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Truth is the pillar of civilization. The word 'truth' occurs 224 times in the King James Version of the Holy Bible; witnesses testifying in American courts and before the United States Congress must swear to tell the truth; and, laws and civil codes require truth in advertising and in business practices, to list just a few examples. The purpose of science is to discover the true nature of Earth and Universe and to convey that knowledge truthfully to people everywhere. Science gives birth to technology that makes our lives easier and better. Science improves our health and enables us to...

Nearly half of the Earth's heat comes from the radioactive decay of materials inside, according to a large international research collaboration that includes a Kansas State University physicist. Studying the physical properties of Earth can help astrobiologists understand the mechanisms that caused our planet to become habitable. In turn, this information can then be used to determine where and how to search for habitable worlds throughout the Universe. ...

Berkeley Lab scientists join their KamLAND colleagues to measure the radioactive sources of Earth's heat flowWhat spreads the sea floors and moves the continents? What melts iron in the outer core and enables the Earth's magnetic field? Heat. Geologists have used temperature measurements from more than 20,000 boreholes around the world to estimate that some 44 terawatts (44 trillion watts) of heat continually flow from Earth's interior into space. Where does it come from? Radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium in Earth's crust and mantle is a principal source, and in 2005 scientists in the KamLAND collaboration, based in...

New research gives the first accurate estimate of how much faster the Earth's core is rotating compared to the rest of the planet. Previous research had shown that the Earth's core rotates faster than the rest of the planet. However, scientists from the University of Cambridge have discovered that earlier estimates of 1 degree every year were inaccurate and that the core is actually moving much slower than previously believed – approximately 1 degree every million years. Their findings are published today, Sunday 20 February, in the journal Nature Geoscience. The inner core grows very slowly over time as material...

What may be a new outermost layer of the Earth's core has been found, geoscientists have revealed. This discovery could help solve mysteries of the planet's magnetic field, researchers say. The Earth's core is composed mainly of iron, divided into a solid inner center roughly 1,500 miles (2,440 kilometers) wide covered by a liquid outer layer about 1,400 miles (2,250 km) thick. Even though the bulk of the core is iron, researchers also knew it contained a small amount of lighter elements such as oxygen and sulfur. As the inner core crystallized over time, scientists think this process forced out...

A new method of capturing detailed, three-dimensional images of minute samples of material under extreme pressures is shedding light on the evolution of the Earth's interior. Early results suggest that the early Earth did not have to be entirely molten to separate into the rocky crust and iron-rich core it has today. Researchers at Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are leading the group pioneering the technique, which could lead to a wide range of new experiments.To answer the big questions, it often helps to look at the smallest details. That is the approach Stanford mineral physicist Wendy Mao...

Earth's internal dynamo generates average field in outer core 50 times that at surface A University of California, Berkeley, geophysicist has made the first-ever measurement of the strength of the magnetic field inside Earth's core, 1,800 miles underground. The magnetic field strength is 25 Gauss, or 50 times stronger than the magnetic field at the surface that makes compass needles align north-south. Though this number is in the middle of the range geophysicists predict, it puts constraints on the identity of the heat sources in the core that keep the internal dynamo running to maintain this magnetic field. "This is...

It's a classic image from every youngster's science textbook: a cutaway image of Earth's interior. The brown crust is paper-thin; the warm mantle orange, the seething liquid of the outer core yellow, and at the center the core, a ball of solid, red-hot iron. Now a new theory aims to rewrite it all by proposing the seemingly impossible: Earth has not one but two inner cores. The idea stems from an ancient, cataclysmic collision that scientists believe occurred when a Mars-sized object hit Earth about 4.45 billion years ago. The young Earth was still so hot that it was mostly...

