Posts tagged Scotland
Buff Asst. La Crosse Coach Nielsen Claims Bronze Medal At World Cup
Jul 22nd
OSHAWA, Ontario – For the ninth consecutive time since the Federation of International Lacrosse Women’s Lacrosse World Cup began in 1982, Australia is taking home a medal – its first bronze since the 1993 games.
After ending pool play with a 2-2 record, Australia entered the Championship Bracket a No. 3 seed. In the quarterfinals, Australia easily took down Scotland 26-2. In a rematch with the host team in the semifinals, Australia suffered only its second ever loss to Canada at the World Cup. With the loss behind them, Australia was determined to keep its medal-winning streak alive and was victorious in the bronze medal game, defeating England 12-6.
University of Colorado assistant lacrosse coach Hannah Nielsen has now won one of each medal in her three World Cup appearances with the Australian National Team. The Adelaide, Australia native has also earned a spot on the All-World Team at back-to-back Cups. In 2005, Nielsen scored a key goal to push Australia over the United States in the Gold Medal game. In 2009, she led the team with 12 goals and 13 assists as the Aussies fell by a single goal to the U.S. in the title game. In the 2013 games, she led the team with 24 total points, including 10 goals and 12 assists.
“I am so proud of Hannah and all she has accomplished not only in this last World Cup, but her entire lacrosse career,” CU head lacrosse coach Ann Elliott said. “To be able to play in the World Cup and represent your home country is such an incredible honor and one I know Hannah cherishes and works extremely hard for. This particular World Cup was a difficult one for Hannah as their team had to overcome the loss of one of their leaders, Jen Adams, to an ACL tear right before the tournament started. However, to watch Hannah battle through that and step up to help lead her team to the bronze medal and making the All-World Team was extremely special and I could not be more proud of all she has worked for and achieved.”
Quarterfinals (Thursday, July 18): Australia allowed just two goals against Scotland to advance to the semifinals. The No. 3 seeded Aussies stomped No. 11 seed Scotland 26-2 in the highest scoring game of the first two rounds of the Championship Bracket. Australia came out on a 9-0 run, not allowing a Scottish goal until nearly the halfway point in the first half. Scotland would not score again until the final 15 seconds of the match. Australia outshot Scotland 38-6 and forced 24 Scottish turnovers. Nielsen scored two goals and contributed a game-high four assists in the win.
Semifinals (Friday, July 19): Host team Canada marked several firsts during the 2013 World Cup. They earned their first ever win against Australia in World Cup play with a 13-12 pool play victory. In the teams’ rematch in the semifinals, Canada picked up its second, downing Australia 11-7 to advance to its first final. Just as she did in their first match-up, Nielsen tied for a team-high in scoring, netting two goals and contributing an assist. Canada dominated the offense, outshooting Australia 21-9 in the first-half alone on their way to 34 total shots, compared to the Aussies’ 28. Australia never had the lead, but Nielsen helped them get back within two late in the first half, and kept the match competitive by scoring Australia’s final two goals.
Bronze Medal Game (Saturday, July 20): Though they fell behind early against England as Sarah Taylor gave the Brits two quick goals, Australia was not content in going home empty handed. The Aussies claimed the bronze medal with a definitive 12-6 win over England. Australia led England 13-7 in both draw controls and ground balls. Nielsen tied for game-high scoring with four goals and one assist. Her first goal of the game helped the Aussies to a 4-3 lead. Her next came off a free position shot in the final minutes of the first half to help Australia take an 8-4 lead into halftime. She got the Aussies on the board again in the first 40 seconds of the second half and again with 11:19 remaining.
CU lacrosse coach Elliott was in attendance for the final three days of the tournament to support Nielsen and three other former Northwestern teammates that represented the USA.
“The World Cup is an amazing event that this year brought together 19 countries,” Elliott said. “The growth of our sport continues to amaze me.”
