Yes, wonderful photos.
Yes, wonderful photos.
After a bad personal moment. I am slowly returning to activity. It is good to know we can share beauty with our friends. Thanks c303a and Mike029.
Duke
I would like to invite all friends to make a small stomp for some days at rosetta. The Team Musketeers will be stomping for this week but you can crunch in your own team, if you want.
The important is to crunch rosetta. I would appreciate vey much your help on the fight of some human diseases. Thanks in advance for your help.
your friend
Duke of Buckingham
Rosetta@home needs your help to determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins in research that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases. By running the Rosetta program on your computer while you don't need it you will help us speed up and extend our research in ways we couldn't possibly attempt without your help. You will also be helping our efforts at designing new proteins to fight diseases such as HIV, Malaria, Cancer, and Alzheimer's (See our Disease Related Research for more information). Please join us in our efforts! Rosetta@home is not for profit.
Thank you very much for your help and crunching on this important project. You are the best friends one can have.
Duke, I had my old PC on it anyway but just now put my Quad on it as well. I'll keep crunching Rosetta till simap has work.
That is the idea to fullfill the gap, till boincsimap starts, with something usefull and keep the Team alert, and not disperse helping a friend on a personal project from all to all. In spite Alzheimer doesn`t usually show before 60 there are some cases the illness shows early signs of development at an earlier stage. That can be a blessing and a hell at the same time.
Any how all forms of dead are a wipe out of all the knoledge adquired in a lifetime, some big losses of memories and study, the paying price for our big mathematical brains, that we are trying to solve and keep all that knoledge alive because no one writes all that knows and for sure all that he learned about feelings. We need a lifetime to learn how to feel as kids again. Isn`t it?
Your Friend
Duke
Keep the good working for a small while more ... that is my wish.
Last edited by Duke of Buckingham; 04-26-12 at 06:21 PM.
Any time Duke. Glad to help.
Our friends, each time we see them less. It seems it was only when we were young, worked and drank together that we met as often as wanted, always daily. And in the greatest luxury of all, lost for so long: Because we had nothing better to do.
This week I have lunch with my great friends, that for the first time in our lives, I do not see for so many years. Each one of them starts talking to me as if I had not spent a day without seeing them.
Nothing fails. All fires out as if this was in our blood: the excitation of counting things and the joy of sharing trifles; LOL of the oft-repeated jokes; and the promises of hopes that are decades for accomplish.
There are great friends that I am lucky to have that insist in the importance of the PRESENCE in capital letters. So far never agreed, thinking that nostalgia makes jokes of the time and that the heart is more sensitive to the reminder than to repetition. I was wrong.
The best friends have to do is to see themselves whenever they can. It is true that, even if ten years have passed, is like we have seen each other yesterday. But even then we can feel the pleasure of finding who we never thought to find.
Time doesn`t pass for friendship, but friendship passes to time. You have to hold it while is there. We are friends forever but between day of staying friends and the day of die is a great distance. A distance as large as life.
Volcanic gas
Krakatoa
Volcanic gases include a variety of substances given off by active (or, at times, by dormant) volcanoes. These include gases trapped in cavities (vesicles) in volcanic rocks, dissolved or dissociated gases in magma and lava, or gases emanating directly from lava or indirectly through ground water heated by volcanic action.
The sources of volcanic gases on Earth include:
primordial and recycled constituents from the Earth's mantle,
assimilated constituents from the Earth's crust,
groundwater and the Earth's atmosphere.
Substances that may become gaseous or give off gases when heated are termed volatile substances.
Composite Volcano
Gases are released from magma through volatile constituents reaching such high concentrations in the base magma that they evaporate. (Technically, this would be described as the exsolution and accumulation of the gases upon reaching excess supersaturation of these constituents in the host solution (magmatic melt), and their subsequent loss from the host by diffusion and phase separation into bubbles). Molten rock (either magma or lava) near the atmosphere releases high-temperature volcanic gas (>400 °C). In explosive volcanic eruptions, sudden release of gases from magma may cause rapid movements of the molten rock. When the magma encounters water, seawater, lake water or groundwater, it can be rapidly fragmented. The rapid expansion of gases is the driving mechanism of most explosive volcanic eruptions. However, a significant portion of volcanic gas release occurs during quasi-continuous quiescent phases of active volcanism.
