Magnetic Field

October 15, 2014

Scientist Find Earth’s Magnetic Field Can Flip Much More Quickly Than Thought

Shawn Hopkins earth, Magnetic Field, Reversal, Science 0

The earth’s magnetic field has completely reversed itself, flipping the magnetic pole from north to south or vice-versa, more than once during the planet’s history. Scientists have long thought these flips took thousands of years to accomplish, but evidence shows the last flip about 786,000 years ago was completed in less than 100 years. A team of scientists came to this conclusion after studying data gathered on the magnetic field alignment of ancient lake sediments in the Sulmona basin of the Apennine Mountains east of Rome, Italy. Scientists were able to find and date the layer showing the reversal, and were surprised to see how quickly it happened. “What’s incredible is that you go from reverse polarity to a field that is normal with essentially nothing in between, which means it had to have happened very quickly, probably in less than 100 years,” said Paul Renne, director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center and a UC Berkeley professor-in- residence of earth and planetary science and a co-author of the study. “We

October 9, 2014

A Fusion Reactor Cheaper Than a Coal Plant? Scientists Say It’s Possible

Shawn Hopkins Fusion, Magnetic Field, plasma, Reactor, University of Washington 0

Face it, we are never going to get the full Buck Rogers “let me just pop over there on my jetpack” sci-fi future experience if we keep relying on fossil fuels. The best we can hope for is an extension of our current cyberpunk dystopia, or maybe a gloomy 1970s planetary disaster novel. A staple of every “flying car and robot maid” sci-fi future is that they’ve moved on to more exotic forms of energy, like nuclear fusion. Unfortunately, in real life fusion is much more difficult and expensive to use as an energy source than fossil fuels. But that might change soon. University of Washington Engineers have designed a fusion reactor concept they say could actually be slightly cheaper to build than a coal-fired plant. The design is called the dynomak, which is a suitable Buck Rogersy word. It started as UW class project to design a reactor, but Thomas Jarboe, a UW professor of aeronautics and astronautics and an adjunct professor in physics and doctoral student Derek Sutherland