What the bang dang diddly is goin on?

Sunday, August 30, 2015

W.W.J.D.

A few years ago a group of salesmen went to a regional sales convention in Chicago. They had assured their wives that they would be home in plenty of time for Friday night's dinner. In their rush to catch the plane home and with tickets and briefcases, one of these salesmen inadvertently kicked over a table which held a display of apples. Apples flew everywhere. Without stopping or looking back, they all managed to reach the plane in time for their nearly-missed boarding.

ALL BUT ONE!!! He paused, took a deep breath, got in touch with his feelings and experienced a twinge of compassion for the girl whose apple stand had been overturned. He told his buddies to go on without him, waved good-bye, told one of them to call his wife when they arrived at their home destination and explain his taking a later flight.

Then he returned to the terminal where the apples were all over the terminal floor. He was glad he did.
 
The 16-year-old girl was totally blind! She was softly crying, tears running down her cheeks in frustration, and at the same time helplessly groping for her spilled produce as the crowd swirled about her; no one stopping and no one to care for her plight.

The salesman knelt on the floor with her, gathered up the apples, put them back on the table and helped organize her display. As he did this, he noticed that many of them had become battered and bruised; these he set aside in another basket.
When he had finished, he pulled out his wallet and said to the girl, "Here, please take this $50 for the damage we did. Are you okay? "She nodded through her tears.

He continued on with, "I hope we didn't spoil your day too badly. "
 
As the salesman started to walk away, the bewildered blind girl called out to him, "Mister...."
 He paused and turned to look back into those blind eyes.
 
She continued, "Are you Jesus?"

He stopped in mid-stride .... and he wondered. He gently went back and said, "No, I am nothing like Jesus - He is good, kind, caring, loving, and would never have bumped into your display in the first place.”

The girl gently nodded: "I only asked because I prayed for Jesus to help me gather the apples. He sent you to help me, Thank you for hearing Jesus, Mister."
 Then slowly he made his way to catch the later flight with that question burning and bouncing about in his soul: "Are you Jesus?"
Do people mistake you for Jesus?

That's our destiny, is it not? To be so much like Jesus that people cannot tell the difference as we live and interact with a world that is blind to His love, life and grace.

If we claim to know Him, we should live, walk and act as He would. Knowing Him is more than simply quoting scripture and going to church. It's actually living the Word as life unfolds day to day.

You are the apple of His eye even though you, too, have been bruised by a fall. He stopped what He was doing and picked up you and me on a hill called Calvary and paid in full for our damaged fruit.

Sometimes we just take things for granted, when we really need to be sharing what we know....Thanks.

The nicest place to be is in someone's thoughts,
the safest place to be is in someone's prayers,
and the very best place to be is ........in the hands of God!

Saturday, August 15, 2015

Besides Seeing Family...the Only Reason for FB

zPerfmon – Zynga’s Server Performance Analysis Tool is Now Open

Binu Philip

Friday, August 14, 2015

God Gathering Against Persia

Questions that Demand Credible Answers

The President would be well advised to stop attacking his critics and to start answering their hard questions with specific and credible answers. Questions that need answering include the following:
1. Even after the expiration of the nuclear agreement, will American policy remain that Iran will never under any circumstances be allowed to develop nuclear weapons? Or is it now our policy that Iran will be free to do whatever it wants to do once the deal expires?
2. After the major constraints contained in the deal end, or were the deal to collapse at any point, how long would it take Iran to produce a deliverable nuclear bomb?
3. Would the United States allow Iran to begin production of a nuclear arsenal when the major constraints of the deal end?
4. Does the deal reflect a reversal in policy from President Obama’s pre-reelection promise that “My policy is not containment; my policy is to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon”?
5. If not, will President Obama now announce that it is still the policy of the United States that Iran will not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon?
6. How exactly will the inspections regime work? Precisely how much time will the Iranians have between a request for inspection and the inspection itself? What precisely will they be permitted to do during this hiatus? And why do they need so much time if they don’t plan to cheat?
7. What will President Obama do if Iran is caught cheating on this deal during his administration?
8. Precisely when will which sanctions be lifted under the agreement? Do provisions that prevent the P5+1 from imposing new sanctions apply even if Iran is found to be in violation of its commitments under the agreement? When exactly will sanctions prohibiting the sale of weapons, and particularly missile technology, be lifted?
If and when these and other important questions about the deal are answered — directly, candidly, and unambiguously — Congress will be in a better position to answer the fundamental questions now before it: would rejecting this deeply flawed deal produce more dangerous results than not rejecting it? If so, what can we now do to assure that Iran will not acquire a nuclear arsenal? The answers to those questions may profoundly affect the future of the world.
So the President should spend more time on substance and less on personal attacks.
By: Alan M. Dershowitz/Gatestone Institute
Alan Dershowitz is an emeritus professor of law at Harvard Law School.

