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Bizarro Earth

The Earth's magnetic poles may reverse soon

Dr Jon Mound and Dr Phil Livermore
The Conversation
Sat, 27 Jan 2018 10:21 UTC
Earth’s magnetic field
© The Conversation
A model of the Earth’s magnetic field: radial magnetic field at the core-mantle boundary (red/blue) and magnetic field lines as observed at the surface.
The Earth's magnetic field surrounds our planet like an invisible force field - protecting life from harmful solar radiation by deflecting charged particles away. Far from being constant, this field is continuously changing. Indeed, our planet's history includes at least several hundred global magnetic reversals, where north and south magnetic poles swap places. So when's the next one happening and how will it affect life on Earth?

During a reversal the magnetic field won't be zero, but will assume a weaker and more complex form. It may fall to 10% of the present-day strength and have magnetic poles at the equator or even the simultaneous existence of multiple "north" and "south" magnetic poles.

Geomagnetic reversals occur a few times every million years on average. However, the interval between reversals is very irregular and can range up to tens of millions of years.

There can also be temporary and incomplete reversals, known as events and excursions, in which the magnetic poles move away from the geographic poles - perhaps even crossing the equator - before returning back to their original locations. The last full reversal, the Brunhes-Matuyama, occurred around 780,000 years ago. A temporary reversal, the Laschamp event, occurred around 41,000 years ago. It lasted less than 1,000 years with the actual change of polarity lasting around 250 years.
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Magnify

Scientists discover million-year-old hidden 'nursery' of Hammerhead Sharks in Galapagos


teleSUR
Mon, 29 Jan 2018 00:00 UTC
hammerhead sharks
© Wikipedia
The hammerhead sharks grow as long as three meters (yards) and live for up to 50 years.
"The females arrive to give birth and then leave. The young have all the food they need here and the reefs afford protection from large predators," an expert said.

A group of Ecuadorean scientists has discovered a hammerhead shark nursery where they have been born and sheltered for nearly a million years on the Galapagos Islands, the remote archipelago tucked away 1,000 kilometers off South America's Pacific coast.

"It was quite by chance that we found this natural nursery for baby hammerheads, a species that is under a high level of threat," Eduardo Espinoza, the biologist in charge of monitoring ecosystems in the Galapagos Marine Reserve, told AFP.

"It is a unique area, of great interest to conservationists."

Comment: It would be interesting to know how the scientists determined the cave has been used by the hammerheads for a million years...

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Info

Unexpected find by robots exploring undersea volcanic eruption

Matthew Loffhagen
Outer Places
Mon, 29 Jan 2018 19:03 UTC
Underwater Volcano
© University of Tasmania, Australia, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
Back in 2012, the Pacific ocean experienced the biggest volcanic eruption that the planet had seen in a hundred years. An enormous plume of volcanic material bubbled up out of the water with fantastic force, in a dramatic show that, sadly, nobody managed to catch on camera.

Eager to find out exactly what had happened deep below the sea, scientists from the University of Tasmania in Australia have sent a pair of diving robots to examine the volcano (called Havre) and the surrounding area. The results are a lot of fun: according to volcanologist Rebecca Carey who led the study, "what we found on the seafloor was almost entirely different from what we expected".

Whenever a scientist says that something is the opposite of what they were expecting, you know things are interesting. Throw in a giant underwater volcano, and things get even better.

While the volcano's activity wasn't viewed from up close, thanks to its location at the bottom of the ocean, flotsam from the eruption was visible on satellite images that have been taken from space. From this, in 2015 (three years after the eruption), the scientists were able to pinpoint the location of the volcano, and were able to track how the area had surrounding changed from before things went boom.
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Info

Lunar Eclipse on January 31st

Kelly Beatty
Sky & Telescope
Mon, 29 Jan 2018 03:21 UTC
Lunar Eclipse Jan 2018
© Sky & Telescope
Events for the total lunar eclipse on the morning of January 31, 2018. This version is labeled for Universal Time (UT). The event's timing favors western North America, where totality is observable before dawn, and eastern Asia and Australia, where it occurs after sunset.
Given its predawn timing and the vagaries of winter weather, relatively few of us will get to watch the Moon's eerie glide through Earth's shadow on January 31st. And so ordinarily I wouldn't expect the news media to pay much attention to this event this event.

