The World Is a Little Off-Center

I’m not going to write about the NIH cuts, devasting though they will be (to researchers, universities, and all of America). I’m not even going to touch on healthcare, or even technology per se, as I usually do. Instead, I want to write about some really cool Science, emphasis on the capital “S.”

Earth’s inner core, it seems, is not always the same shape.

The inner core was previously considered to be solid. (USC Graphic/Edward Sotelo)

Now, in case you forget your high school geology, we live on the Earth’s surface, which rests on the crust, followed by the mantle (which accounts for 84% of the earth), and then, some three thousand miles down, is the core. Think about that carefully: three thousand miles down. By comparison, Mt. Everest is less than 30,000 feet high. The deepest point in the ocean is 36,000 feet down. The deepest hole we’ve ever bored into the earth is 40,000 feet.  Three thousand miles is a looong way down. So, no, we’re never going to get to the core (despite what movies you might have seen). We may get to Mars or even the stars, but not the core.

And it’s big. It’s about 70% of the size of the moon. As one expert put it, “it’s like a planet within a planet.” It is about a third of the Earth’s mass, since it is primarily made of metals (mostly iron and nickel). It’s incredibly hot, close to 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit at its surface, which is about the temperature of the surface of the sun. There’s the inner core, which is basically solid, and the outer core, which is molten. The inner core is only solid, despite the temperature, due to the high pressure it is under.

Now researchers from USC are telling us that the inner core is not quite as solid as we’d thought; it changes shape. John Vidale, Dean’s Professor of Earth Sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and principal investigator of the study, says: “What we ended up discovering is evidence that the near surface of Earth’s inner core undergoes structural change.”

Scientists studying the core had previously found that the core didn’t spin at the same speed or even in the same direction as the rest of the earth, both of which are mind-blowing in themselves. (It’s that spinning, by the way, that generates the magnetic fields which prevents life on earth from being scorched by radiation.) Pretty cool stuff, but the researchers now state: “Previous research has proposed that the inner core has undergone either rotational or shape changes through time, but not both simultaneously.”

If you’re wondering how we can possibly know anything about the core, researchers analyze seismic waves, using them kind of like a form of radar. In this case, USC researchers analyzed what are called “earthquake pairs” – earthquakes that happen in the same place and at about the same magnitude but at different times. “But as I was analyzing multiple decades’ worth of seismograms, one dataset of seismic waves curiously stood out from the rest,” Professor Vidale said. “Later on, I’d realize I was staring at evidence the inner core is not solid.”

“Basically, the wiggles are different,” Dr. Vidale told The New York Times.

“This is kind of the first time we’ve seen the evidence for this kind of motion,” he told The Washington Post. “The surface of the inner core is moving around in ways we hadn’t detected and still don’t understand very well.”

The hypothesis is that, though it may be solid, the edge of the inner core isn’t solid enough to withstand the gravitation pressures from the outer core and the mantle. “Even though that inner core part is really solid, [this boundary] is really soft,” Guanning Pang, a co-author and geophysicist at Cornell University, explained to WaPo. “Maybe as soft as jelly.”

They call these changes “viscous deformation.” Dr. Vidale told Live Science: "We sort of expect that the motion could be on the order of hundreds of meters, maybe a kilometer or two, and we don't know how broad. It could be hundreds of kilometers across."

Wow.

No everyone is convinced. “The offered interpretation is sound,” Hrvoje Tkalcic, a professor of geophysics at the Australian National University who was not involved with the research, told The New York Times, “although it is not the only possible explanation, as the authors acknowledge.” Dr. Vidale acknowledged that the paper is not the final word: “We’re pretty sure we were right, but this isn’t a bulletproof paper. How sure? I sort of put it at 90 percent.”

Bruce Buffett, a geoscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the work, told Live Science: "Maybe everyone's a little bit right."

That’s how science words; theories are only as good as the next set of facts.

"We'll need to keep accumulating the data and keep searching for the inner core behaviors," Xiaodong Song, a geophysicist at Peking University who coauthored important earlier work on the inner core, told Live Science. "I won't be surprised by future surprises about the inner core behaviors as we keep searching." Dr. Tkalcic believes we should build “seismological infrastructure in remote areas of the planet, including the ocean floor” to help accumulate such data.

In case you’re wondering, the results don’t offer any immediate practical benefits.  The researchers think they may help improve our understanding of Earth’s thermal and magnetic fields, but we’re a long way off from being able to do anything with that understanding. Again, that’s how science works. History suggests that this kind of knowledge will end up being useful someday.