Australia continues to be a dominant force in women’s lacrosse, having won gold medals in 1986 and 2005 and earning four silver (1982, 1997, 2001 and 2009) and three bronze (1989, 1993 and 2013) medals. With a 19-5 championship victory this year, rival United States won its second straight and seventh overall World Cup title. In its first ever title game, Canada capped its most successful World Cup tournament with a silver medal.
About the FIL
The Federation of International Lacrosse (FIL) is the international governing body for men’s and women’s lacrosse. The FIL currently has 45 member nations and sanctions five World Championships (women’s and men’s field, women’s and men’s U19 field and men’s indoor.) The FIL is responsible for the governance and integrity of all forms of lacrosse and provides responsive and effective leadership to support the sports’ development throughout the world.
All-World Team
Attack
Katrina Dowd – United States
Lindsey Munday – United States
Katie Rowan – United States
Dana Dobbie – Canada
Midfield
Laura Merrifield – England
Hannah Nielsen – Australia
Sarah Albrecht – United States
Stacey Morlang Sullivan – Australia
Defense
Amber Falcone – United States
Katie Guy – Canada
Alicia Wickens – Australia
Goalkeeper
Devon Wills – United States
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Marlee Horn Graduate Assistant SID University of Colorado O: 303.492.7525 C: 719.821.0689 marlee.horn@colorado.edu CUBuffs.com
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CU-Boulder study: Spiral galaxies like Milky Way bigger than thought
Jun 27th
Let’s all fist bump: Spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way appear to be much larger and more massive than previously believed, according to a new University of Colorado Boulder study by researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope.
CU-Boulder Professor John Stocke, study leader, said new observations with Hubble’s $70 million Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, or COS, designed by CU-Boulder show that normal spiral galaxies are surrounded by halos of gas that can extend to over 1 million light-years in diameter. The current estimated diameter of the Milky Way, for example, is about 100,000 light-years. One light-year is roughly 6 trillion miles.
The material for galaxy halos detected by the CU-Boulder team originally was ejected from galaxies by exploding stars known as supernovae, a product of the star formation process, said Stocke of CU-Boulder’s astrophysical and planetary sciences department. “This gas is stored and then recycled through an extended galaxy halo, falling back onto the galaxies to reinvigorate a new generation of star formation,” he said. “In many ways this is the ‘missing link’ in galaxy evolution that we need to understand in detail in order to have a complete picture of the process.”
Stocke gave a presentation on the research June 27 at the University of Edinburgh’s Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics in Scotland at a conference titled “Intergalactic Interactions.” The CU-Boulder research team also included professors Michael Shull and James Green and research associates Brian Keeney, Charles Danforth, David Syphers and Cynthia Froning, as well as University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Blair Savage.
Building on earlier studies identifying oxygen-rich gas clouds around spiral galaxies by scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst College and the University of California, Santa Cruz, Stocke and his colleagues determined that such clouds contain almost as much mass as all the stars in their respective galaxies. “This was a big surprise,” said Stocke. “The new findings have significant consequences for how spiral galaxies change over time.”
In addition, the CU-Boulder team discovered giant reservoirs of gas estimated to be millions of degrees Fahrenheit that were enshrouding the spiral galaxies and halos under study. The halos of the spiral galaxies were relatively cool by comparison — just tens of thousands of degrees — said Stocke, also a member of CU-Boulder’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy, or CASA.
Shull, a professor in CU-Boulder’s astrophysical and planetary sciences department and a member of CASA, emphasized that the study of such “circumgalactic” gas is in its infancy. “But given the expected lifetime of COS on Hubble, perhaps another five years, it should be possible to confirm these early detections, elaborate on the results and scan other spiral galaxies in the universe,” he said.
Prior to the installation of COS on Hubble during NASA’s final servicing mission in May 2009, theoretical studies showed that spiral galaxies should possess about five times more gas than was being detected by astronomers. The new observations with the extremely sensitive COS are now much more in line with the theories, said Stocke.