But Wednesday's total lunar eclipse is different. Depending on where you look for news, headlines are calling it a "super blue blood Moon" or "blue blood super moon" - a sky spectacle not seen in more than 150 years!

It's true that January 31st will be a busy day for Luna. First, there is indeed a total lunar eclipse, the first in nearly 2½ years visible anywhere. As we've noted elsewhere, those living near the West Coast and most everywhere around the Pacific Rim will have the best views. The Moon usually takes on a deep red or coppery color during totality, hence the often-used term "blood Moon" to describe its appearance. Those of us stuck on the East Coast of the U.S. will be challenged to see much of anything as the Moon sinks out of sight in the west as the Sun comes up.

Second, this event falls on the second full Moon of the month, what's often called a "Blue Moon." And, third, the eclipse comes just 27 hours after the Moon reaches perigee, its closest orbital point to Earth. Lots of you have no doubt heard this extra-close full Moon called a "super-moon."

Yes, it's an astronomical trifecta. But it's not nearly as rare as you might have heard.
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Dig

Paleontologists excited to make rare find of bus-size dinosaur in Egypt

Laura Geggel
Live Science
Mon, 29 Jan 2018 21:59 UTC
africa dinosaur Mansourasaurus
© Andrew McAfee/Carnegie Museum of Natural History
Even though it was discovered in Egypt, Mansourasaurus shahinae had more in common with dinosaurs uncovered in Europe than it did with dinosaurs found in southern Africa.
Egypt is known for its magnificent pyramids and powerful pharaohs, but now the country is gaining fame among paleontologists, especially now that an international team has uncovered the remains of an 80-million-year-old dinosaur the size of a school bus that had bony plates embedded in its skin during its lifetime.

Egyptian researchers discovered the newfound sauropod - a long-necked, long-tailed herbivorous dinosaur named Mansourasaurus shahinae - in the Sahara Desert. The find is remarkable, given the rarity of dinosaur fossils in Africa from the Late Cretaceous (100 million to 66 million years ago), the period of time just before the 6-mile-long (10 kilometers) asteroid slammed into Earth and killed the nonavian dinosaurs, the researchers said.

"Africa remains a giant question mark in terms of land-dwelling animals at the end of the age of dinosaurs," study co-researcher Eric Gorscak, a postdoctoral research scientist at The Field Museum in Chicago, who started the project as a doctoral student at Ohio University, said in a statement. "Mansourasaurus helps us address long-standing questions about Africa's fossil record and paleobiology - what animals were living there, and to what other species were these animals most closely related?"
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Brain

Is there a storage device for memories somewhere in the brain?

Laura Sanders
Science News
Wed, 24 Jan 2018 12:09 UTC
Brain Memories 1
© Sven Huath
TRACES OF MEMORY New technologies and new ideas have revived the hunt for the physical basis of memory, challenging existing notions of where memories are stored.
People tend to think of memories as deeply personal, ephemeral possessions - snippets of emotions, words, colors and smells stitched into our unique neural tapestries as life goes on. But a strange series of experiments conducted decades ago offered a different, more tangible perspective. The mind-bending results have gained unexpected support from recent studies.

In 1959, James Vernon McConnell, a psychologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, painstakingly trained small flatworms called planarians to associate a shock with a light. The worms remembered this lesson, later contracting their bodies in response to the light.

One weird and wonderful thing about planarians is that they can regenerate their bodies - including their brains. When the trained flatworms were cut in half, they regrew either a head or a tail, depending on which piece had been lost. Not surprisingly, worms that kept their heads and regrew tails retained the memory of the shock, McConnell found. Astonishingly, so did the worms that grew replacement heads and brains. Somehow, these fully operational, complex arrangements of brand-spanking-new nerve cells had acquired the memory of the painful shock, McConnell reported.

