When is the last time you used yours?
Lava lamps get old fast, get shut down and sit unchanged for eons in unheated storage.
Alien 'lava lamp' with dying magnetic field orbited Earth a billion years ago – science
Scientists studying prehistoric lunar rocks have found evidence of a lava-lamp-like dynamo at the heart of our Moon’s metallic core that generated a long-lasting magnetic field. The Moon samples were collected in 1971 by astronauts, David Scott and James Irwin, during NASA’s Apollo 15 space mission. Now, a paper published in …
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Friday 11th August 2017 09:24 GMT DropBear
Re: When is the last time you used yours?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I just got a IoT* wall plug just so I can control it whenever I like without having to dig for its inline cord-switch (it's in a quite visible but hard-to-reach spot)...
* Now, now, we're all adults here, no need for that pitchfork - it just functions like a wireless switch within a larger existing system, there's no remote access at all to any of it...
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Friday 11th August 2017 11:32 GMT breakfast
Re: When is the last time you used yours?
I heard an account of an office where they were used on everyone's desks, activated whenever they broke the build.
I suspect the story was completely spurious, but I rather like the idea because it gives you a brief window of opportunity after your build break to get it fixed before it becomes super obvious...
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Friday 11th August 2017 11:37 GMT Mike Richards
Re: I thought radioactive decay was a big part of keeping the core molten...
On the modern Earth, the heat of the Core is thought to be largely primordial heat left over from its formation. There is also a continuous contribution of latent heat released as the Inner Core grows through crystallisation from the Outer Core. Radioactive heat is likely to be a relatively minor component in heating the Core.
Radioactive heating is much more important in the Mantle where it is largely driven by the decay of low concentrations of 40K, 232Th, 235U and 238U. Even though concentrations of isotopes are low, the volume of the Mantle is so vast that most of the Earth's heat is generated here. Perhaps counterintuitively, the continental Crust contains the largest concentration of radioactive isotopes due to their elemental incompatibility with the ultramafic minerals of the Mantle. Their relatively high concentrations means the geothermal gradient rises most quickly at shallow depths.
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Friday 11th August 2017 18:44 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I thought radioactive decay was a big part of keeping the core molten...
Just to add that the Moon will have continued to heat the Earth after its formation via tidal distortion.
These days, we only really notice the Moon's tidal effects on the Earth's oceans but when the Moon was first formed it was much closer and its tidal effects were strong enough to affect the entire Earth, rock and all, the Earth's (rocky) surface rising and falling through several tens of metres every few hours and heating the Earth as it did so.
The same effects would have also occurred on the Moon, of course, but to an even greater degree, so the hypothesis proposed in the article seems quite plausible. Moreover, the gravitational tidal effects of the Earth and Moon upon each other would follow an inverse square law as the distance between them increased so you'd expect to see a nearly exponential decline in this particular factor of the Moon's magnetic field.
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Monday 14th August 2017 02:07 GMT Faux Science Slayer
Discover of Earth's Inner, Innermost Core" U of Illinois/UC....Mar 2008
Earth's inner core is 900 mile, cubic crystal Iron and given the dipole nature would form a permanent magnet.This core is rotating faster than the surface, likely due to solar/cosmic magnetic forces. The mantle contains 800,000 cubic miles of Uranium, 1.2 million cubic miles of Thorium, and the Bridgeman Effect causes all metallic element to undergo fission in the presence of Hydrogen, a common fission byproduct.
We have been systematically lied to about everything, as Planet X will soon prove.
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