Published Dec 5, 2023 by Josh Reed

Both of the UAA basketball teams got their first taste of Great Northwest Athletic Conference action last week with a pair of road games against Montana State Billings and Seattle Pacific, and both went 0-2. It marked the first time that the men’s team experienced defeat after beginning the season with a hot 8-0 start that led to its first national ranking since 2016. The women’s team has now lost four straight. Leading the Seawolves in scoring on the men’s side in the two games was senior forward Sawyer Storms with 26 points. Junior guard Senya Rabouin was the top scorer on the women’s team with 44 points.

“We did not defend in the first half like we are capable of,” said UAA men’s head coach Rusty Osborne after the team suffered it’s first loss. “We did defend well in the second half, but we were very poor offensively. Some of it was execution, some of it was them, and a lot of it was missing open shots and layups that we usually make.”

The UAA men’s hockey team hosted UAF for a two-game series in the second leg of the annual Governor’s Cup. The Nanooks shut out the Seawolves on Friday night powered by a superb special teams and beat them 3-1 on Saturday night. Anchorage’s Maximilion Helgeson scored the lone goal for the home team in the third period off a power play, marking just their second in their last five games.

“Just clinching the Governor’s Cup is huge,” UAF head coach Erik Largen said after Saturday’s win. “That’s a big thing for our campus and community but obviously the next two games (against UAA) are going to be important and whenever we face off against each other, they’re going to bring a great effort. It’s going to be another battle when we play back in Fairbanks.”

Published Dec 5, 2023

The Nanooks rifle team will face the Air Force Falcons in their final match of 2023 on Wednesday, Dec. 6. The Nanooks are coming off a win against Akron and Kentucky with a season-high aggregate score of 4745.

Rachael Charles leads the team in average aggregate scoring and smallbore average. As a team, the Nanooks have the third-best aggregate score this season. Air Force enters the matchup with an average team score of 4716.334. Alaska has a seven-game winning streak against the Falcons and has won 13 of the last 15 head-to-head matchups.

Why It Matters

The matchup between the Nanooks and the Falcons is their final match of 2023, making it an important opportunity for both teams to end the year on a high note. The Nanooks will be looking to extend their winning streak against Air Force and maintain their dominance in head-to-head matchups.

By the Numbers

• Nanooks' season-high aggregate score: 4745
• Air Force's average team score: 4716.334
• Nanooks' seven-game winning streak against the Falcons
• Nanooks have won 13 of the last 15 head-to-head matchups

Published Dec 5, 2023

An engine manufacturer and the Alaska higher education system are partnering to create more technicians capable of fixing outboard motors, the external engines on small and medium size boats.

Ilkan Cokgor will be the instructor of a course sponsored by the Japanese motor manufacturer Yamaha and offered at Kenai Peninsula College in Soldotna. He’s an electrical engineer by training who currently works as an instructor with AVTEC, a vocational school based in Seward.

He said Yamaha conducted a survey of its dealerships nationally, and discovered it needed about 2,000 more technicians around the country, which inspired the course. Cokgor said Yamaha owns almost 50% of the market share for outboard engines in Alaska.

“Back in August of 2022, there was an announcement,” he said. “Yamaha U.S. Marine Business Unit and the Alaska Maritime Education Consortium, they signed a training agreement. A Yamaha Marine Training Program agreement.”

He said the goal was to establish training centers where students could become certified in outboard engine maintenance. Under the agreement, Yamaha provides the training curriculum, instructor training and discounted engines and parts for learning. The University of Alaska system, which includes Kenai Peninsula College, provides the facility.

Cokgor said the course is divided into five modules, including a required introduction. Then there are four sections focused on technical training.

“And these four are divided by engine class: portable, mid-range, inline and offshore,” Cokgor said.

Students don’t have to take every module; they’ll get a certification to go along with each engine type they study.

Published Dec 4, 2023 by Jess Battison

A city that was plunged into two months of darkness now won’t see daylight until the end of January.

And here’s us moaning that it’s still dark when we get up for work in the morning.

The sun set on America’s northernmost town for the final time this year in late November, as the Arctic Circle now experiences ‘polar nights’.

Utqiaġvik, Alaska, will now not experience a sunrise until 23 January 2024 at around 1.09pm local time and will be visible for about an hour.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks has created the Utqiaġvik Sea Ice Webcam, which shows the rest of the world what the city looks like during the polar night period.

The stream comes from a camera overlooking the 'landfast ice' (or coastal ocean during the ice-free period in summer) from the top of a the bank building in downtown Utqiaġvik.

Located at 71° 17′ 33″ N, 156° 47′ 18″, approximately 20m above sea level, the camera looks approximately northward.

On its website, the university explains: "Apart from providing a visual impression of the sea-ice conditions off Barrow, these images establish a longer-term record of key dates in the seasonal evolution of the sea-ice cover, such as: onset of fall ice formation, formation of a stable ice cover, onset of spring melt, appearance of melt ponds, beginning of ice break-up in early summer, removal or advection of sea ice during the summer months.”

Published Dec 4, 2023 by Art Nash UAF Cooperative Extension

Many parts of Alaska are getting hammered with heavy snow. In addition, heavy winds in some areas are bringing down large tree limbs. These conditions are likely to lead to periodic power outages, which may take anywhere from a few hours to days to be restored.

With such wild weather, many people decide to make their own power and conserve what they have on hand when the power goes out.

If you are using a generator during a power outage, you’ll want to be sure to run the engine portion outside any confined space where people will breathe because of the carbon monoxide in the exhaust. In fact, having a dedicated carbon monoxide alarm on hand for outages isn't a bad idea, as any combustion from devices may contaminate the ambient air. 

You’ll want to have plenty of cords, with the right plugs for the generator outlets, to deliver the power into the house to operate individual appliances if you don’t have a complex transfer switch connected to your breaker box. Whatever the fuel source (gasoline, diesel, natural gas, propane, wood), you want to make sure that heaters, ovens, and lighting combustion devices have flue or smoke stack exhaust.

Published Dec 4, 2023 by Derek Smith

"Right now, we detect space debris by looking for objects that reflect light or radar signals," said Nilton Renno, the principal investigator from the University of Michigan team and a professor of climate and space sciences and engineering and aerospace engineering. "The smaller the objects get, the harder it becomes to get sunlight or radar signals strong enough to detect them from the ground."

Today objects larger than a softball are the only trackable pieces of this "space junk," which is less than 1% of the nearly 170 million pieces of trash leftover from rocket launches, spacewalks and defunct satellites. The new method can detect debris smaller than one millimeter in diameter—similar to the thickness of pencil lead.

Renno will present the findings at the Second International Orbital Debris Conference Dec. 5 with Yun Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher in climate and space sciences and engineering. The results are among the first to come from a larger, collaborative project, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity's Space Debris Identification and Tracking Program. The project is led by military contractor Blue Halo and includes the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

While potentially disastrous, collisions between space debris could prove to be the best way to track tiny space junk. When small pieces of space debris collide, they blow up into tiny fragments, some of which vaporize into a charged gas due to the heat generated by the impact.

"When the cloud of charged gas and debris fragments expands, it creates lightning-like energy bursts, similar to signals produced by static sparks that appear after rubbing a freshly laundered blanket," said Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti, an assistant research scientist in climate and space sciences and engineering, and a lead scientist on the project.

After this initial energy burst, charged solid pieces of debris fragments can create electric field pulses whenever they are close enough to each other, producing additional lightning-like bursts.

These electric signals last for only a fraction of a second, but they could help track pieces of space debris and clouds of microscopic fragments that form when debris collides.