovekies have migrated north to their Arctic breeding areas; thus, they seldom have been recorded as prey. Perry hopes more telemetry tracking of goosefish will be done in winter when birds are in the area and are potential prey.

As for what's ahead, Richards says ongoing use of electronic tags on goosefish will provide more information on their vertical movements.

Provided by NOAA Headquarters

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Research holds revelations about an ancient society's water conservation, purification

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Key find for treating wastewater on World Water Day

A newly developed membrane used to separate waste from water could become key in the treatment of pollutants ranging from acid mine drainage to oil-containing wastewater, as well as in processes ranging from desalination to kidney dialysis.

The research was published in Scientific Reports (Nature Publishing Group) on Friday, 22 March, coinciding with World Water Day and falling within South Africa's National Water Week.

The technology – which was developed by a team of researchers from Wits University, in collaboration with NASA – will make it easier to filter pure water from waste produced during mining, oil and gas exploration and production, and nuclear exploration, to name a few. Even medical purification processes such as kidney dialysis could benefit.

A commercial product will hopefully be developed soon, and there are plans to approach the US government regarding their problems with contaminants such as arsenic, mercury, and other heavy metals in their water. Closer to home, the technology could make huge inroads in dealing with the major issue of acid mine drainage.

According to the Head of the Wits School of Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering, Prof. Sunny Iyuke, who developed the product in collaboration with two PhD students, the membrane module (similar to a household water filter) could be used to catch water waste from mines before it entered drains or the water table. Water flow analytics could be used to track the direction and location of any escaped wastewater, where another membrane module (in the form of a borehole) could be stationed.

The nanocomposite membrane gives two products: a smaller amount of concentrated waste and water so clean it could be drinkable. The waste can be reused, as in the case of arsenic, which is used in preservatives for wood and leather, ammunitions manufacturing, and pest control. Even the waste from acid mine drainage could be reused.

"Water is critical to sustaining life, and water scarcity is becoming a huge problem not just in South Africa, but all over the world," said Iyuke. "This technology produces a win win situation, for industry and the environment."

Journal reference: Scientific Reports

Provided by Wits University

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