In subsequent experiments, McConnell went even further, attempting to transfer memory from one worm to another. He tried grafting the head of a trained worm onto the tail of an untrained worm, but he couldn't get the head to stick. He injected trained planarian slurry into untrained worms, but the recipients often exploded. Finally, he ground up bits of the trained planarians and fed them to untrained worms. Sure enough, after their meal, the untrained worms seemed to have traces of the memory - the cannibals recoiled at the light.

Comment: The jury is still out there on whether memories are truly stored in the brain or are external to us. See also:

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Info

Ancient Eurasian DNA sequencing is revealing links with modern humans


The Archaeology News Network
Thu, 25 Jan 2018 17:09 UTC
Until recently, very little was known about the genetic relationship between modern humans of the Upper Palaeolithic age (the period of time between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, also called the Late Stone age) and today's populations. But with direct DNA sequencing, researchers are discovering unexpected genetic connections between individuals on opposing sides of Eurasia. These suggest a complex history that may represent early gene flow across Eurasia or an early population structure that eventually led to Europeans and Asians.
Schematic of populations in Eurasia
© Melinda A.Yang and Qiaomei Fu
Schematic of populations in Eurasia and the Americas from 45,000 to 7,500 years ago. A summary of major events in each of the time periods is on the left.
In a review published in the journal Trends in Genetics, scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing discuss what we know about the genetics of ancient individuals from Eurasia (Europe and Western Asia) between 45,000-7,500 years ago. The authors summarized work that investigated the genomes of more than 20 ancients in the Eurasian family tree, including the 45,000-year-old Ust'-Ishim individual from Central Siberia, for their paper.

"Aside from these individuals, it is a fact that sampling for the Eurasian region is sparse for all time periods except the present-day," says co-author Qiaomei Fu, a paleogeneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. "But with the information from the several individuals available for ancient DNA sequencing we do have hints at interesting population structure, migration and interaction in East Asia."
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Info

Majority of Americans 'not comfortable' with self-driving cars - poll


RT
Mon, 29 Jan 2018 13:41 UTC
Self driving cars
© Kim Kyung Hoon / Reuters
Although self-driving cars are becoming more of a reality each day, the majority of Americans are wary of the idea, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.

When asked whether they felt comfortable with the notion of "riding in an entirely self-driving car," a whopping 67 percent of Americans said they were "not comfortable." Only 27 percent said they were "comfortable" with the idea.

Males were significantly more likely than females to be on board with the idea, with 38 percent of men saying they were comfortable with the idea. That's compared to just 16 percent of females.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, millennials were the age group most likely to embrace such technology. Some 38 percent said they would be comfortable with the idea, compared to 27 percent of Gen-X respondents. Just 16 percent of baby boomers said they'd be comfortable with self-driving cars on the roads.
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Brain

Retirement causes short term memory to rapidly decline, warn scientists

Sarah Knapton
Telegragh
Mon, 22 Jan 2018 05:08 UTC
Retirees
© SG HIRST
Retirement is bad for brain health as study of retired civil servants has shown.
Workers looking forward to enjoying a long and leisurely retirement after years of toil, may need to think again.

New research shows that brain function declines rapidly as soon as people stop work and put their feet up.

A major British study which tracked 3,400 retired civil servants found that short-term memory declines nearly 40 per cent faster once employees become pensioners.

It appears that the lack of regular stimulation takes a heavy toll on cognitive function and speeds up memory loss and dementia, researchers warned.
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Smiley

Scientists find 'happy' secret to improve your running endurance


RT
Sun, 28 Jan 2018 16:51 UTC
Runner
© Getty
Runners of all levels who want to improve their endurance, speed and/or strength may want to try cracking a smile during their workout, according to new research.

While it may go against all natural instincts, at least pretending you're enjoying your run by intentionally smiling has been found to improve your overall performance, according to new research by Ulster University in Northern Ireland and Swansea University in Wales.

According to the new study, a key psychological factor in the success of one's workout is the effort we feel we're putting into the activity. In other words, the less effort we think we're putting in, the easier we perceive the exercise to be and the likelier we are to progress.

The 'fake it till you make it' technique is favored by Olympic marathon gold medallist Eliud Kipchoge, a strategic smiler whose smiling helped him relax and ease his way to the finish line during his fastest-ever marathon.
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