Posts Tagged ‘Dan Nosowitz’
Earth’s Core Is Weaker Than We Thought
Written by Dan Nosowitz
Thursday, 16 May 2013 20:30
No Comments
Earth's Core

Wikimedia Commons

Like so many of our own! No judgments, Earth.

A new study in Nature Geoscience, from two Stanford researchers, indicates that our planet's super-dense, super strong core may not be as strong as we'd thought.

It's very difficult to replicate the kind of ultra-high-pressure environment of Earth's iron core; we can't dig down there and monitor it, so researchers have relied on reading and tracking seismic waves and extrapolating other information from there. The outer core, which is more liquid, produces the geomagnetic field that stretches all the way out past the ionosphere and into space, where it meets the solar wind. That geomagnetic field protects our atmosphere from solar radiation, which could strip away the ozone layer and make life on Earth impossible.

The study is the first to use a tool called a DAC, or diamond anvil cell, to measure the core. A DAC smooshes a very tiny amount of material between two diamonds with incredible force: it's able to exert up to a 300 gigapascals. That's about three million times the pressure on Earth's surface.

In this particular experiment, the researchers stuck a piece of pure iron in there to emulate what goes on in the Earth's core. They found, according to the lead author of the paper, that "The strength of iron under these extreme pressures is startlingly weak." In fact, it's only 40% as strong as previous estimates had indicated, and prone to shearing.

The researchers don't really know what this means. It'll probably impact our understanding of the geomagnetic shield and its effects, however.

[via Stanford]

    


 
Acer Announces Weird Folding Laptop With The Trackpad In The Wrong Place
Written by Dan Nosowitz
Friday, 03 May 2013 16:28
No Comments
Acer Aspire R7 Hinge Acer
An easel-inspired hinge turns this singularly weird laptop into a tablet or an all-in-one.

At an event this morning in New York City, Acer announced a slate of new gadgets, some boring (an iPad-Mini-sized Iconia tablet, a small convertible laptop) but one distinctly...odd. The Acer Aspire R7 isn't quite like any other laptop out there.

Windows 8's emphasis on touchscreen navigation has led to a lot of unusual laptop designs, which is exciting; there's Dell's vertically-flipping screen, Lenovo's excellent bend-all-the-way-around Yoga, and now Acer's easel-inspired design. The hinge is actually called "Ezel," which we assume is pronounced like "easel," and works sort of like the old iMac G4, moving up and down and forward and back. The hinge also allows the screen to lay down flat on the keyboard, so the computer looks more like a tablet.

Interestingly, the Aspire R7 has switched the positions of the keyboard (a nice-looking chiclet affair) and the trackpad, so the trackpad actually sits above, closer to the screen. The idea is that you use the trackpad less in a Windows 8 device, because so much of the operating system encourages you to touch the screen instead. Thanks to the hinge, you can bring the screen even closer to you, right over the trackpad, making the laptop look kind of like a jumbo iPad with a keyboard case.

The laptop has the standard specs; 15.6-inch 1080p display, Intel Core i5 processor, 6GB of memory, a 500GB hard drive with a 24GB SSD to load the OS faster, plus HDMI, SD reader, and three USB ports. The laptop looks thin, but we're skeptical about the utility of using a 15.6-inch laptop as a tablet. Even the very thin and light Lenovo Yoga 13 proved kind of heavy and unwieldy to use in "tablet mode," but perhaps you could use it for tabletop demos or something.

No price yet, but it'll be out May 14th as a Best Buy exclusive.

    


 
Mystery Animal Contest: Who Is This Big-Eared Wrinklenose?
Written by Dan Nosowitz
Friday, 26 April 2013 19:46
No Comments
Guess the species (either common or Linnaean) by tweeting at us--we're @PopSci--and get your name listed right here! Plus eternal glory, obviously. Update: We have a winner!

So, here are the rules: To answer, follow us on Twitter and tweet at us with the hashtag #mysteryanimal. For example:

Hey @PopSci, is the #mysteryanimal a baboon?

And then I might say "if you think that's a baboon, perhaps you are the baboon!" But probably not, because this is a positive environment and all guesses are welcome and also this is not a very common animal so guess whatever you want!

The first person to get it right wins! We'll retweet the answer from @PopSci, and also update this post so your amazing animal knowledge will be permanently etched onto the internet. Show your kids! Your dumb kids who thought that was a baboon!

Update: And the winner is...Seth Rosenthal, who, for the second week in a row, correctly guessed the mystery animal first! This creature is a gerenuk, Litocranius walleri, a species of antelope native to the dry brush and scrubland of East Africa. The gerenuk is also called the "long-necked giraffe," though it is not closely related to the giraffe. In fact, it's the only member of its genus, so it's not that closely related to any other species, though it is in the same subfamily as the gazelles.

The gerenuk's identification with the giraffe comes from both its long neck and its feeding habits. As the gerenuk lives in hot, dry, sparsely-vegetated areas, it has to reach high up to find leaves and twigs to eat--so it stands up on its super-muscled hind legs, reaches its long neck up, and can plug leaves off the acacia tree that gazelles and other antelopes can't come close to.

Their appearance is adorable and odd; it looks as though they have enormous ears, but in fact their ears are proportional to the rest of the body. It's the head that's curiously small. But it's not a huge animal, only reaching about 41 inches tall.

There are an estimated 95,000 gerenuks in the wild; the species is listed as "Near Threatened," with habitat loss and fragmentation the key culprits. Hi gerenuk!