For I Am Fearfully And Wonderfully Made

Part 6 of Center for Medical Progress' exposé reveals more of PPH's and StemExpress' deceptive tactics. Their use of trickery to achieve political, financial, or legal purposes knows no limits. The abortion/body harvesting machine is now admitting that they also procure adult stem cells from the mothers they have sometimes butchered and even killed.
  Their underhanded schemes, corruption and political chicanery are no longer behind closed doors. The Center for Medical Progress is keeping it out in the open.
  
We could call the body snatchers grave robbers, but since their baby victims rarely get a decent burial, we have to call a spade a spade. These people kill and harvest people for profit.
  They are taking stem cells and body parts at a time when the mother is awaiting their abortion "services." She is likely conflicted, sedated, scared and subject to agree to anything without understanding what is really happening while she is in their clutches.
  
Meanwhile, the abortion providers and scientists are after her baby's body parts, umbilical cord blood, mothers eggs and ovaries and God knows what else they might be harvesting and trading for money. And they charge the mother upfront and make her sign papers to cover their trail. She consents and pays a fee for impending doom.
  
Of course StemExpress and PPH deny any reports against their agenda. In response to part six of the CMP expose, they had this to say:
  That it has "never obtained blood or tissue samples from a patient without first obtaining consent." It adds, "Like all of their previous material, today's video by CMP is deceptively edited and falsely worded to suggest impropriety or illegality where none exists. CMP's continued efforts to malign StemExpress -- a life sciences company that predominantly supplies adult cells, blood and tissue to the nation's leading researchers -- will only serve to slow the pace of life-saving medical research aimed at curing disease and extending quality of life for millions of Americans."
  
I wonder if Donald Trump and other presidential hopefuls have taken time to study the history of Planned Parenthood. Mr. Trump and maybe millions of Americans seem to think that if the government only cuts or bans PPH abortion funding, that the abortion giant and their cohorts like StemExpress will be salvageable and can offer something good to society. That's like giving a lion a pedicure, ignoring its fangs and letting it loose on unsuspecting victims.
  
I recently signed a letter demanding that the statue and other likenesses of PPH Founder Margaret Sanger be removed from the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery. The letter points out that Sanger was a racist and elitist who advocated limiting if not eradicating those she deemed unworthy of life. In her book, "Women and The New Race," Sanger wrote of "weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or those who will become defective."
  
Currently there are two women running for President of the U.S. Which one really cares about women? In two FOX NEWS debates, we heard 17 candidates say that abortion is not good. Are preachers, politicians, leaders, and lay people listening? Is America ready to hear the truth? It's really time to PRAY for AMERICA.
Alveda King is the niece of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and pastoral associate at Priests for Life.

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Vamos A Comer

Issam Massaoudi, an unemployed Moroccan immigrant, checks out what's inside the Solidarity Fridge. Massaoudi says money is tight for him, and it's "amazing" to be able to help himself to healthy food from Galdakao's communal refrigerator.
Issam Massaoudi, an unemployed Moroccan immigrant, checks out what's inside the Solidarity Fridge. Massaoudi says money is tight for him, and it's "amazing" to be able to help himself to healthy food from Galdakao's communal refrigerator.
Lauren Frayer for NPR
At a Basque restaurant nestled in the green hills just outside the Spanish city of Bilbao, head cook Itziar Eguileor gestures toward a dumpster out back.
"This all used to go into the garbage," she says, lugging a huge pot of leftover boiled artichokes. "But now, these artichokes, we pack them in Tupperware, load them into our old Land Rover and drive them over to Solidarity Fridge."
Deliveries like Eguileor's arrive several times per day at the Solidarity Fridge, a pioneering project in the Basque town of Galdakao, population about 30,000. The goal is to avoid wasting perfectly good food and groceries. In April, the town established Spain's first communal refrigerator. It sits on a city sidewalk, with a tidy little fence around it, so that no one mistakes it for an abandoned appliance. Anyone can deposit food inside or help themselves.
This crusade against throwing away leftovers is the brainchild of Alvaro Saiz, who used to run a food bank for the poor in Galdakao.
"The idea for a Solidarity Fridge started with the economic crisis — these images of people searching dumpsters for food — the indignity of it. That's what got me thinking about how much food we waste," Saiz told NPR over Skype from Mongolia, where he's moved onto his next project, living in a yurt and building a hospital for handicapped children.
Saiz says he was intrigued by reading about a scheme in Germany in which people can go online and post notices about extra food and others can claim it.
But Saiz wanted something more low-tech in his hometown of Galdakao — something accessible to his elderly neighbors who don't use the Internet. So he went to the mayor with his idea for a Solidarity Fridge.
"When he came to city hall with this idea, I thought it was both crazy and brilliant! How could I say no?" says Mayor Ibon Uribe. "We approved a small budget of 5,000 euros [about $5,580] right away to pay for the fridge and an initial health safety study, as well as electricity and upkeep. And we granted this fridge a special independent legal status, so that the city can't be sued if someone gets sick."
There are rules: no raw meat, fish or eggs. Homemade food must be labeled with a date and thrown out after four days. But Javier Goikoetxea, one of the volunteers who cleans out the fridge, says nothing lasts that long.

