Friday, November 28, 2008

The Agulhas leakage

Agulhas leakage dynamics affects decadal variability in Atlantic overturning circulation in Nature.
The Agulhas leakage around South Africa is the main source of the warm and salty waters carried towards the subpolar North Atlantic as the upper limb of the MOC. The Agulhas leakage region is characterized by vigorous variability on intraseasonal to interannual timescales9 shedding the largest mesoscale eddies in the world ocean10, which are the dominating vehicles transporting and releasing the Indian Ocean waters into the Atlantic11. Observational palaeoclimate studies have suggested a broken inter-ocean exchange on centurial to millennial timescales12, and ocean climate model studies13, 14 have elucidated the potential of the inter-ocean exchange of heat and salt to alter the long-term MOC response. However, large uncertainties in those studies remain, owing to unresolved mesoscale processes15 that govern the dynamics and strength of the Agulhas leakage16; the present study focuses on those effects on decadal timescales.

The MOC is the meridional overturning circulation see Thermohaline circulation in Wikipedia.

Unifying Nanophotonics and Nanomechanics

Photonics: Nanomechanics gets the shakes in Nature.
Photonic circuits can allow light to be tightly confined on a chip. A clever experiment reveals how this process can be exploited to create optical forces that drive a nanoscale mechanical oscillator.

Amazing New "Nanoscope"

Microscopy: A terahertz nanoscope in Nature.
Using a very small light source and scanning it very close to the sample they are able to beat the diffraction limit - by a lot.

Hacking Victoria's Secret

Victoria Secret competition gets hacked - MIT votes for Zion Bible College:)
It was too good to be true.

With more than 5 million votes registered, Drexel University had overwhelmed the Victoria's Secret online poll to become the first school to be added to the Pink Collegiate Collection.

The nearest competition - Texas Tech and George Mason University -trailed behind Drexel by at least two million votes.

Except a majority of the votes from Drexel, and many of the other top 25 schools in the poll, were generated by computer programs.