Laboratory Equipment

Earth’s Iron Core is Shockingly Weak

The massive ball of iron sitting at the center of Earth is not quite as “rock-solid” as has been thought, say two Stanford mineral physicists. By conducting experiments that simulate the immense pressures deep in the planet’s interior, the researchers determined that iron in Earth’s inner core is only about 40 percent as strong as previous studies estimated.

This is the first time scientists have been able to experimentally measure the effect of such intense pressure – as high as 3 million times the pressure Earth’s atmosphere exerts at sea level – in a laboratory. A paper presenting the results of their study is available online in Nature Geoscience.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/earths-iron-core-shockingly-weak

Google’s New Project Shows Land Time Lapse

Google released more than a quarter-century of images of Earth taken from space compiled into an interactive time-lapse experience. Working with data from the Landsat Program managed by the U.S. Geological Survey, the images display an historical perspective on changes to Earth’s surface over time.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/google%E2%80%99s-new-project-shows-land-time-lapse

Early Earth Smelled Like Rotten Eggs

Tiny 1,900 million-year-old fossils from rocks around Lake Superior, Canada, give the first ever snapshot of organisms eating each other and suggest what the ancient Earth would have smelled like.

The fossils, preserved in Gunflint chert, capture ancient microbes in the act of feasting on a cyanobacterium-like fossil called Gunflintia – with the perforated sheaths of Gunflintia being the discarded leftovers of this early meal.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/early-earth-smelled-rotten-eggs

Earth’s Center is 1,000 C Hotter than Thought

Scientists have determined the temperature near the Earth’s center to be 6,000 C, 1,000 degrees hotter than in a previous experiment run 20 years ago. These measurements confirm geophysical models that the temperature difference between the solid core and the mantle above, must be at least 1,500 C to explain why the Earth has a magnetic field. The scientists were even able to establish why the earlier experiment had produced a lower temperature figure.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/04/earth%E2%80%99s-center-1000-c-hotter-thought

NEON Gives Earth an EKG

Earth Day invariably begs the question: what is the current and future state of our Earth’s ecology?

Answers to this question have traditionally been woefully inadequate because scientists have lacked a mechanism to systematically measure the long-term health of large ecosystems. But that is now changing as a new, precedent-setting, nationwide, multidisciplinary infrastructure — the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) — is starting to go online across the U.S.NEON will be to ecological health what an EKG is to heart health.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/videos/2013/04/neon-gives-earth-ekg

Study Explains 90 Percent of Vegetation Changes

In the last 30 years, vegetation has changed significantly throughout the world. Until recently, the extent to which the climate or humankind was responsible remained unclear. However, geographers from the Univ. of Zurich and colleagues from the Netherlands now reveal that over half of these changes are climatological, human-caused or as yet unknown. Human-climate interactions cause over a third, and around 10 percent cannot be explained fully by either the climate or human activity.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/04/study-explains-90-percent-vegetation-changes

Multiple Approaches Explain Mystery of Subduction Zone Earthquake

Compressive-sensing technique, a sampling theory in the field of applied mathematics and signal image processing, plays a significant role in the cooperative research on subduction zone earthquakes, which reveals the law of subduction zone earthquake rupture systematically for the first time.

Among the earthquakes above magnitude Mw 8.0 in the last 10 years, most are subduction zone earthquakes like the 2004 Sumatra–Andaman earthquake and 2011 Tohoku earthquake and brought human great catastrophe, which necessitates investigation into laws under this type of earthquake.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/04/multiple-approaches-explain-mystery-subduction-zone-earthquake

Sun Will Upset Mars Missions in April

The positions of the planets next month will mean diminished communications between Earth and NASA’s spacecraft on Mars.

Mars will be passing almost directly behind the sun, from Earth’s perspective. The sun can easily disrupt radio transmissions between the two planets during that near-alignment. To prevent an impaired command from reaching an orbiter or rover, mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., are preparing to suspend sending any commands to spacecraft at Mars for weeks in April. Transmissions from Mars to Earth will also be reduced.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/videos/2013/03/sun-will-upset-mars-missions-april

Scientists See Cause of Solar Storm Near Earth

On March 17, 2013, at 1:28 a.m. EDT, a coronal mass ejection (CME) from March 15 passed by NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) as it approached Earth. Upon interacting with the giant magnetic bubble surrounding Earth, the magnetosphere, the CME caused a kind of solar storm known as a geomagnetic storm.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/videos/2013/03/scientists-see-cause-solar-storm-near-earth

Earth’s Interior Cycles Contribute to Long-Term Sea-Level, Climate Change

Ancient rises in sea levels and global warming are partially attributable to cyclical activity below the earth’s surface, researchers from New York Univ. and Ottawa’s Carleton Univ. have concluded in an analysis of geological studies.

However, the article’s authors, NYU’s Michael Rampino and Carleton Univ.’s Andreas Prokoph, note that changes spurred by the earth’s interior are gradual, taking place in periods ranging from 60 million to 140 million years — far less rapidly than those brought on by human activity.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/03/earth%E2%80%99s-interior-cycles-contribute-long-term-sea-level-climate-change

Earth’s ‘Heartbeat’ Seen in Clouds

The height of clouds changes by up to 200m during a day under the influence of a global “electrical heartbeat” in the atmosphere, scientists at the Univ. of Reading have discovered.

The findings, made by analyzing 10 years’ data of cloud heights from the north and south poles, open up a whole new perspective on our understanding of how clouds form and influence our weather and climate. Scientists have been aware of the daily global ebb and flow of electric current through the atmosphere for 100 years, when it was shown to vary consistently throughout the day wherever on the planet it was measured. This regular variation, effectively a global electrical heartbeat, is known as the Carnegie curve, after the ship whose cruises provided the defining experiments in the 1920s.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/videos/2013/03/earth%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98heartbeat%E2%80%99-seen-clouds

New Information About ‘Snowball Earth’ Period

It is rather difficult to imagine, but approximately 635 million years ago, ice may have covered a vast portion of our planet in an event called “Snowball Earth.” According to the Snowball Earth hypothesis, the massive ice age that occurred before animal life appeared, when Earth’s landmasses were most likely clustered near the equator, precipitated relatively rapid changes in atmospheric conditions and a subsequent greenhouse heat wave. This particular period of extensive glaciation and subsequent climate changes might have supplied the cataclysmic event that gave rise to modern levels of atmospheric oxygen, paving the way for the rise of animals and the diversification of life during the later Cambrian explosion.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/03/new-information-about-snowball-earth-period

Comets May Have Sparked Life on Earth

It’s among the most ancient of questions: what are the origins of life on Earth? A new experiment simulating conditions in deep space reveals that the complex building blocks of life could have been created on icy interplanetary dust and then carried to Earth, jump-starting life.

Chemists from UC Berkeley, and the Univ. of Hawaii, Manoa, showed that conditions in space are capable of creating complex dipeptides – linked pairs of amino acids – that are essential building blocks shared by all living things. The discovery opens the door to the possibility that these molecules were brought to Earth aboard a comet or possibly meteorites, catalyzing the formation of proteins (polypeptides), enzymes and even more complex molecules, such as sugars, that are necessary for life.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/03/comets-may-have-sparked-life-earth