Maybe He Will Shave His Head

There is no cure for the Touch of Death, or Dim Mak as it's known in those cheesy martial arts movies.
Legend and comic books tell us that it is a precise and forceful strike, with delayed yet fatal result, sometimes taking days or weeks to do its work.
It is subtle, quick, almost unseen, and usually delivered by a monk or some warrior priest with a topknot. Uma Thurman used it to great effect in "Kill Bill: Vol 2." When she was done, she flashed a smirk of wistful sadness.
That's what happened to Donald Trump's presidential campaign, which received the Touch of Death from Megyn Kelly, the warrior priestess of Fox News.
Kelly didn't flash the smirk of sadness. She doesn't wear a topknot. But at the Republican presidential debate in Cleveland last week, she asked questions Trump didn't like. So angry was he that he began raging in public, and over the weekend, he did what had been considered impossible, even for him.
Trump gutted himself with his own vulgarity.

Trump climbed in the polls by playing the establishment critic, even as he served the establishment's interests by sucking up the media oxygen from true conservatives like Sens. Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
He plays the tough guy. But he couldn't handle it when Kelly asked him a straight and fair question, without any of that Uma Thurman attitude from the "Kill Bill" movies.
Bill: "Pai Mei taught you the five point palm exploding heart technique?"
Thurman, as the Bride: "Of course he did."
Bill: "Why didn't you tell me?"
Why didn't Kelly tell us?
Because she's a journalist doing her job, asking the questions that Democrats would ask if Trump were the Republican nominee.
Let the Dim Mak do its work. You can see the effects already. We're simply waiting for the Trump campaign to pick a soft, dry place to fall.

God Gives Us Choices




1 Corinthians 6:18-19
Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own;


1 Corinthians 6:15Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never!


Colossians 3:5Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry

Mark 7:21
For it is from within, out of a person's heart, that evil thoughts come-sexual immorality, theft, murder

Ephesians 5:3
But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God's holy people.

1 Thessalonians 4:3
It is God's will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality

1 Corinthians 6:9
Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men, nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

1 Corinthians 7:2
But since sexual immorality is occurring, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband.

1 Corinthians 6:13
You say, "Food for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will destroy them both." The body, however, is not meant for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.

Hebrews 13:4
Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral

Sunday, August 9, 2015

Issues Vs. Name Calling

August 9, 2015

5 Good Stories You NEED to See Before Tomorrow

Editor’s Note: We’ve got a special “collector’s edition” of The Daily Reckoning for you today. Below is a collection of the 5 most interesting news items from the past week, just in case any of them passed you by. Enjoy!
The current spate of Republican presidential candidates makes for excellent political theater. Especially when one of the most popular – at least at the moment -- represents an astounding lack of seriousness among people who pretend to be political heavyweights. Read on...
The world of solar power is changing the country so rapidly it’s difficult to keep up with the news. But if the results of solar development in one California town are even close to what’s being projected, the future could look very bright for this energy source...
There was an experiment done with a group of stocks that’s rarely seen discussed in the mainstream press. They’re powerful. They’re fast-moving. They’re not for the faint of heart. But they could quickly put you on the path to an early (or wealthier) retirement. Read on...
To say that China’s had a rough week is an understatement. Between the Shanghai Index tanking and the loss of confidence in the yuan, China’s currency peg to the dollar could be coming to an end. What would that mean for the near future of the U.S. dollar? Read on...
With an $18 trillion debt and $97 trillion or so in unfunded liabilities, Uncle Sam is anything but flush with money. So Congress and 

Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Trumps Lead

The Democrats are living in a dream world, they're stuck in a no-forward slot. They can't understand--they simply can't understand--that Trump's real power is in its own honesty: He is confronting vocally (the first one to ever do this) what 50% of this nation has been begging--hoping!--for someone to admit: that this country is in a financial, social, international mess. We don't need gay rights, we don't need transgender rights, we don't need amnesty when the middle class is drowning in poverty and disillusion, and when we're the weak-kneed cousin on the global platform. The Dems are so in love with their fearless Ovomit that they can't grasp why half this country doesn't equally adore him.

Sunday, August 2, 2015

Is the Pope Catholic?