The CU-Boulder team used distant quasars — the swirling centers of supermassive black holes — as “flashlights” to track ultraviolet light as it passed through the extended gas haloes of foreground galaxies, said Stocke. The light absorbed by the gas was broken down by the spectrograph, much like a prism does, into characteristic color “fingerprints” that revealed temperatures, densities, velocities, distances and chemical compositions of the gas clouds.
“This gas is way too diffuse to allow its detection by direct imaging, so spectroscopy is the way to go,” said Stocke. CU-Boulder’s Green led the design team for COS, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder for NASA.
While astronomers hope the Hubble Space Telescope keeps on chugging for years to come, there will be no more servicing missions. And the James Webb Space Telescope, touted to be Hubble’s successor beginning in late 2018, has no UV light-gathering capabilities, which will prevent astronomers from undertaking studies like those done with COS, said Green.
“Once Hubble ceases to function, we will lose the capability to study galaxy halos for perhaps a full generation of astronomers,” said Stocke. “But for now, we are fortunate to have both Hubble and its Cosmic Origins Spectrograph to help us answer some of the most pressing issues in cosmology.”
The study was supported by a NASA/Hubble Space Telescope contract to the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph science team, general NASA/Hubble Space Telescope observing grants to Stocke and a National Science Foundation grant to Keeney.
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CU-NOAA study shows summer climate change, mostly warming
Nov 15th
Analysis of 90 years of observational data has revealed that summer climates in regions across the globe are changing — mostly, but not always, warming –according to a new study led by a scientist from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences headquartered at the University of Colorado Boulder.
“It is the first time that we show on a local scale that there are significant changes in summer temperatures,” said lead author CIRES scientist Irina Mahlstein. “This result shows us that we are experiencing a new summer climate regime in some regions.”
The technique, which reveals location-by-location temperature changes rather than global averages, could yield valuable insights into changes in ecosystems on a regional scale. Because the methodology relies on detecting temperatures outside the expected norm, it is more relevant to understand changes to the animal and plant life of a particular region, which scientists would expect to show sensitivity to changes that lie outside of normal variability.
“If the summers are actually significantly different from the way that they used to be, it could affect ecosystems,” said Mahlstein, who works in the Chemical Sciences Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory.
To identify potential temperature changes, the team used climate observations recorded from 1920 to 2010 from around the globe. The scientists termed the 30-year interval from 1920 to 1949 the “base period,” and then compared the base period to other 30-year test intervals starting every 10 years since 1930.
The comparison used statistics to assess whether the test interval differed from the base period beyond what would be expected due to yearly temperature variability for that geographical area.
Their analysis found that some changes began to appear as early as the 1960s, and the observed changes were more prevalent in tropical areas. In these regions, temperatures varied little throughout the years, so the scientists could more easily detect any changes that did occur, Mahlstein said.
The scientists found significant summer temperature changes in 40 percent of tropical areas and 20 percent of higher-latitude areas. In the majority of cases, the researchers observed warming summer temperatures, but in some cases they observed cooling summer temperatures.
“This study has applied a new approach to the question, ‘Has the temperature changed in local areas?’ ” Mahlstein said. The study is in press in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union.
The study’s findings are consistent with other approaches used to answer the same question, such as modeling and analysis of trends, Mahlstein said. But this technique uses only observed data to come to the same result. “Looking at the graphs of our results, you can visibly see how things are changing,” she said.
In particular the scientists were able to look at the earlier time periods, note the temperature extremes, and observe that those values became more frequent in the later time periods. “You see how the extreme events of the past have become a normal event,” Mahlstein said.
The scientists used 90 years of data for their study, a little more than the average lifespan of a human being. So if inhabitants of those areas believe that summers have changed since they were younger, they can be confident it is not a figment of their imagination.
“We can actually say that these changes have happened in the lifetime of a person,” Mahlstein said.
Co-authors on the study were Gabriele Hegerl from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and Susan Solomon from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
CIRES is a joint institute of CU-Boulder and NOAA.
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