Aha! Finally, a good reason to exploit tidal power - stabilizing the lunar orbit!
Mystery of MAGNETIC ROCKS FOUND ON MOON cracked
Scientists say they may finally have cracked a long-standing boffinry conundrum – the mystery of why it is that the Moon rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts of the 1960s and '70s are magnetic. The Moon, unlike the Earth, has no global magnetic field – a compass would not work on the lunar surface – and so its rocks …
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Thursday 10th November 2011 13:37 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
Not really
Extracting energy from the tides could theoretically increase the tidal friction which is drawing rotational energy away from the Earth-Moon system. This would make the moon recede faster and the earth's rotation slow down more quickly. The process stops when 1 day = 1 month = 50x24 hours (if I recall correctly).
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Thursday 10th November 2011 13:37 GMT Grease Monkey
If we're being pedantic (we are aren't we?) then a magneto is a type of dynamo. The word dynamo being a generic term for a DC electrical generator. Although a lot of so called dynamos fitted to bicycles are actually alternators. Although you are right in so far as a magneto uses a permanent magnet where a dynamo describes a device which uses either a permanent magnet or a commutator.
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Thursday 10th November 2011 13:39 GMT Rob Dobs
so does this mean?
that magnetization of rocks will last for billions of years?
Why do magnets on Earth seem to wear out after a while? Is it all the magnetic charge from the Earth itself?
Paris, because I feel kinda of stupid for not knowing the answer, and even dumber for asking here and not just looking it up :-)
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Thursday 10th November 2011 15:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Oh Dear #ScienceFail
“The further out the Moon moves, the slower the stirring, and at a certain point the lunar dynamo shuts off,” says Dwyer.
The "stirring" is not proportional to distance as he infers but instead to the relative spin. There is no stirring because the Moon is now Tidally Locked by the Earth, and this can occur at any distance!
Which is better Dwyer or Wikipedia? well this time its the wiki wins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking
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Tuesday 15th November 2011 15:04 GMT Rob Dobs
It seems pretty basic
Science seems to say that its easily explainable if the electrons were moving faster than the speed of light, thanks to Einstein this is thrown out the window.
My explanation: magnets are objects who's electrons are capable of moving faster than the speed of light, and Einsteins theories are flawed.
We only ignore this obvious answer because it doesn't "fit" with the general theory.
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Friday 11th November 2011 00:05 GMT YARR
Age of surface rocks?
Given that since the Earth was formed (after the Lunar impact) it has been hit by enough asteroids to form it's oceans and more, would this not mean that for a body like the moon with no volcanism or continental drift, that the entire surface down to a depth of perhaps several kilometers, would be formed from material acquired from asteroid impacts?
Hence, would any magnetism in the surface rocks not be attributable to a more recent phenomena?
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Friday 11th November 2011 10:07 GMT Hairy Airey
Moon receding too quickly
The rate of recession of the moon is such that at a linear rate it would have been touching the earth 5 billion years ago. Realistically it would have been moving away faster to begin with and slow down. The moon is probably about 2 billion years old at best.
Just one of the reasons that I cannot mathematically accept the theory of evolution. The other reason is the low global population. Had mankind been around for millions of years the population should now be in the trillions.
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Friday 11th November 2011 14:02 GMT thehealer
?
What has mathematics got to do with the theory of evolution? Species mutate with every single generation, that's biology, it's got nothing to do with mathematics. Basing human population on some exponential mathematical formula is just plain daft; infant mortality has better than halved over the last 30 years alone, never mind the last 200,000. And that's without factoring recent developments like medicine and dentistry. Perhaps no-one dies in Mathworld?
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Tuesday 15th November 2011 10:00 GMT Allan George Dyer
Troll alert (do I get a prize?)
Hairy Airey is definitely a bit out of touch with reality, and can't have read Darwin's book. For most of recorded history, human population has been controlled by a variety of diseases and famines, plus frequent wars. Infant mortality was particularly high.
Further in the past, additional factors in population control no doubt included being eaten by sabre-toothed tigers and many other extinct predators, though, far enough back, the ancestor being eaten would not be human.
One of the key observations behind Darwin's idea is exactly what Hairy fails to understand - individuals of every species produce greater than replacement numbers of young, yet we are not overrun with rabbits, or any other species because most die before they reach reproductive age. Which ones live long enough to reproduce? The answer is pretty famous.
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Friday 11th November 2011 11:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Why is this theory necessary?
Computer modelling has shown that the moon's size, orbit, strata and make up can all be best explained by a large object impacting the earth. The impact as shown strips the earth's surface which is ejected into space and eventually forms the moon.
As a result of this it would seem fairly logical that some rocks that had previously made up the surface of the earth would end up laying on the surface of the moon as they get collected up by the moon's orbit.
Seems much more plausible to me than needing to give the moon an active core generating a magnetic field under temporary conditions.
Even if you don't accept the impact lunar creation theory, this new theory does nothing to address or suggest how the moon came to be there. It just appears, fully formed with a molten core? Very convenient.
Now, I'm off to make up some improbable theories. It's obviously dead easy to get good funding for bad research these days and I could do with a few quid!