WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON (AP) — A few desperately ill patients have managed to get into clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health’s famed hospital, even though the government’s partial shutdown has others being turned away, the agency said Wednesday.
Normally, about 200 new patients every week enroll in studies at the NIH’s research-only hospital, often referred to as the “house of hope” because so many of those people have failed standard treatments.
High school sweethearts and Hollywood power couple, singer Robin Thicke and actress Paula Patton, have been together for 20 years. What’s their secret? In the above clip from this Sunday’s episode of “Oprah’s Next Chapter” on OWN, Oprah asks Thicke how he and Patton have made their relationship last.
“You pretty much take it one day at a time,” Thicke says. “The one thing I’ve realized about loving somebody is you have to love them every day. Like people think, ‘Oh, I’ll get to loving you on Saturday.’ Or ‘I don’t have time this week.'”
“And the thing is that people are changing every day — their thoughts, their desires, their insecurities change every day,” he says.
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BRISTOL, Pa. — BRISTOL, Pa. (AP) — Republican Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick had been expected to face a tough re-election fight.
Then he sided with GOP leadership and a tea party insisting that a federal spending plan to keep the government open must delay or defund President Barack Obama’s health care law. Now, with the partial government shutdown stretching into its second week, Fitzpatrick’s bid for a second term may be growing even more challenging.
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Sometimes it’s hard to figure out exactly what the people at Samsung are thinking when it comes to some of the things the company does with its smartphones. Recently Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Round and the only selling point for the device is a curved screen leaving some scratching their heads. Samsung’s Galaxy Note 3 […]
Animal welfare authorities are looking to catch someone who has been dumping mistreated poodles at a strip mall pet supply store. Dirty, matted, covered in feces and in need of veterinary care, more than a dozen dogs have been found and rescued at the Troy, Mich. PetSmart in the last several months — including six pups found on Monday.
The six animals, with ages ranging between 1 and 4, were likely dumped at two different times Monday, though they were found throughout the day. They, along with three dogs found in April and May, were rescued and taken to the Animal Welfare Society of Southeastern Michigan, a no-kill 501(c)(3) non-profit.
Shelter staff member Kirk Taylor said these dogs would be adoptable at some point, but likely not for a month or more.
Earth’s magnetic field shields the planet from charged particles streaming from the sun, keeping it from becoming a barren, Mars-like rock. For more than 300 years, scientists have recorded a westward-drifting feature in the field that models have been unable to explain.
By relying on insights gleaned from previous work, as well as data collected over nearly four centuries, an international team of scientists has been able to provide a model that accounts for the western drift of the magnetic field on one side of the planet.
“People have tried various configurations regarding the state of the core-mantle alignment,” lead author Julien Aubert, of the Université Paris Diderot in France, told SPACE.com in an email.”The ingredients were here, but they were never put in the right configuration, in particular for reproducing the geomagnetic westward drift.”
Driven by temperature and gravity
The magnetic field that encases the planet is caused by interactions deep inside Earth’s core. The inner core is solid, while the outer core features flowing liquid iron, which generates currents that in turn lead to magnetic fields.
The field surrounding the Earth changes over time, with shifts occurring most prominently in low latitudes in the Western Hemisphere. The fast-moving magnetic patches that occur near the equator drift approximately 10 miles (20 kilometers) per year. These changes are driven by intense regions of activity in the core, the cause of which scientists have been at a loss to explain.
Relying on more than 400 years of data, including more than a decade’s worth of continuous global satellite observations, Aubert’s team was able to create the first model to explain the westward drift.
Gravity aligns the inner core and the mantle, the layer between the core and the outer crust, forcing liquid metal in the outer core into enormous rotating vortexes known as gyres. These gyres can reach as large as 1,700 miles (2,700 km) deep within the mantle, while smaller gyres occur closer to the surface. As these gyres are concentrated at low latitudes, core convection expels them and pushes them westward, the model shows.
At the same time, the cooling Earth is causing the outer core to slowly solidify. Over the course of a few billion years, the entire core will become solid iron.
The team concluded that the core was not growing evenly, but instead seemed to be cooling at different rates, with the solid material changing differentially across the core.
“Inner core growth is thought to be fastest below Indonesia because of the influence from Earth’s mantle,” Aubert said.
This broken-up cooling causes an uneven buoyancy release from the outer core, which distorts the gyre as it reaches the core’s surface. These shifts create westward-drifting patches along the equator in the Western Hemisphere.
The team’s results were published online today (Oct. 9) in the journal Nature.
An artist’s impression of the magnetic fields of Venus, Earth and Mars interacting with charged particles streaming from the sun. Earth’s magnetic field protects it from these atmosphere-stripping particles.
Four centuries of records
To create such a detailed model, Aubert relied not only on modern satellite readings, but also on data collected centuries ago, some by scientists famous for other exploits.
“Edmund Halley — the comet guy — observed the geomagnetic westward drift in 1692, some 300 years ago,” Aubert said.
“Today’s mapping of geomagnetic variations back to 1590 is the fruit of the collaboration between historians and mathematicians — gathering magnetic observations in ship logbooks, blending them with observatory data, available mainly after 1840,” he said.
The long-term scope of these observations is important because the core convection changes about every century.
“If you have less than that, you’re not observing the system long enough to be able to draw a viable conclusion,” Aubert said.
Understanding how the Earth’s core and magnetic field have changed in the past can help scientists to understand its future evolution. Since the magnetic field shields Earth from harmful solar radiation, which could strip the planet of its protective atmosphere, it is important to understand how it changes and will change over time.
“Being able to correctly model geomagnetic variations means that we’re able to predict how the field will evolve in the next century,” Aubert said.
This understanding could also help planetary scientists to learn more about planets other than Earth.
“Once Juno gets to Jupiter in 2016, we’ll maybe be in a position to measure Jupiter’s magnetic variations and perform the same analysis as on Earth,” Aubert said.
Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on SPACE.com.
Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
For those who don’t need or want an app to track and categorize every single aspect of their financial situation, Level Money simply answers the most important question: How much money can I spend today?
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In recognition of World Mental Health Day, HuffPost OWN is looking back at Oprah’s recent conversation with actress and devoted mental health advocate Mariel Hemingway.
Because her family has an extensive history of mental illness, addiction and suicide, actress and author Mariel Hemingway has made it her life’s mission to promote spiritual health with her partner, Bobby Williams. In their book, Running With Nature, they say nature holds a sacred power to heal, and that by reconnecting with nature, we can reconnect with ourselves.
“So you say it’s about really finding a way to live a simpler life that is in rhythm with nature,” Oprah says to Hemingway and Williams in the above clip from “Super Soul Sunday” on OWN. “What does that mean if I am living in the middle of, you know, Manhattan or Dallas?”
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NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Comedian and condo board president Joan Rivers is being sued for $15 million in a dispute involving a former downstairs neighbor in her luxury New York City building.
The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in state Supreme Court in Manhattan.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
