Mountain Views News          Saturday, August 17, 2013

10

SPORTS

Mountain Views News Saturday, August 17, 2013 

2013 SUMMER ADULT BASKETBALL CHAMPIONS

The Arcadia Recreation and Community Services Departments would like to congratulate the Summer 2013 Adult Basketball Division 
‘C’ Champions, “That Team.” The championship game was played on Sunday, August 11th at the Dana Gym, with “That Team” taking 
the win by two points over ‘Alpha Q.” Congratulations again, to the top division champs for a great season finish. Photo provided by 
Jonathan Lui.


ARCADIA INTRAMURAL 
FOOTBALL LEAGUE

Registration for the Intramural Football League 
is limited and will take place online beginning

Monday, August 19, and go through Friday, 
September 6, 2013. Registration for the league 
is online only. In order to register online, you 
will need a login ID and pin number. If you do 
not have your login ID or pin number, you will 
need to contact the Recreation Department at 
626.574.5113. Please keep in mind if you have 
never registered with us and need to show proof 
of birth for your child and residency, it may take 
up to 24 hours to activate your online account.

Intramural football is held at all three middle 
school sites. This program is open to boys and 
girls in grades 6-8 of all ability levels. Practices 
will be held two times a week after school. Rotating 
teams will scrimmage each other each 
Friday. The league will run from September 16 
through November 8. The first league game will 
be on Friday, September 27 and will conclude 
with an end of the season tournament. Dates 
and times to be determined. The league is organized 
to provide a fun, non-competitive, learning 
experience. Transportation to and from the 
games is the responsibility of the participant. 
Students must be picked up no later than 6pm 
or have a signed consent to walk home. Late fees 
will apply after 6pm on game days.


ScienceNews 

by JEFF

THE WORLD AROUND US


An experimental 
malaria vaccine 
proved highly 
effective in a small, 
early stage clinical 
trial : This raises 
hope in the global 
effort to combat 
the deadly disease, 
U.S. researchers 
reported Thursday 
in the journal 
Science. “This 
was something 
that everybody 
said was not 
possible. And 
here it is.””We’re 
in the first stages now of really being able to have 
a completely effective vaccine,” said U.S. navy 
Captain Judith Epstein, one of the researchers, 
who said they hope to see licensing of the vaccine 
within three to five years. Malaria,usually spread 
by mosquitoes, infected 219 million people in 2010 
and killed around 660,000, according to estimates 
by the W.H.O. That translates into one child in 
Africa dying every minute.

 Cocoa might prevent memory decline: Drinking 
cocoa every day may help older people keep their 
brains healthy, research suggests. Reported in the 
journal Neurology (a study from Dr. Sorond of 
Harvard) 88% of those with impaired blood flow 
at the start of the study saw improvements in blood 
flow and some cognitive tests, compared with 37% 
of people with no problems at the start. Experts 
said more research was needed before conclusions 
could be drawn.

 Doctors don’t follow back pain guidelines: A 
study published in JAMA Internal Medicine 
has found that many Doctors are not following 
expert recommendations for the treatment of back 
pain. They are subjecting patients to unnecessary 
ineffective surgeries, imaging tests, and addictive 
narcotics. They don’t necessarily need tests such as 
MRIs, CT scans, or referrals to specialists .More 
aggressive treatments have not been shown to 
improve the pain and can put patients to some 
risk. “One of the biggest things to realize is that 
when patients first present with back pain, the 
majority of them will have complete resolution of 
their symptoms within a couple of months,” said 
Dr. Bruce Landon of Harvard . What works is time 
. Physical therapies such as core strength building 
,stretching, and regular exercising such as walking 
and jogging have shown to improve back pain. 

