Driving onto the Web
People over age 65 prefer to get traffic reports from radio and television, while younger people turn to the Internet to find trave l information, according to Penn State research presented earlier this month.
Konstadinos Goulias, professor of civil engineering and environmental engineering, collected data from Seattle-area residents in 1997 and 2000 about their travel habits and awareness of travel information on television, radio, the Internet and telephone.
In 2000, people showed the highest awareness of television and radio as sources for travel information.
The study also found that older people were less likely to be aware of travel information on the Internet and those who were employed were most likely to be aware.
Order more, eat more
Penn State Professor of Nutrition Barbara Rolls recently found that increasing portion sizes subtly promotes overeating. She said policymakers and industry officials should work to make the public aware of why they should eat less.
She offered several recommendations for combating the nation's growing obesity epidemic.
They include: making nutrition labels easy to read and understand; having restaurant officials determine the best way to convey nutritional information to customers; reducing fat and adding water-rich vegetables to foods like hamburgers and sandwiches, which decreases the number of calories in the items.
Forecasting for floods
Penn State and National Weather Service forecasters recently developed a model that could be used to predict flash floods several days in advance.
Paul Knight, instructor of meteorology, said the technique could be similarly used with severe thunderstorms, record heat and cold, and winter storms.
His research team collected the location, date and time of historic flash floods. The researches also determined the temperature, pressure, humidity and winds at various atmospheric locations.
The top five pairs of data that were greatly above or below the normal measurements for the day were then ranked by their difference. These five sets were paired in all possible combinations in order to determine which were present most often during floods.
Knight said that by this summer, forecasters would be able to look at the models and issue a warning three days in advance of a major weather event.
The project only covers the Middle Atlantic forecast region, which includes New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Maryland, but Knight expects to further expand the geographical area to which these models can be applied.
Brown dwarf lights up
Scientists have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to detect X-rays from a brown dwarf in a multiple star system.
The system is as young as 12 million years old and is 180 light years from the sun.
The brown dwarf, known as TWA 5B, is located in the southern constellation Hydra. It is between 15 and 40 times the mass of Jupiter, making that one of the smallest brown dwarfs.
Brown dwarfs are believed to be lighter than the mass needed to cause hydrogen to fuse into helium, as occurs in traditional stars.
This finding could help scientists better understand the evolution of magnetic activity in brown dwarfs.
The research team was led by Gordon Garmire, Penn State professor of astronomy and astrophysics.
