Diurnal mountain wind systems are local thermally driven wind systems that form over mountainous terrain and are produced by the buoyancy effects associated with the diurnal cycle of heating and cooling of the lower atmospheric layers. This chapter reviews the present scientific understanding of diurnal mountain wind systems, focusing on research findings published since 1988. Slope flows are e...

The rostral brainstem of the harbor seal Phoca vitulina was cooled and heated 33-41 degrees C while oxygen consumption and rectal, hypothalamic, flipper and dorsal skin temperatures were measured. These experiments were made on restrained seals at ambient temperatures -15 to 30 degrees C. Cooling the preoptic and hypothalamic (POH) tissue increased oxygen consumption in a way that could be appr...

We present near-infrared observations of the proposed counterpart of GRB 000301c. The K’ filter (2.1μm) light curve shows a well-sampled break in the decay slope at t ≈ 3.5 days post-burst. The early time slope is very shallow (∼ −0.1), while the late time slope is steep (−2.2). Comparison with the optical (R band) light curve shows significant differences, especially in the early time decay sl...

We study thermal-gravitational instability in simplified models for protogalactic halos using three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations. The simulations started with isothermal density perturbations of various power spectra, and followed the evolution of gas with radiative cooling down to T = 10 K, background heating, and self-gravity for up to ∼ 20 cooling times. Then cooled and condensed clo...

I discuss a new gravitational potential, Φ(r) ∝ (r 0 + r ), for modeling the mass distribution of spherical systems. This potential has a finite mass and generates a density profile with inner slope 2− n. A gas embedded in this potential has hydrostatic temperature and gas density distributions that are elementary functions of n, greatly simplifying the task of measuring the slope from X-ray da...

Asynchronously coupled atmosphere and ocean general circulation model simulations are used to examine the consequences of changes in the west/east sea-surface t mperature (SST) gradient across the equatorial Pacific at the last glacial maximum (LGM). Simulations forced by the CLIMAP SST for the LGM, where the west/east SST gradient across the Pacific is reduced compared to present, produce a re...

A solution is presented for the spectrum of high-energy GRB photons confined to a quasithermal baryonic photosphere. The solution is valid in the steady-state limit assuming the region under consideration is optically thick to the continuously injected photons. It is shown that for a high luminosity photosphere, the non-thermal electrons resulting from γ-ray Compton cooling lose their energy by...