Enjoying the Blooms

There is something about flowers that attracts us. Don’t forget to spend time to smell the flowers, as these sweet animals and birds certainly did.

Earth Core is Melting and Freezing As Well

The inner core of Earth is simultaneously melting and freezing due to circulation of heat in the overlying rocky mantle, according to new research from the University of Leeds, UC San Diego and the Indian Institute of Technology.

"Our new model provides a fairly simple explanation to some of the measurements that have puzzled scientists for years. It suggests that the whole dynamics of Earth's core are in some way linked to plate tectonics, which isn't at all obvious from surface observations.

Earth's inner core is a ball of solid iron about the size of our moon. This ball is surrounded by a highly dynamic outer core of a liquid iron-nickel alloy (and some other, lighter elements), a highly viscous mantle and a solid crust that forms the surface where we live.

Over billions of years, Earth has cooled from the inside out causing the molten iron core to partly freeze and solidify. The heat given off as the core cools flows from the core to the mantle to Earth's crust through a process known as convection. This escaping heat powers the geo dynamo and coupled with the spinning of Earth generates the magnetic field.

Scientists have recently begun to realize that the inner core may be melting as well as freezing. They show that heat flow at the core-mantle boundary varies depending on the structure of the overlying mantle. On the other hand, melting would produce a layer of dense liquid above the boundary. Therefore, the blobs of light elements will rise through this layer before they stir the overlying outer core.

Mom with Twins Have Longer, Healthier Lives

Women who give birth to natural twins are probably more reproductively fit to do so, according Compared with other mothers, women who deliver twins live longer, have more children than expected, bear babies at shorter intervals over a longer time, and are older at their last birth, according to a University of Utah study.

"Having twins will not make you stronger or healthier, but stronger, healthier women are more likely to have twins naturally," says Shannen Robson, the study's first author and a recent Ph.D. graduate in anthropology at the University of Utah.

"Women having children are fundamentally young and healthy," he adds. "So the risk of dying in childbirth is quite low. The women who have twins have a somewhat elevated risk of mortality over those [child-bearing] years, but the vast majority of those women reach age 50, and we're able to observe that they have healthier lives."

Real Heroes in Action

SEAL training is very rigorous, one of the toughest training programs for special operations in the world. The dropout rate for SEAL classes is regularly 80 per cent. The average Navy SEAL spends over a year in a series of formal training environments. Making them unique among the world's special-ops teams, Navy SEALs can perform combat operations completely submerged in saltwater or freshwater.

Royal Wedding - William and Catherine