If the magmatic gas traveling upward encounters meteoric water in an aquifer, steam is produced. Latent magmatic heat can also cause meteoric waters to ascent as a vapour phase. Extended fluid-rock interaction of this hot mixture can leach constituents out of the cooling magmatic rock and also the country rock, causing volume changes and phase transitions, reactions and thus an increase in ionic strength of the upward percolating fluid. This process also decreases the fluid's pH. Cooling can cause phase separation and mineral deposition, accompanied by a shift toward more reducing conditions. At the surface expression of such hydrothermal systems, low-temperature volcanic gases (<400 °C) are either emanating as steam-gas mixtures or in dissolved form in hot springs. At the ocean floor, such hot supersaturated hydrothermal fluids form gigantic chimney structures called black smokers, at the point of emission into the cold seawater.
Eruption Column
The gas release can occur by advection through fractures, or via diffuse degassing through large areas of permeable ground as Diffuse Degassing Structures (DDS). At sites of advective gas loss, precipitation of sulfur and rare salts forms sulfur deposits and small sulfur chimneys, called fumaroles. Very low-temperature <100 °C) fumarolic structures are also known as solfataras. Sites of cold degassing of predominantly carbon dioxide are called mofettes. Hot springs on volcanoes often show a measurable amount of magmatic gas in dissolved form.
The principal components of volcanic gases are water vapor (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2), sulfur either as sulfur dioxide (SO2) (high-temperature volcanic gases) or hydrogen sulfide (H2S) (low-temperature volcanic gases), nitrogen, argon, helium, neon, methane, carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Other compounds detected in volcanic gases are oxygen (meteoric), hydrogen chloride, hydrogen fluoride, hydrogen bromide, nitrogen oxide (NOx), sulfur hexafluoride, carbonyl sulfide, and organic compounds. Exotic trace compounds include methylmercury, halocarbons (including CFCs), and halogen oxide radicals.
The abundance of gases varies considerably from volcano to volcano. Water vapor is consistently the most common volcanic gas, normally comprising more than 60% of total emissions. Carbon dioxide typically accounts for 10 to 40% of emissions.
Volcanoes located at convergent plate boundaries emit more water vapor and chlorine than volcanoes at hot spots or divergent plate boundaries. This is caused by the addition of seawater into magmas formed at subduction zones. Convergent plate boundary volcanoes also have higher H2O/H2, H2O/CO2, CO2/He and N2/He ratios than hot spot or divergent plate boundary volcanoes.
Volcanic Gas Collect
Volcanic gases were collected and analysed as long ago as 1790 by Scipione Breislak in Italy.
Volcanic gases can be sensed (measured in-situ) or sampled for further analysis. Volcanic gas sensing can be:
within the gas by means of electrochemical sensors and flow-through infrared-spectroscopic gas cells
outside the gas by ground-based or airborne remote spectroscopy (e.g., COSPEC, FLYSPEC, DOAS, FTIR)
Volcanic gas sampling is often done by a method involving an evacuated flask with caustic solution, first used by Robert W. Bunsen (1811-1899) and later refined by the German chemist Werner F. Giggenbach (1937-1997), dubbed Giggenbach-bottle. Other methods include collection in evacuated empty containers, in flow-through glass tubes, in gas wash bottles (cryogenic scrubbers), on impregnated filter packs and on solid adsorbent tubes.
Analytical techniques for gas samples comprise gas chromatography with thermal conductivity detection (TCD), flame ionization detection (FID) and mass spectrometry (GC-MS) for gases, and various wet chemical techniques for dissolved species (e.g., acidimetric titration for dissolved CO2, and ion chromatography for sulfate, chloride, fluoride). The trace metal, trace organic and isotopic composition is usually determined by different mass spectrometric methods.