Deep down, the moon may be more like Earth than scientists ever thought. A new moon-rock study suggests the satellite has an iron core... The moon's core could be a clue to its ancient origins, which have long puzzled astronomers. "Our moon is too big to be a moon," Taylor said. "It's huge compared to the moons we see around other planets, so it has always been suspected that there was something strange in its origin." ...Rock samples from NASA's Apollo 15 and Apollo 17 moon missions of the early 1970s have now shed more light on the moon's origins,...

EARTH'S natural radioactivity has been measured for the first time. The measurement will help geologists find out to what extent nuclear decay is responsible for the immense quantity of heat generated by Earth. Our planet's heat output drives the convection currents that churn liquid iron in the outer core, giving rise to Earth's magnetic field. Just where this heat comes from is a big question. Measurements of the temperature gradients across rocks in mines and boreholes have led geologists to estimate that the planet is internally generating between 30 and 44 terawatts of heat. Some of this heat comes from...

Oklo: Ancient African Nuclear Reactors Explanation: The remnants of nuclear reactors nearly two billion years old were found in the 1970s in Africa. These reactors are thought to have occurred naturally. No natural reactors exist today, as the relative density of fissile uranium has now decayed below that needed for a sustainable reaction. Pictured above is Fossil Reactor 15, located in Oklo, Gabon. Uranium oxide remains are visible as the yellowish rock. Oklo by-products are being used today to probe the stability of the fundamental constants over cosmological time and distance scales and to develop more effective means for...

Using a delicate instrument located under a mountain in central Italy, two University of Massachusetts Amherst physicists are measuring some of the faintest and rarest particles ever detected, geo-neutrinos, with the greatest precision yet achieved. The data reveal, for the first time, a well defined signal, above background noise, of the extremely rare geo-neutrino particle from deep within Earth. The small number of anti-neutrinos detected, however, only a couple each month, helps to settle a long-standing question among geophysicists and geologists about whether our planet harbors a huge, natural nuclear reactor at its core. Geo-neutrinos are anti-neutrinos produced in the...

(PhysOrg.com) -- A new theory suggests the Moon was formed after a natural nuclear explosion in the Earth's mantle rather than after the impact of a massive object with the Earth, as previously thought. The problem with the impact hypothesis is that simulations calculate the Moon should be composed of 80% impactor and 20% Earth, whereas in fact the isotope ratios of light and heavy elements found in Moon rocks so far examined are virtually identical to those on Earth. The fission hypothesis is an alternative explanation for the formation of the moon, and it predicts similar isotope ratios in...

Sunlike stars that harbor planets are low on lithium, according to a recent study that may offer a new tool in the hunt for planets beyond our solar system. Stars are made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. A small percentage of a star's mass comes from heavier elements, which astronomers refer to as metals. Young, yellow stars like our sun usually have more metals than older, redder stars, although the exact mix of those metals can vary. But astronomers have been unable to explain why otherwise similar sunlike stars have widely different lithium levels.The new study suggests that the...

TORONTO, ON – According to a new study by geologists at the University of Toronto and the University of Maryland, the wealth of some minerals that lie in the rock beneath the Earth's surface may be extraterrestrial in origin. "The extreme temperature at which the Earth's core formed more than four billion years ago would have completely stripped any precious metals from the rocky crust and deposited them in the core," says James Brenan of the Department of Geology at the University of Toronto and co-author of the study published in Nature Geoscience on October 18. "So, the next question...

The ancient sea floor was discovered in southwest Greenland A sliver of four-billion-year-old sea floor has offered a glimpse into the inner workings of an adolescent Earth.The baked and twisted rocks, now part of Greenland, show the earliest evidence of plate tectonics, colossal movements of the planet's outer shell. Until now, researchers were unable to say when the process, which explains how oceans and continents form, began. The unique find, described in the journal Science, shows the movements started soon after the planet formed. "Since the plate tectonic paradigm is the framework in which we interpret all modern-day geology,...

