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A geological mystery is unfolding far beneath our feet, and it may shed light on the life-sustaining magnetic field that extends far above our heads.


Each year, the solid-iron inner core at the heart of our planet expands by about a millimeter as the Earth’s nether regions cool and solidify. According to a recent study, one side appears to be growing faster — but scientists don’t know why.

This phenomenon likely dates back to the inner core’s creation, between 1.5 billion and half a billion years ago. At this point, after billions of years of cooling, the Earth’s fiery interior finally lost enough heat to begin an ongoing process of crystallization. Now, as the outer core’s molten iron loses heat, it crystallizes to become the newest layer of the inner core.

The center of this hyperactive hemisphere lies 1,800 miles (2,896 kilometers) under Indonesia’s Banda Sea: About 60 percent more iron crystals form at that point on the inner core than on the other side of the world.

The precise understanding of shear banding emergence in amorphous solids is still a mystery, due to the intrinsic entangling of three elementary local atomic motions: shear, dilatation and rotation.

Recently, researchers from the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IMCAS) have unveiled the spatiotemporal sequence of shear band in amorphous solids through decoupling and quantitatively characterizing the highly entangled shear, dilatation and rotation flow units.

The results were published in Physical Review Research.

Soundspear offers Formula, a FREE and open-source effects development environment. Formula works as a plugin inside your DAW or as a standalone application. It utilizes the C programming language to create effects. The Formula effects editor has a few use cases that might interest different users. First, as the developer states, it offers a simple way to test and debug audio effects, which might interest anyone who already creates custom effects.