Certain constituents of volcanic gases may show very early signs of changing conditions at depth, making them a powerful tool to predict imminent unrest. Used in conjunction with monitoring data on seismicity and deformation, correlative monitoring gains great efficiency. Volcanic gas monitoring is a standard tool of any volcano observatory. Unfortunately, the most precise compositional data still require dangerous field sampling campaigns. However, remote sensing techniques have advanced tremendously through the 1990s.
Volcanic gases were directly responsible for approximately 3% of all volcano-related deaths of humans between 1900 and 1986. Some volcanic gases kill by acidic corrosion; others kill by asphyxiation. The greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, is emitted from volcanoes, accounting for nearly 1% of the annual global total.[3] Some volcanic gases including sulfur dioxide, hydrogen chloride, hydrogen sulfide and hydrogen fluoride react with other atmospheric particles to form aerosols.
Mount Saint Helens Eruption
References
a b c d H. Sigurdsson et al. (2000) Encyclopedia of Volcanoes, San Diego, Academic Press
N. Morello (editor) (1998), Volcanoes and History, Genoa, Brigati
Royal Society Climate Change Controversies, London, June 2007
Maya wall calendar discovered
Ancient astronomical records found on room’s painted walls
By Bruce Bower
Web edition : Thursday, May 10th, 2012
Astronomical tables dating to the golden age of Maya civilization have unexpectedly come to light on the walls of a roughly 1,200-year-old room in Guatemala.
Hieroglyphs and numbers painted on the stucco walls of a structure built during the Classic Maya civilization record cycles of the moon, and possibly Mars, Venus and Mercury, say Boston University archaeologist William Saturno and his colleagues. Excavations in 2010 and 2011 at Xultun, a Maya site first described in 1915, revealed that painted murals once covered three of the room’s inside walls and its vaulted ceiling.
Until now, Maya astronomical tables were known from bark-paper books — known as the Dresden Codex — created 400 years or more after the ancient civilization’s demise around 900, the researchers report in the May 11 Science.
“The Xultun finds provide the first direct evidence of astronomical information from the summit of Maya glyphic literacy, the Classic period,” remarks archaeologist Stephen Houston of Brown University. He calls the recording of astronomical tables on walls rather than in a book “baffling, even astonishing.”
One Xultun wall section contains bar-and-dot numbers in columns that resemble astronomical tables in the Dresden Codex. Moon hieroglyphs appear atop at least five columns. These tables record lunar months, in six-month sets, over roughly 13 years. The number 13 held special significance for organizing the Maya calendar.
“It’s as though someone today took a university textbook and painted it on a wall,” says archaeologist Charles Golden of Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.
Similar numerical records at Xultun and in the Dresden Codex suggest that the Maya passed and revised astronomical information over many generations after the Classic collapse, Saturno says.
A table of solar and lunar eclipses in the Dresden Codex starts in the mid-8th century, indicating that the document was based on information from at least 50 years before the Xultun finds, anthropologists Harvey Bricker and Victoria Bricker, both of Tulane University in New Orleans, wrote in a joint email.
Referring to Dresden Codex calculations of a starting time for astronomical tables, the Brickers say that corresponding numbers at Xultun record a period of almost exactly 198 eclipse seasons. Each 37-day eclipse season contains at least one solar and one lunar eclipse.
“Ritual specialists at Xultun, like the authors of the Dresden Codex, were concerned not only with the moon’s monthly cycle but with the much longer cycle of solar and lunar eclipses,” the Brickers conclude. So the Xultun Maya used walls as scratch pads to construct astronomical records, the Brickers suggest.
A plaster bench in the Xultun room, resembling benches Maya rulers used at royal court meetings, sits in front of a painting of a king talking to a kneeling attendant, says archaeologist David Freidel of Washington University in St. Louis. Classic Maya vases show similar court scenes, sometimes with humans and gods writing on tablets, Freidel says. No pottery depictions of anyone writing on walls have been found.
Inside a structure excavated at the ancient Maya city of Xultun, researchers found walls bearing astronomical tables and paintings of big-wigs such as these. Credit: Tyrone Turner, copyright 2012 National Geographic
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