I think it’s great. A part of the Earth that is crucial to our existence yet can’t be directly experienced can be indirectly measured, detecting what are relatively minuscule variations. We still don’t fully understand it, but we understand it better today than we did yesterday.

Gotta love scientists!

DEI Is Now a Four Letter Word

I’d love to be writing about something fun. Something that makes us think about things in a new way, or something exciting that will take us into the future. There are lots of such things happening, but there’s too many Orwellian actions happening that I can’t be silent about.

Diversity, we’re told, is actually a pretext for racism – against white people. Equity is foolhardy at best and pernicious at worst. Inclusion only matters if you are the “right” kind of person. “Meritocracy” is the new buzzword; we want only the “best and brightest,” with none of the lowering of standards that we’re being told comes with trying to ensure that everyone has a fair chance to prove their merits.

The Trump Administration has declared war on DEI. It has fired scores of workers whose jobs involve DEI, has asked other workers to inform on people they think may be involved in DEI, and is searching out even workers who attended diversity training (mandated or not). All that would be horrifying enough but it isn’t ending there.

Federal websites are being cleansed of any references to anything that might be construed as DEI. Pages are being edited, or taken down entirely. The NIH has ground to a halt until the appropriate authorities can ensure that no grants are being even to anything that might possibly be related to DEI. The CDC has been forced to pull papers from its researchers that are up for publication for similar review.

The Atlantic reports: “the government was, as of yesterday evening, intending to target and replace, at a minimum, several “suggested keywords”—including “pregnant people, transgender, binary, non-binary, gender, assigned at birth, binary [sic], non-binary [sic], cisgender, queer, gender identity, gender minority, anything with pronouns”—in CDC content.”

Thousands of pages of data from the CDC and Census Bureau have “disappeared,” and the same from other agencies. Health data is prominent among the missing. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, told Science: ““I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn’t know it was going to be this bad. It’s like a data apocalypse.”

Just one example

Elon Musk, who has no official power yet seems to have control over government IT and the data it contains, is shutting down U.S.A.I.D., who provides almost $40b annually in health services, disaster relief, anti-poverty, and other social mission programs. Previously the Administration had shutdown, then reinstated, PEPFAR, a vital international HIV program that has been credited with saving millions of lives.

The President and his team even tried to blame last week’s Washington D.C. plane-helicopter collision on DEI.  That’s just “common sense, ok,” according to President Trump.

As if all that wasn’t enough, The Washington Post reported:

Late Friday, newly confirmed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the agency to stop commemorating cultural celebrations such as Black History Month. The message to staff was headlined: “Identity Months Dead at DoD.”

On Thursday, the FBI directed janitorial staff at Quantico to paint over a multicolored mural that once featured the words “FAIRNESS,” “LEADERSHIP,” “INTEGRITY,” “COMPASSION” and “DIVERSITY.”

I can’t even…

The breadth and depth of the changes caught many off guard, but people are starting to respond. Stat reports that CDC’s advisory board has demanded to be told why information has gone missing from CDC websites, and when it will be restored. “Silence is not an option right now,” said one advisory board member, Daniel Dawes. “I try to use the term unprecedented sparingly, but I believe this is an unprecedented moment. There will be dire consequences if they do not restore this information and it may not come back if we do not speak out.”  

The Guardian reports that a union representing 5,000 NIH researchers filed a legally binding demand to bargain over the sweeping changes. Marjorie Levinstein, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse and a union bargaining committee member, told The Guardian: “We cannot do our research effectively, and this is putting into question delaying research on cancer and diabetes, on drug addiction, on heart disease. And this is going to delay medical breakthroughs that the American people deserve.”

Alexander Jordan Lara, a postbaccalaureate fellow at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research and also a member of the union’s bargaining committee, added: “We were anticipating changes, and that it would be a new relationship we would have to manage but I don’t think anyone expected this firehose.”

We should have expected it.

Let’s be clear what all this is. “His attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion aren’t about a particular program or some acronym — they’re just a sanitized substitute for the racist comments that can no longer be spoken openly,” Margaret Huang, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s president and chief executive said.

When I heard “meritocracy,” I think of an exchange in the TV adaption of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere. When the rich employer criticizes her minority employee about her life choices, the latter responds: “You didn’t make good choices. You had good choices. Options that being rich, and white, and entitled gave you.”

Somehow the meritocracy never see that.

And let’s be clear where this is all going.  As George Orwell’s 1984 said:

Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.

Sadly, we’re only beginning to understand.

As Professor Dawes said, silence is not an option now. Make yourself heard.