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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. [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]

Abstract: The increasing global warming is most likely to affect the magnitude and pattern of wind at a regional level and such an effect may or not follow the trend predicted at the global scale. Regional level exercises are therefore necessary while making decisions related to engineering infrastructure. In this paper an attempt is made to know the extent of change in design as well as operational wind conditions at two offshore locations along the west coast of India. The design wind speeds with return periods of 10, 50 and 100 years derived for two 30-year time slices in the past and future are compared. In two separate exercises the past and future wind at the local level is simulated by empirical downscaling as well as by interpolation of the general circulation model (GCM) output. Both sets of past and future data are fitted to the Generalized Pareto as well as Weibull distributions using the peak over threshold method to extract long term wind speeds with a specified return. It is noticed that at the given locations the operational and design wind may undergo an increase of around 11%–14% when no downscaling is adopted and 14%–17% when the GCM data are downscaled. Although these figures may suffer from a certain level of statistical uncertainty the study points out to take a relook into the safety margins kept in the design and operation of ocean structures in the light of global warming. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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]