In The News: Division of Research
Something happens whenever Aaron Morrill takes his large and fluffy mutt, Donut, for her daily walk, and it’s something that always catches him a bit by surprise.
Brittney Martino, a student at 51ԹϺ spent her time in a Gambling Innovation class developing a new type of card shoe that could make edge sorting impossible. She has now been granted a patent for her invention. The 51ԹϺ class has also produced a prototype model.
Some history will be made on the Las Vegas Strip on Thursday.
It's one of the biggest mysteries of recent human evolution. Roughly 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens went through a genetic bottleneck, a period when our genetic diversity shrank dramatically. But why? In the late 1990s, some scientists argued that the culprit was a massive volcanic eruption from what is now Lake Toba, in Sumatra, about 74,000 years ago, whose deadly effects reduced our species to a few thousand hardy individuals. Now, new evidence suggests we were right about the volcano—but wrong about pretty much everything else.
Diamonds are a geoscientist’s best friend — this is especially true for a group of researchers who recently found hard evidence that water exists deep within Earth’s mantle by examining diamonds from around the world.
It’s fun to test a college professor. After reading a few chapters from Simon Gottschalk’s new book, The Terminal Self: Everyday Life in Hypermodern Times (Routledge), I emailed him late on a Friday to see if he'd walk the talk. Would he instantly reply (F)? Or would he wait until Monday (A-plus) and resist our culture’s “increasingly pervasive and mandatory interaction with terminals”? After all, according to Gottschalk, a 51ԹϺ sociology professor, to fully be alive and human, we should avoid adjusting to “terminal logic.” Well, he aced my informal exam.
Robert Hunter would have shied away from a feature in the newspaper.
The team, led by University of Nevada, Las Vegas geoscientist Oliver Tschauner, found inclusions of the high-pressure form of water called Ice-VII in natural diamonds sourced from between 255 and 410 miles (410-660 km) depth.
A team of researchers has discovered ice crystals in a diamond. Probably not a huge discovery, you may think, but this ice, names Ice-VII, is coming from the Earth’s mantle and has been supposed, until now, that it only naturally exists on other planets and their moons and can only be made in a lab.
The discovery of Ice VII in mantle diamonds suggests the possibility of the Earth having water pockets in the mantle. What could this mean, and why is this important?
Supervolcanoes have the power to cough up enough ash to coat entire continents. They emit waves of hot gas, rocks and ash that flow down their slopes at speeds so great they strip away vegetation and kill anyone in their path. And they carve vast depressions in the planet, leaving permanent scars.
Imagine a year in Africa that summer never arrives. The sky takes on a gray hue during the day and glows red at night. Flowers do not bloom. Trees die in the winter. Large mammals like antelope become thin, starve and provide little fat to the predators (carnivores and human hunters) that depend on them. Then, this same disheartening cycle repeats itself, year after year. This is a picture of life on earth after the eruption of the super-volcano, Mount Toba in Indonesia, about 74,000 years ago. In a paper published this week in Nature, scientists show that early modern humans on the coast of South Africa thrived through this event.