Climate change on pace to occur 10 times faster 
than any change recorded in past 65 million years, 
Stanford scientists Deffenbaugh & Field say: 
Without intervention, this extreme pace could lead 
to a 5-6 degree Celsius spike in yearly temperatures 
by the end of the century. The planet is undergoing 
one of the largest changes in climate since the 
dinosaurs went extinct. But what might be even 
more troubling for humans, plants and animals is 
the speed of the change. If the trend continues at 
its current rapid pace, it will place significant stress 
on ecosystems and many species will need to make 
evolutionary, behavioral or geographic adaptations 
to survive. Although some of the changes the 
planet will experience in the next few decades are 
already “baked into the system,” how different the 
climate looks at the end of the century will depend 
on how humans respond. There are opportunities 
to decrease those risks.

 IF WE LANDED ON EUROPA, WHAT WOULD WE WANT TO KNOW


This artist’s concept shows a simulated view from the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Europa’s potentially rough, icy surface, tinged with reddish areas that scientists 
hope to learn more about, can be seen in the foreground. The giant planet Jupiter looms over the horizon. This work was conducted with Europa study funds from 

 Most of what scientists know of Jupiter’s moon 
Europa they have gleaned from a dozen or so close 
flybys from NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1979 and 
NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the mid-to-late 1990s. 
Even in these fleeting, paparazzi-like encounters, 
scientists have seen a fractured, ice-covered world 
with tantalizing signs of a liquid water ocean under 
its surface. Such an environment could potentially 
be a hospitable home for microbial life. But what 
if we got to land on Europa’s surface and conduct 
something along the lines of a more in-depth 
interview? What would scientists ask? A new 
study in the journal Astrobiology [http://online.
liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ast.2013.1003] 
authored by a NASA-appointed science definition 
team lays out their consensus on the most important 
questions to address.

 “If one day humans send a robotic lander to the 
surface of Europa, we need to know what to look 
for and what tools it should carry,” said Robert 
Pappalardo, the study’s lead author, based at NASA’s 
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “There 
is still a lot of preparation that is needed before we 
could land on Europa, but studies like these will help 
us focus on the technologies required to get us there, 
and on the data needed to help us scout out possible 
landing locations. Europa is the most likely place in 
our solar system beyond Earth to have life today, and 
a landed mission would be the best way to search for 
signs of life.”

 The paper was authored by scientists from a 
number of other NASA centers and universities, 
including the Johns Hopkins University Applied 
Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md.; University of 
Colorado, Boulder; University of Texas, Austin; and 
the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, 
Md. The team found the most important questions 
clustered around composition: what makes up the 
reddish “freckles” and reddish cracks that stain the 
icy surface? What kind of chemistry is occurring 
there? Are there organic molecules, which are 
among the building blocks of life?

 Additional priorities involved improving 
our images of Europa—getting a look around at 
features on a human scale to provide context for 
the compositional measurements. Also among the 
top priorities were questions related to geological 
activity and the presence of liquid water: how 
active is the surface? How much rumbling is there 
from the periodic gravitational squeezes from its 
planetary host, the giant planet Jupiter? What do 
these detections tell us about the characteristics of 
liquid water below the icy surface?

 “Landing on the surface of Europa would be a 
key step in the astrobiological investigation of that 
world,” said Chris McKay, a senior editor of the 
journal Astrobiology, who is based at NASA Ames 
Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. “This paper 
outlines the science that could be done on such a 
lander. The hope would be that surface materials, 
possibly near the linear crack features, include 
biomarkers carried up from the ocean.”

 DID YOU SEE A PERSEID METEOR? Did 
you record your experience in a picture or poem? 
Coastal Los Angeles was totally “socked in” with 
low clouds on the prime viewing night (August 
11-12), but fine sightings were reported at clearer 
sites. The international astronomy outreach 
organization Astronomers Without Borders (www.
astronomerswithoutborders.org) would welcome 
meteor-viewing reports—in picture, prose, or 
poem—for sharing in its AstroPoetry Blog. To share 
your meteor experience with a worldwide audience, 
email your material to:

astropoetry@astronomerswithoutbordors.org

 You can contact Bob Eklund at: b.eklund@
MtnViewsNews.com.