On Nov. 27, 1944, 4, 000 tons of bombs went off at RAF Fauld, a munitions facility in the English countryside near Hanbury, Burton. The explosion was so great that it caused a mushroom cloud and could be felt as far as Morocco. Read more…
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This is What The Site of Britain’s Largest Non-Nuclear Explosion Looks Like 70 Years Later
An anonymous reader writes: We’ve previously discussed Soylent, the self-proclaimed “meal replacement.” The product has not been without controversy, and now it’s likely to see some more: As You Sow, a non-profit foundation dedicated to corporate responsibility, plans to bring legal action against Soylent for failing to provide sufficient warning about the amount of lead and cadmium in it. They allege that a serving of Soylent contains 12 to 25 times the concentration of lead at which point consumers in the state of California must be warned. The concentration of cadmium, they say, is four times the current maximum. Soylent has acknowledged the results of heavy metal tests but says the levels present in Soylent are not toxic. As You Sow maintains that Soylent’s marketing focus on replacing food suggests chronic exposure, which is more of an issue than an occasional indulgence. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Health Watchdog To Bring Legal Action Against Soylent Over Lead, Cadmium Levels
sciencehabit writes: What are the oldest fossils on Earth? For a long time, a 3.46-billion-year-old rock from Western Australia seemed to hold the record. A 1993 Science paper (abstract) suggested that the Apex chert contained tiny, wormy structures that could have been fossilized cell walls of some of the world’s first cyanobacteria. But now there is more evidence that these structures have nothing to do with life. The elongated filaments were instead created by minerals forming in hydrothermal systems, researchers report (abstract). After the minerals were formed, carbon glommed on to the edges, leaving behind an organic signature that looked suspiciously like cell walls. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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3.46-Billion-Year-Old ‘Fossils’ Were Not Created By Life Forms
When most of us imagine what the mantle of the Earth is like, we see burning hot rock and magma (and maybe satan hanging out for good measure). But scientists have discovered evidence that all that rock may be hiding huge amounts of water— three times the volume of all our oceans combined. Read more…
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The Planet’s Biggest Water Supply Might Be Hidden 400 Miles Below the US
cold fjord writes “I wish it was always this easy. Business Insider reports, ‘Iodized salt is so ubiquitous that we barely notice it. Few people know why it even exists. Iodine deficiency remains the world’s leading cause of preventable mental retardation. According to a new study (abstract), its introduction in America in 1924 had an effect so profound that it raised the country’s IQ. A new NBER working paper from James Feyrer, Dimitra Politi, and David N. Weil finds that the population in iodine-deficient areas saw IQs rise by a full standard deviation, which is 15 points, after iodized salt was introduced…. The mental impacts were unknown, the program was started to fight goiter, so these effects were an extremely fortunate, unintended side effect.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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US Gained a Decade of Flynn-Effect IQ Points After Adding Iodine To Salt
A new study by Australian geologists has shown that over 80% the world’s commercial gold deposits were generated in a flash process, the result of depressurizing earthquakes that rapidly converted mineral-rich fluids into precious veins of gold. The process is called flash vaporization . Deep below the Earth’s crust, at depths ranging from three to 18 miles (5-30 km), fluid-filled fault cavities are subject to extreme temperatures and pressure. These fluids are rich in dissolved substances like gold and silicate minerals. But for those deposits located near fault lines, an earthquake can create a dramatic drop in pressure which forces the fluid to expand to as much as 130,000 times its former size — and in the blink of an eye. The researchers, a team consisting of Dion Weatherley and Richard Henley, found that this depressurization process causes trapped fluids to expand to a very low-density vapor. This ‘flash’ effect results in the rapid deposition of silica, along with gold-enriched quartz veins. From New Scientist : The fluid cannot get from the surrounding rock into the hole fast enough to fill the void, Henley says, so pressure drops from 3000 times atmospheric pressure to pressures almost the same as those at Earth’s surface in an instant. The nearby fluid flash-vaporises as a result – and any minerals it contains are deposited as it does. Later, incoming fluid dissolves some of the minerals, but the less-soluble ones, including gold, accumulate as more episodes of quake-driven flash deposition occur. “Large quantities of gold may be deposited in only a few hundred thousand years,” says Weatherley – a brief interval by geological standards. “Each event drops a little more gold,” adds Henley. “You can see it microscopically, tiny layer after tiny layer. It just builds up.” They calculate that large earthquakes can deposit as much as 0.1 milligrams of gold along each square meter of a fault zone’s surface in a fraction of a second. Eventually, over the course of many thousands of years, these deposits begin to accumulate. The researchers estimate, for example, that active faults can produce a 100-metric-ton deposit of gold in less than 100,000 years. Read the entire study at Nature Geoscience . More at Nature News and New Scientist . Image: Shutterstock/farbled.
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Most gold deposits were produced by earthquakes
When massive, open-pit mines like the Minera Escondida —in Chile’s Atacama Desert—need to pull millions of tons of minerals out of the ground each year, they rely on fleets of huge, “Ultra-Class” haul trucks. The ETF Haul Train, however, pulls four times the minerals of these stone-toting behemoths with just one driver. More »
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Don’t Call It a Dump Truck: This Massive Mineral Hauler Transforms Into an Overland Train