Earth's magnetic field - the force that protects us from deadly radiation bursts from outer space - is weakening dramatically. Scientists have discovered that its strength has dropped precipitously over the past two centuries and could disappear over the next 1,000 years. The effects could be catastrophic. Powerful radiation bursts, which normally never touch the atmosphere, would heat up its upper layers, triggering climatic disruption. Navigation and communication satellites, Earth's eyes and ears, would be destroyed and migrating animals left unable to navigate. 'Earth's magnetic field has disappeared many times before - as a prelude to our magnetic poles flipping...

Jupiter's Spots Disappear Amid Major Climate Change By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer posted: 01:00 pm ET 21 April 2004 Jupiter is undergoing major climate change and could lose many of its large spots over the next seven years, only to make way for the creation of fresh spots in a decades-long cycle, according to a new explanation of old mysteries. While the analysis remains to be proven, it is seen by other researchers as interesting and, importantly, testable even with large backyard telescopes. Philip Marcus, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who came up with the...

Researchers are preparing to test the highly controversial theory of a San Diego scientist, J. Marvin Herndon, who thinks a huge, natural nuclear reactor or "georeactor" -- a vast deposit of uranium several miles wide -- exists at Earth's core, thousands of miles beneath our feet... [I]t might help to explain otherwise puzzling phenomena of planetary science, such as fluctuations in the intensity of Earth's magnetic field... If Herndon's theoretical nuclear reactor really exists, then it should be gushing out antineutrinos that would fly through the roughly 4,000 miles of solid rock and emerge at the Earth's surface.

When you consider that his committee's sole function was to advise whether or not research funds should be spent to investigate an entirely new area of physics and electrochemistry, and that this statement is one of his principal reasons for deciding not to invest such research funds, his statement takes on an almost Kafkaesque quality. It is unwise to invest research funds in any new area, unless we already have a thorough foundation in the basics of that new area? How could anyone ever get any money for research out of professor Huizenga's committee? By proving that they already know...

Slowly Strangling America's Golden Goose© 2006 J. Marvin HerndonTransdyne Corporation   Imagine: You wake up tomorrow and find that America’s judicial system has changed. Now, prosecutors can present secret witness testimony and only provide their own brief excerpts or summaries to the defense; judges are no longer independent, they have been replaced by the prosecutor’s boss. Your first thought, “Now, we will get much needed criminal convictions.” Then, “Ohmygosh! Are we in deep yogurt! We have seen all that before, in the Spanish Inquisition and in virtually every totalitarian regime on Earth, so we know what will happen. Soon...

Lava left its mark on Grand Canyon Friday, 15 February 2008 Larry O'Hanlon Discovery News Volcanic lava flows onced dammed the river that ran through the Grand Canyon (Source: iStockphoto) The Grand Canyon was not just carved by water. It has also been the scene of periodic wars between the Colorado River and volcanic eruptions that dammed the river, then burst. New airborne elevation survey data and radioisotope dating of Grand Canyon lava flows sheds new light on the battle between water and molten rocks there over the past 725,000 years. Over that time there have been no fewer than...

Earth gives off a relentless hum of countless notes completely imperceptible to the human ear, like a giant, exceptionally quiet symphony, but the origin of this sound remains a mystery. Now unexpected powerful tunes have been discovered in this hum. These new findings could shed light on the source of this enigma. The planet emanates a constant rumble far below the limits of human hearing, even when the ground isn't shaking from an earthquake. (It does not cause the ringing in the ear linked with tinnitus.) This sound, first discovered a decade ago, is one that only scientific instruments -...

Rapid changes in the churning movement of Earth's liquid outer core are weakening the magnetic field in some regions of the planet's surface, a new study says. "What is so surprising is that rapid, almost sudden, changes take place in the Earth's magnetic field," said study co-author Nils Olsen, a geophysicist at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen. The findings suggest similarly quick changes are simultaneously occurring in the liquid metal, 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers) below the surface, he said. The swirling flow of molten iron and nickel around Earth's solid center triggers an electrical current, which generates the...