Weatherwatch: Glass globes blown by lightning
The Guardian – April 8
The Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted in April 2010, emitting a cloud of volcanic ash which grounded air traffic across Europe for six days. Five years later, researchers led by Kimberly Genareau, of the University of Alabama. have written, that, among the volcanic debris, were glass spherules (small spheres) measuring less than a 10th of a millimetre across, which had been created by lightning. In their paper published in Geology, the team describe how lightning melts ash particles inside the volcanic plume. Molten ash forms a ball like a raindrop before re-solidifying as a glass spherule. The team confirmed this theory by comparing natural spherules with ones created artificially in high-voltage experiments. The quantity of spherules, which made up about 5% of the debris sampled, showed how much electrical activity there was around the volcanoe. “We hypothesize that the ash would need to be very close, likely within the discharge channel, to be affected,” Genareau said.
‘Goblin green” quasar ghosts caught on camera
Statesboro Herald (Ga.) –April 8
A new series of images show the beauty of quasars flickering to life before fading. NASA researchers described the glowing objects as the “ephemeral ghosts of quasars.” The eight images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope show objects with varying wispy structures, including helical, looping and braided patterns. ”The ethereal wisps outside the host galaxy are believed to have been illuminated by powerful ultraviolet radiation from a supermassive black hole at the core of the host galaxy,” a statement from NASA reads. “The most active of these galaxy cores are called quasars, where infalling material is heated to a point where a brilliant searchlight shines into deep space. The beam is produced by a disk of glowing, superheated gas encircling the black hole.” “Green goblin” objects first caught researchers attention in 2007, when a school teacher found one through the Galaxy Zoo project, according to NASA. The discovery prompted University of Alabama researcher Bill Keel to launch a survey to find more. “The quasars are not bright enough now to account for what we’re seeing; this is a record of something that happened in the past,” Keel said in a statement. “The glowing filaments are telling us that the quasars were once emitting more energy, or they are changing very rapidly, which they were not supposed to do.”
University of Alabama journalism professor gets SEC faculty award
Tuscaloosa News – April 8
Kimberly Bissell, a journalism professor at the University of Alabama, was named Wednesday as one of 14 winners of the 2015 Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Awards. According to an SEC news release, the annual awards honor one faculty member from each SEC university who has excelled in teaching, research and scholarship. “I am extremely honored and humbled to be selected,” Bissell said Wednesday. “I am surrounded by excellent researchers and scholars at the university, and I am completely thrilled to have been selected as this year’s nominee. I am most grateful to the Department of Journalism and the College of Communication and Information Sciences for taking the time and effort to nominate me for this prestigious award.” All 14 honorees will receive a $5,000 honorarium from the SEC and are eligible for the 2015 SEC Professor of the Year Award, which will be named later this month.
University of Alabama ranked No. 58 in Forbes magazine’s list of top employers
Tuscaloosa News – April 8
The University of Alabama ranked No. 58 in Forbes magazine’s list of the nation’s top employers. The business magazine asked more than 20,000 employees at some of the nation’s largest employers to find out if they would recommend their company to a friend and used that data to compile the list. UA employs 6,428 people and has 36,155 students. Birmingham-based Regions Financial was the only other Alabama-based employer to make the list. The top three employers in Forbes’ survey were Google, Costco Wholesale and Marathon Petroleum. Rounding out the top 10 were the Container Store, LL Bean, Baxter International, BMW Group, Shaw Industries, Wegmans Food Markets and Harley-Davidson.
ABC 33/40 (Birmingham) – April 8
‘The Prayer of the South’
Catholic Herald – April 8
“On the 17th day of April, 1861, Virginia issued the proclamation of secession, and the clouds which long since had gathered black and blacker over this country broke; the pen was declared useless, and it was left to the sword to settle the issues and contentions agitating the political parties of these States,” wrote Charles T. Loehr, secretary of the Old First Virginia Infantry Association in his post-war recollection, 1884 War History of the Old First Virginia Infantry Regiment, Army of Northern Virginia. Today, the Civil War lives in reenactments, books, documentaries and museum exhibits. Some may remember it through single artifacts — a cannon, the hoop skirt — or dates on a timeline. But when it ended 150 years ago with the April 9 surrender at Appomattox Court House, the Civil War was a conflict that haunted Americans on a daily basis … But not everyone agrees with the argument that Irish — or any immigrant identity — played a distinct role in the Union or Confederate efforts. “I don’t think the ethnic differences among Catholics had much impact on Catholic participation in the war (in the Confederacy),” said George C. Rable, a professor in Southern history at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. “Some Confederates claimed they were much more tolerant of Catholicism than northerners (they often referred to Know Nothingism).”
Troopers prepare for crackdown on texting, driving
Montgomery Advertiser – April 8
Texting and driving continues to be a distraction among Alabama drivers and has caused more than 1,000 vehicle accidents in 2014 in the state. This week a new national campaign, U Drive. U Text. U Pay. will launch Friday to curb texting in order to prevent accidents caused by using phones. The campaign, which will last through April 15, is sponsored through Alabama State Troopers with the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency. Troopers will use a combination of strategies to “crack down on motorists who text while driving,” according to Sgt. Steve Jarrett with ALEA. The campaign will push for higher-visibility of troopers on the road, in order to enforce anti-texting laws including advertisements and public outreach to stop roadway texting. Out of more than 130,000 accidents reported last year in Alabama, 1,444 of those were caused by a driver using an electronic communication device or another electronic-type device, according to data collected by the university of Alabama Advanced Center of Public Safety.
Yale Richards Professional Education Seminar
The Jewish Press – April 8
The 2015 Yale Richards Professional Education Seminar will be held on Friday, May 1, at the Boys Town Conference Center. The Jewish Federation of Omaha Foundation is co-sponsoring the event with Boys Town and the Union Bank & Trust Company. The seminar is geared toward attorneys, accountants, financial advisors, insurance professionals, and charitable planners. Featured at the seminar will be three nationally known speakers addressing the topics of IRA planning, estate planning, charitable giving tax planning and family legacy conversations … Steven G. Siegel is president of The Siegel Group, which provides consulting services to attorneys, accountants, business owners, family offices and financial planners. Based in Morristown, New Jersey, the Group provides services throughout the United States. He is presently serving as an adjunct professor of law in the Graduate Tax Program (LLM) of the University of Alabama and has served as an adjunct professor of law at Seton Hall and Rutgers University law schools. Siegel will talk about charitable giving tax planning.
Pabst to give Tide Talk on censorship, satire
Crimson White – April 9
Former Tide Talks president Kevin Pabst, a senior majoring in communications studies from Niceville, Florida, will give his own Tide Talk on Friday, April 17, at 7 p.m. in Russell Hall. What are you speaking about? This next Tide Talks, I will be talking about satire using my background drawing cartoons for The Crimson White and whatnot, speaking to its power as a rhetorical tool to engage people in conversations about current events, cast subjects in new lights and encourage folks to consider ideas they might otherwise reject. How did you choose your topic? I’ve been doing cartoons for The Crimson White since my freshman year, sporadically at first but more consistently recently, and I’ve always had a love of comedy of all forms and satire, specifically. There were a couple of instances last year with a cartoon that I released that got a little bit of controversy because it was misunderstood, and then other forms of satire more recently with the Charlie Hebdo incident, Trevor Noah, Colbert had an incident last summer. It just seems like recently satire is causing a lot of fuss, and I wanted to examine why that was.