You bum. I had no idea that Restak has written sooo much. Now all I want to do is buy them all and sit and read them. I wish there was enogh time in the day.
I haven't read the book you mention. If our brain were bicameral I hope they had a strong judiciary component.
I am fascinated by schizophrenia, especially the religious connotations often seen in the images and hallucinations.
Another thing that interests me is the current state of video images. The quick cuts to things that have little or no relation to the last image. It appears to be modeling the schizophrenic brain. It often looks like a visual analog to the clang associations often exibited by those with the disease.
Since this type of editing is often considered "hip" it is used most heavily in media aimed at the young. Are we teaching them to model the schizophrenic thought processes.
Mystery of Mercury's Core Cracked
Mystery of Mercury's Core Cracked
By Ker Than
May 5, 2007
Kitchen physics dictates that a raw egg will spin slower than a hard-boiled one. Scientists using this same logic have discovered the planet Mercury has a fluid core of molten iron.
Sloshing Around in Space
The finding, detailed in the May 4 issue of the journal Science, solves a 30-year-old mystery but raises another.
To figure out whether Mercury's core was liquid or solid, a team of scientists led by Jean-Luc Margot at Cornell University measured small twists in the planet's rotation. They used a new technique that involved bouncing a radio signal sent from a ground telescope in California off the planet and then catching it again in West Virginia.
After 5 years and 21 such observations, the team realized their values were twice as large as what would be expected if Mercury's core was solid.
"The variations in Mercury's spin rate that we measured are best explained by a core that is at least partially molten," Margot said. "We have a 95 percent confidence level in this conclusion."
A Polluted Core
Mercury, named after the Roman gods' fleet-footed messenger, is the closest planet to our Sun. One year there is equal to 88 Earth-days. Mercury is thought to consist of a thin silicate mantle encasing an iron core. Because it is so small-its mass is only 5 percent of Earth's-scientists thought it cooled rapidly early in its formation, essentially freezing any liquid core it had into a solid.
But 30 years ago, a flyby of the planet by the Mariner 10 spacecraft detected a weak magnetic field, about 1 percent as strong as Earth's, within the planet. Magnetic fields are generally associated with a dynamic molten core.
Amazing Space Photos
Margot and his team speculate that sulfur or some other light element got mixed with Mercury's iron core when the planet was forming and lowered its melting temperature.
"If you had such a lighter element polluting the iron, it could explain why the core has remained fluid up to the present time," Margot told SPACE.com.
"The surprise," Margot added, "is that you don't expect sulfur to condense out at the distance of Mercury from the Sun."
Radial Mixing
That unexpected result fails to jibe with standard planet formation theory. That theory asserts that planets form out of the swirling disks of gas and dust that swaddle newborn stars. Within this "protoplanetary" disk, elements condense and solidify out at different distances from the star depending on their densities.
Heavy elements with high melting points, such as iron, nickel and silicon, condensed into solids closer to the star. Out of these solids, planet embryos form. These "planetesimals" sometimes become full-fledged planets. This is why the inner planets in our solar system-Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars-are formed mostly of these heavy elements. Lighter elements such as sulfur can only solidify farther out from the star, where it is cooler.
"Since you don't expect sulfur to condense in solid form there when [Mercury] formed, it must have been brought in from farther out in the solar system," Margot said.
The mysteries still surrounding Mercury's core might be solved when NASA 's Messenger spacecraft makes its first flyby of the planet in 2008.
"It is our hope that Messenger will address the remaining questions that we cannot address from the ground," Margot said.
The researchers made their measurements using the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 70-meter antenna at Goldstone, California, and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. They also sent signals from Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and received them back at Goldstone.
The "Earth-like" planet search is intriguing to me for a couple of reasons:
1. Fodder for my fantasy of getting off this rock and exploring a new planet ripe with new geology/formations/landscapes, etc.
2. The prospect of finding complex life on a distant world, and what kind of discourse would be had between the intelligent design/evolutionist camps.
Mark
stlstrike3
stlstrike3, welcome to Planet A2K where lots of aliens post.
BBB :wink:
