All posts tagged: Blobs

Nature’s strangest eggs—from spongy clusters to gelatinous blobs

Nature’s strangest eggs—from spongy clusters to gelatinous blobs

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Eggs are pretty incredible. They must be sturdy enough to keep the precious cargo inside safe, yet soft enough for a baby bird, crab, or snake to push through when the time is right.  Over millions of years, some egg laying species have evolved a wide variety of shapes, sizes, colors, and methods for laying them to ensure the survival of the next generation. Here, we break down three of nature’s most interesting egg laying strategies, from spongy blue crab eggs, gelatinous salamander eggs, and more.  An assortment of eggs from the collection at the National Museum of Natural History. The large egg in the middle is an ostrich egg. Image: Christina Gebhard, Smithsonian. Blue crabs and their amazing ‘sponges’ Blue crabs (Callinectes sapidus) go through a complex series of life stages. As larvae they live in coastal waters off the mouth of an estuary settling into the sea grasses in the brackish water near the Atlantic Ocean. As …

Huge hot blobs inside Earth may have made its magnetic field wonky

Huge hot blobs inside Earth may have made its magnetic field wonky

Published by skeptic

Earth’s magnetic field extends tens of thousands of kilometres into space Getty Images/iStockphoto Two vast, mysterious blobs of hot rock around Earth’s core may have been instrumental in producing Earth’s magnetic field and caused it to be slightly wonky for millions of years. Scientists have known for decades about two peculiar continent-sized chunks of rock, one beneath Africa and the other under the Pacific Ocean. These blobs, which extend nearly 1000 kilometres from the outer core to the rocky mantle above, must be different from their surroundings because seismic waves travel through them more slowly. But as it is difficult to measure them due to their depth, scientists can’t identify exactly how they differ. Andrew Biggin at the University of Liverpool, UK, and his colleagues looked to Earth’s magnetic field for clues. This field has been generated for billions of years by the churning of molten iron within our planet’s core. It extends tens of thousands of kilometres into space, protecting us from solar wind and cosmic radiation. The exact shape and form of this magnetic …

How giant ‘Blobs’ of rock have influenced Earth’s magnetic field for millions of years – new research

How giant ‘Blobs’ of rock have influenced Earth’s magnetic field for millions of years – new research

Published by skeptic

While we have sent probes billions of kilometres into interstellar space, humans have barely scratched the surface of our own planet, not even making it through the thin crust. Information about Earth’s deep interior comes mainly from geophysics and is at a premium. We know it consists of a solid crust, a rocky mantle, a liquid outer core and solid inner core. But what precisely goes on in each layer – and between them – is a mystery. Now our research uses our planet’s magnetism to cast light on the most significant interface in the Earth’s interior: its core-mantle boundary. Roughly 3,000km beneath our feet, Earth’s outer core, an unfathomably deep ocean of molten iron alloy, endlessly churns to produce a global magnetic field stretching out far into space. Sustaining this “geodynamo”, and the planetary force-field it has produced for the past several billions of years (protecting Earth from harmful radiation), takes a lot of energy. This was delivered to the core as heat during the Earth’s formation. But it is only released to drive …