Random question:

[conuly]

Is there any particular science-y reason having to do with rotation and whatnot why the magnetic poles of the Earth happen to be (more or less) North and South instead of East and West? Or did it just happen to shake out that way?

***********************************

The Man Who Changed Reading Forever

Longtime Residents Worry Roommate With Well-Paid Job Slowly Gentrifying Apartment

Microbiology: Here's looking at you, squid

Forget Standing Desks: Are You Ready to Lie Down and Work?

Intelligent Dressing Glows When Wounds Are Infected

Americans think crime is on the rise, aren’t so worried about being the victims of crime

Behold As This Amazing Graphene Folds Itself And Walks

When Daydreaming Replaces Real Life

Where Did We Get Cooties?

The greatest vanishing act in prehistoric America

Centuries-old coffins, skeletons found under New York street

10 tribes get access to US criminal databases to improve flaws in how information is shared

This Living Clothing Morphs When You Sweat

'We got pizza and wings': US and Chinese warships talk turkey in South China Sea

NASA Is Testing ‘Impossible’ Warp Drive Engine- And It Seems To Be Working (Honestly, now has got to be the absolute weirdest time to be alive.)

China: Scientists decode panda 'language'

Elephants Use Their Trunks To 'Leaf-Blow' Unreachable Food

As the automation of physical and knowledge work advances, many jobs will be redefined rather than eliminated—at least in the short term.

Plastic Contaminates Table Salt in China

NSA says how often, not when, it discloses software flaws

Long before the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, more than half of African-American millennials indicated they, or someone they knew, had been victimized by violence or harassment from law enforcement, a new report says.

With Roma migrants, poverty returns to Sweden

Monsanto to Mexico honey farmers: Our soya seeds not to blame for woes

Comments

[ancarett]

As long as it had some sort of metallic and semi-mobile core, this appears to be the thinking. There's some neat scholarship that's been done on Jupiter's magnetosphere and alignment - there the metal is hydrogen. The field is much stronger than earth's, and that's partly thought to be caused by the difference in rotation and core size.

Here's a decent write up - http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/jupiter/magnetic.html

Way back when I was a geophysics major as an undergraduate, I was really interested in planetary magnetism. I still collect links and reports on the subject whenever I stumble across something of interest.

Edit to fix icon!

[conuly]

Thankies again :)