Briefs

Astronomers and scientists studying global warming are both using Sapphire, a data-mining technology developed by Chandrika Kamath at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The four-year-old program is still being refined, but is unique in its scalability, versatility, and precision, Kamath says. The Faint Images of Radio Sky at Twenty-cm (FIRST) group is using Sapphire to identify galaxies that are likely to be bent-double morphology galaxies. Instead of looking through each of 32,000 galaxy images themselves, the astronomers have used Sapphire to target 2,500 probable images.

Another application is looking at global warming and trying to isolate the effects of volcanic eruptions and El Nino from long-term changes in the Earth's climate that can be attributed to other factors.

See http://www.bizjournals.com/eastbay/stories/2002/06/03/story6.html