The Daily Nash-on

Inspiration strikes in many forms – and this time it was a carphone salesman who enrolled in a talent show. Passion gives you wings, no matter what your origins and deficiencies, if you don’t believe that, watch Paul Pott.

Need I say more?

xkcd

And this is no April Fool’s Joke !

The electrical properties of a new-found mineral could help to explain our planet’s wiggle.

Rachel Courtland
As the world turns: do conductive materials in the mantle interfere with its spin?As the world turns: do conductive materials in the mantle interfere with its spin?NASA

If a day seems to go by faster now than it did when you were younger, it might not just be your imagination. The speed of the Earth’s rotation is known to fluctuate slightly over decades. Now researchers have found a piece of the puzzle to explain this drift: a highly conductive mineral that could change the way the Earth spins.

A full day is almost never exactly 24 hours long. Early on in the Earth’s history, a day may once have been as short as five hours; tidal friction with the Moon has since made each successive day slightly longer. In any given year, earthquakes and seasonal ice melting change the Earth’s rotational speed by exerting subtle influences on how the planet’s mass is distributed. On the scale of decades, geophysicists see irregular millisecond-scale fluctuations in day length.

The exact cause of this decadal-scale variation is a bit of a mystery, but many have speculated that some process 2,900 kilometres down, at the boundary between the Earth’s core and mantle, may cause it. The Earth’s core and mantle spin somewhat independently; models show that if the bottom of the mantle contains a conductive layer, it may interact with the magnetic field coming from the core, putting a wiggle in the Earth’s spin that affects day length on this time frame.

But what could cause this conductance? A team led by Kei Hirose at the Tokyo Institute of Technology took a close look at a recently discovered mineral and say it could be at the root of the issue.
Under pressure

The team focused on post-perovskite, a high-pressure phase of a magnesium silicate mineral that was discovered in 2004 and is thought to exist in the mantle.

To investigate post-perovskite’s properties, the team recreated the conditions found at the bottom of the mantle, some 2,700 kilometres down, in the laboratory. They heated samples of post-perovskite to more than 2,700 °C and squeezed them to more than 1 million times surface pressure. “These are really challenging experiments,” says Raymond Jeanloz of the University of California, Berkeley.

The mineral is up to 100 times more conductive under these conditions than it is near the surface, the team reports in Science 1.

The team estimates that a 300-kilometre-thick layer of post-perovskite would create an electromagnetic interaction “strong enough to account for millisecond-order level change in length of a day,” says Hirose. Unfortunately no one yet knows if such a layer actually exists.
Alternative theories

The team also found the conductivity of post-perovskite was sensitive to the amount of iron present in the mineral. This sensitivity might explain geological measurements showing that the electrical conductivity of the mantle is higher at the bottom of the mantle underneath Africa and the Pacific than it is elsewhere. “People thought that the temperature is higher, but our data shows it’s more likely that the chemical composition is different, more iron-rich,” says Hirose.

But other structures might also be responsible for decadal-scale fluctuations in the length of day. A scant 200-meter layer of iron, for example, could also create the same sort of electromagnetic interaction as 300 kilometres of post-perovskite. “Iron is kind of the magic ingredient here,” says Quentin Williams of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “We’re not exactly sure what the detailed iron content is at the core-mantle boundary.”

Alternatively, it might not be down to interactions in electromagnetic fields at all: some propose that a rough boundary on the underside of the mantle might be what’s interacting with the Earth’s liquid outer core, creating a periodic sloshing that changes the Earth’s rotation.

*
References
1. Ohta, K., et al. Science. 320, 89-91. ([year]2008[/year]).

Conductive mineral could change day length : Nature News.

Feel free to flame me…

Made another video tutorial in response to a query…

My feelings exactly.

Regarding Apple’s alleged patent infringements….

HiChris! said:

You can not enforce a patent until it is actually approved. So other people can go ahead and develop similar things, sell, and market them - and there is nothing you can do besides issuing them a stern letter from a lawyer. Now, once you get the patent it is a different story. You can sue and either get money (”forced” licensing) or get the other guys to stop. Of course the defendants will claim that the patent covers something obvious and try to get the patent overturned. Of course what is obvious now, may not have been so in 1999 or whenever Apple started selling iPods/using iTunes - so it will be fun to see what happens.

 

alta replied :

That’s exactly why I just filed for a patent for having sex with an android or similarly computer controled non-sentient beings. You may think this is stupid now, but in 10 years when I get my patent I’m going after whoever makes the iHooker!

How old is this Universe we live in ? How long have the particles and atoms collided, exchanged energies, and gone about their quantum business? The guesses have ranged from the few hundred billion years that redefine antiquity, to the ridiculous and laughable 6000 years.

And what does the scientific community do when that happens ? We build, specifically, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). And we measure, specifically, the patterns of background cosmic radiation. I am tempted to say that this is like counting rings in a piece of wood – but I wouldn’t be doing justice to the feat.

This is the background energy distribution of the Universe – the very essence of reality that we live in. Mark Dragovan and Jeffrey Peterson observed it first using a small radio telescope. In a moment of enlightened humility, they called it “The Face of God”.

The 5–year wait is over.  The data and findings from the WMAP, have been released. We now know for a fact the following :

1. The Universe is flat to an accuracy of 2 degrees in curvature.

2. The Universe is 13.73 billion years old, give or take 120 million.

3. The Universe is cold , with an average temperature of 2.725K, or roughly -271 deg Celsius

4. With our telescopes, we can see less than 5% of the Universe, we are missing the rest : 72.1 % of which is dark energy, 23.3% of which is dark matter.

5. Space expands, objects in it do not.

For a bunch of other cool things that we now do know, you can visit the technical resource.

I beleive the matter is laid to rest, the creationists have to invent another theory now, or it least pre-pone the alleged date of creation.

One of the reasons I read Slashdot is because the commments on postsare one of the best sources of geek humour around. Today I read a comment on a story about PayPal recommending that people stop using Safari, that had all the flair and passion of a classic post-apocalyptic era novel. I quote :

Well, if there’s group of users that has been told repeatedly that their computer is safe from viruses, that it “just works,” and that they don’t need to be concerned with computer threats of any kind…it’s Apple users. Sitting in their offices, wearing their turtlenecks and sipping their lattes, the only thing about phishing they’ve heard about is that it happens to other people. Uglier people. They’re not used to having to defend themselves, not like Windows users. Windows users have a battle-scarred paranoia…they’ve seen worms that can rewrite their BIOS, steal their credit cards, and kidnap their firstborn. Their 50 yard stares have been earned by fixing their mom’s computer for the eighth time this month, and damnit if they’re going to lose another computer to some Ethiopian scammer…not after the last time. Their nightmares are the stuff of Steven King novels, the earlier stuff with lovecraftian clowns and superplagues that are the start of apocalyptic battles between good and evil. Their best days on the internet involve life and death struggles against the next pop-up, because it might be their last. Ironically, Mac users have never had to live with the terror that clicking on that “win a free iPod” might just cause their computer to explode, spamming their grandmother with anal tranny porn on its way out. Maybe it’s time they should… …wait, what the hell was I talking about?

 

– SterlingSylver on Slashdot

Who won’t be moved by that piece, now ?