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Podcasts offer a unique tool in making science learning informative, engaging, and entertaining. They provide an excellent way to incorporate storytelling in science instruction. Podcasts can be accessed easily and free of cost on any internet-enabled device. Recording podcasts is also easy and inexpensive, making them useful to record lesson summaries and other content for revision. This article outlines different ways of using podcasts in the teaching and learning process. To support informal learning, podcasts typically cover cross-disciplinary issues that are relevant to present times as well as those important to local communities. They also feature interviews with researchers who walk through the scientific process of their discoveries. All of these things add value to a physics unit beyond textbook content. In a subject where assessments are dominated by mathematical equations, student-recorded podcasts offer an opportunity for students to string together spoken-word narratives of physics phenomena. In this article, we outline an example lesson centered around the NPR "Short Wave" podcast.

A number of synoptic sky surveys are underway or being planned. Typically, they are done with small telescopes and relatively short exposure times. A search for transient or variable sources involves comparison with deeper baseline images, ideally obtained through the same telescope and camera. With that in mind, we have stacked images from the 0.68 m Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow taken over 10 yr as part of the Catalina Sky Survey. In order to generate deep reference images for the Catalina Real-time Transient Survey (CRTS), close to 0.8 million images over 8000 fields and covering over 27 000 sq. deg have gone into the deep stack that goes up to 3 mag deeper than individual images. CRTS system does not use a filter in imaging; hence, there is no standard passband in which the optical magnitude is measured. We estimate depth by comparing these wide-band unfiltered co-added images with images in the g band and find that the image depth ranges from 22.0 to 24.2 across the sky, with a 200-image stack attaining an equivalent AB magnitude sensitivity of 22.8. We compared various state-of-the-art software packages for co-adding astronomical images and have used swarp for the stacking. We describe here the details of the process adopted. This methodology may be useful in other panoramic imaging applications, and to other surveys as well. The stacked images are available through a server at Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Podcasts offer a unique tool in making science learning informative, engaging, and entertaining. They provide an excellent way to incorporate storytelling in science instruction. Podcasts can be accessed easily and free of cost on any internet-enabled device. Recording podcasts is also easy and inexpensive, making them useful to record lesson summaries and other content for revision. This article outlines different ways of using podcasts in the teaching and learning process. To support informal learning, podcasts typically cover cross-disciplinary issues that are relevant to present times as well as those important to local communities. They also feature interviews with researchers who walk through the scientific process of their discoveries. All of these things add value to a physics unit beyond textbook content. In a subject where assessments are dominated by mathematical equations, student-recorded podcasts offer an opportunity for students to string together spoken-word narratives of physics phenomena. In this article, we outline an example lesson centered around the NPR Short Wave podcast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With an installed capacity of over 19,000 MW, the wind power currently accounts for almost 70% of the total installed capacity among the renewable energy sector in India. The extraction of wind power mainly depends on prevailing meteorology which is strongly influenced by monsoon variability. The monsoon season is characterized by significant fluctuations in between periods of wet and dry spells. During the dry spells, the demand for power from agriculture and cooling equipment increases, whereas during the wet periods, such demand reduces, although, at the same time, the power supply increases because of strong westerly winds contributing to an enhanced production of wind energy. At this backdrop, we aim to assess the impact of intra-seasonal wind variability on the balance of energy supply and demand during monsoon seasons in India. Further, we explore the probable cause of wind variability by relating it to El Nino events. It is observed that the active and break phases in wind significantly impact the overall wind potential output. Although the dry spells are generally found to reduce the overall wind potential, their impact on the potential seems to have declined after the year 2000. The impact of meteorological changes on variations in wind power studied in this work should find applications typically in taking investment decisions on conventional generation facilities, like thermal, which are currently used to maintain the balance of power supply and demand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT A probabilistic framework for evaluating changes in offshore wind potential under a changing climate is presented considering three general circulation models ( GCMs), two representative concentration pathways and two statistical downscaling techniques. The analysis was done with respect to three specific locations along the Indian coastline, identified earlier for future offshore energy extraction. The uncertainty among the GCMs was addressed and the choice of an appropriate GCM was made by combining analysis of GCM uncertainty and model reliability. The regional scale wind was derived from the selected GCM using one hard computing method, namely bilinear interpolation and quantile mapping, and one soft method, an artificial neural network. The efficiency of these methods was assessed using certain performance criteria for the historical period and a convergence criterion over the future period. To evaluate wind potential, the GCM output was downscaled from daily to hourly, taking into account the removal of gusts because of long interval averaging. The wind potential for past (1979-2005) and future (2006-2032) time slices was determined using both hard and soft methods as well as two representative concentration pathways. The resulting four outcomes at annual and seasonal scale were compared with the extrapolated trend of past wind potential derived from both GCM and reanalysis data. Finally, the most efficient strategy was evaluated and the actual extractable power was estimated considering a standard power curve. It is concluded that at all the three locations the annual average wind potential will substantially increase, benefitting the offshore industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]