Vocabulary In the News : Red Celery!!

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Florida company unveils red celery

MIAMI | Sat Oct 16, 2010 11:59am EDT

MIAMI (Reuters) - A Florida-based U.S. produce company is looking to titillate the eye and the taste buds by offering a new red-colored celery to give a "colorful crunch" to salads and dips.

Celery producer Duda Farm Fresh Foods unveiled the celery variety, to be sold under the brand name Celery Sensations, at the U.S. Produce Marketing Association's annual Fresh Summit Trade Show in Orlando, Fla. on Saturday.

The company said its researchers developed the milder-tasting red salad vegetable by cross-pollinating an existing green commercial variety with an old-world heritage celery root, or celeriac variety, whose original heirloom seed could be traced back to Eastern Europe.

"It has the same great crisp, fresh flavor as regular celery," Duda Farm Fresh Foods' President Dan Duda said in a statement.

(Reporting by Pascal Fletcher; Editing by Stacey Joyce)

Taken from : http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69F0VC20101016

Vocabulary In the News: Newfound Bird is Bald

http://www.livescience.com/animals/090729-bald-bird.html

By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Staff Writer

posted: 29 July 2009 09:00 pm ET

Scientists have discovered a rare new bird species with a bald head.

The creature, dubbed the bare-faced bulbul, was found in Laos, and is the only known bald songbird in mainland Asia.

It's also the first time in over 100 years that a new Asian species of bulbul bird has been uncovered.

"To find a new bird species is very rare these days," said Peter Clyne, assistant director for Asia Programs at the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York. "It's not like we're finding new species of birds every year. This is certainly a highly newsworthy event."

The chrome-domed songbird was discovered by Wildlife Conservation Society scientists Will Duckworth and Rob Timmins and Iain Woxvold of the University of Melbourne as part of a project funded by a mining company, Minerals and Metals Group, that operates in the region.

The bare-faced bulbul lives in the sparse trees and sun-bleached karst limestone of the Laos lowlands.

"Its apparent restriction to rather inhospitable habitat helps to explain why such an extraordinary bird with conspicuous habits and a distinctive call has remained unnoticed for so long," Woxvold said.

About the size of a thrush, the new bird has olive green feathers on its back and a light-colored breast. Its large dark eyes dominate its bald pink face.

"Whenever you come across a bird that's bald, it's a prominent characteristic," Clyne told LiveScience. "Usually, but not always, it's thought to play some kind of a role in communication between the sexes."

The researchers describe the bird's call as a "series of whistled, dry bubbling notes."

The researchers describe the new species, whose official name is Pycnonotus hualon, in the latest issue of the Oriental Bird Club's scientific journal Forktail.

Vocabulary In the News: Jupiter’s Been Hit!

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/720/1?rss=1

By Richard A. Kerr
ScienceNOW Daily News
20 July 2009

A large object has slammed into Jupiter, leaving behind a giant black smudge that was first reported yesterday by an amateur astronomer. The find is only the second time in recorded history that scientists have glimpsed an impact scar in the atmosphere of a giant planet. "I never expected I'd get to see something like this," says astronomer Leigh Fletcher, a postdoc at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

Amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley had been taking routine images of Jupiter through his 37-centimeter telescope (pros would be on a 1000-centimeter instrument) in Murrumbateman, Australia, at about 11:30 p.m. local time, when he noticed something unusual: a dark spot several thousands of kilometers across rotating into view high in Jupiter's south polar region (see picture). Wesley had been about to end his observing run, and he initially considered passing the spot off as a typical dark polar storm. But he decided to keep at it, and in 15 minutes more he believed he was seeing something else entirely.

Wesley suspected an impact and soon contacted Fletcher and JPL astronomer Glenn Orton. As luck would have it, the duo had previously scheduled time on the NASA Infrared Telescope on Hawaii (remotely operated from JPL), so they took a closer look. They found the same distinctive infrared signature as Orton and others saw 15 years ago this week when the 21-plus fragments of disrupted comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into Jupiter one after the other  "We've been incredibly fortunate to have a talented amateur report this within hours," says Fletcher. Such amateurs "are doing some of the fundamental work of observing what's happening on Jupiter," adds Orton.

The impact "was a bit of a surprise," says astronomer Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who observed the 1994 impacts with the Hubble Space Telescope. "We all thought these were a little more rare." This one--a solitary event so far--looks like one of Shoemaker-Levy 9's medium-size impacts, says Hammel. How large the rocky asteroid or icy comet was is hard to estimate, says astronomer Harold Weaver of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. There was never any consensus on the size of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 objects, but this one might have been several hundred meters across--a kilometer at most--and traveling at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour.

If scientists are to retrieve any new information about jovian impacts, they'll have to be quick about it. Winds are tearing the black splotch apart even as astronomers race to submit their emergency proposals for telescope time--including time on the recently renovated Hubble Space Telescope.

Vocabulary In the News: For Small Town, Luck Be a Ladybug

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VOCABULARY

a ladybug	a small insect that has a round red or yellow body with small black spots on it
a swarm	a large group of insects flying or moving together a swarm of bees/flies/ants
an affiliate	an organization or company that is connected with or controlled by a larger group
to keep a close eye	(idiomatic) to look after something or someone very carefully Will you keep a close eye on things until I get back?
to spot	to notice someone or something He was spotted by the local police and had to leave quickly.
to disclose	to give information to people, especially information that was secret Most of the people interviewed requested that their identity not be disclosed.
to escort	to go somewhere with someone in order to be certain that they arrive at the right place She escorted him to the front door.
to crawl	if an insect crawls, it moves forwards using its legs Ants were crawling all over the cheese.
bark	(uncountable) the hard substance that covers a tree
to mate	if one animal mates with another, or if two animals mate, they have sex
to handle	to take action in order to deal with a difficult situation The government was criticized for how it handled the situation.