The remains of four Englishmen who formed part of the elite of the first settlers to arrive in Virginia have been found and identified at historic Jamestown. Questions about the identity of one set of remains is said to be perhaps the basis of rewriting the history of colonial America. Four burials, which have been identified as belonging to a clergyman and three military men were found in the cemetery of the oldest Protestant Christian church in what is now the United States. The burials date to a period between 1608 to 1616. The site has been the scene of archaeological excavations for decades.  British archaeologist James Horn said of the find, “This is a major discovery, these four men are the oldest figures to be discovered in America." Horn is the president of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation. "Lost to history for over 400 years, the discovery of these remains reveals new clues about the life, death and the importance of religion in one of the most important English colonies" in America, said Horn on July 28.  "The living conditions were harsh" in this first settlement, said Horn.  "Coming to the New World was risky for a European. Hunger, Indian attacks and disease killed the settlers and most of them did not live beyond 40," he added. "What we have discovered here in the earliest English church in America are four of the first leaders of America," said Horn. "There's nothing like it anywhere else in this country."
The four men, aged 24-39 years, have been identified by combining modern technology with research in British archives. Among those identified by the experts were the Reverend Robert Hunt, the first Anglican minister of the colony, and Captain Gabriel Archer, both of whom were part of the first colonizing expedition of 1607. It was commanded by Captain John Smith, who history records was rescued by Pocahontas – a native Indian woman whose legend was popularized by a Disney cartoon film.  Archer and Smith were rivals. The site is the same church where Pocahontas famously married Englishman John Rolfe. The resulting peace between the Powhatans and colonists at the first permanent English settlement in America. The historical Pocahontas eventually emigrated to England and died there in the mid-1600s.
Alongside Hunt and Archer were found the remains of Sir Ferdinando Wainman - the first English knight to be buried in colonial British America - and Captain William West, who was killed in a skirmish with the Powhatans. They were buried near the altar of the church.  Besides the human remains, certain artifacts the archaeologists uncovered are mystifying experts and historians. The Jamestown settlement is often thought of as an exclusively Protestant endeavour. The discovery of the reliquary may reveal a more nuanced history. Archaeologists had already found Catholic artifacts such as crucifixes and rosaries. However, these were explained away as anomalies.
Buried with the Archer’s mortal remains was a small silver box that contained bones and at least one lead ampule. Scientists have identified the box as a reliquary: a container used by pious Catholics for safeguarding the relics, such as bone fragments, of saints. The ampule may contain holy water. Archer's parents are believed to have been Catholic in Elizabethan Protestant England. Reliquaries and other trappings of Catholic worship were illegal at the time. Horn said that the disovery raises the question of whether Archer was perhaps part of a Catholic cabal or had been spying on behalf of the Spanish. While Catholic relics have been found in the Jamestown archaeological site before, the placement of the reliquary is especially poignant. Using CT scans to see inside the sealed box without damaging it, they gained a perspective that was impossible just one decade ago.
The Church of England had a strong role in the creation of an English America, said Horn, serving as a Anglican bulwark against Spain’s Catholic colonies to the south. Some experts hold that the reliquary may have been simply repurposed for the Anglican Church. Religious strife in the British Isles made for mixed loyalties for centuries. "It was a real kind of ah-ha moment for a lot of us," said William Kelso, who serves as Jamestown's director of archaeology. "It was oh, religion was a big deal here, and that's often overlooked. Everyone thinks that people came to Jamestown to find gold and go home and live happily ever after."
The veneration of holy relics was abjured by Protestants at the time, just as Catholics - especially Catholic priests - were subjected to persecution and death at the hands of English officials. Catholics who refused to bow to the official Anglican Church were known as recusants. Those Catholics who outwardly adhered to the Anglican Church but clung to the Catholic Church are now referred to as crypto-Catholics. The discovery of the reliquary within an Anglican place of worship has caused some experts to conclude that there may have been crypto-Catholics among the early settlers.
The relevant burials were first unearthed in November 2013. However, scientists sought to first trace and identify their findings before announcing the discovery. Experts have been looking at the site since 1994. At that time the original James Fort was rediscovered. It had long been thought to have submerged into the adjacent James River. Mostly untouched and unexcavated for more than a century, the church site was found in 2010.
The four men unearthed in Jamestown were pivotal figures in the history of British America. Archaeologists plan to conduct further excavations at the church site in the hope of finding the remains of Sir Thomas West, an early governor of Virginia who led a rescue mission to save Jamestown when the colony was collapsing, Horn said. West was known as Lord De La Warr and became the namesake of the Delaware colony. Wainman and William West were both related to the powerful baron. Of the four newly discovered persons, only Wainman and Hunt had children. Those family lines could allow for DNA comparisons after more genealogical research is conducted. Researchers first want to learn more about those related to Lord De La Warr.
Elsewhere in what is now the United States, other evidence of European settlements point to much earlier dates. Near Morganton, North Carolina, the remains of a fort believed to have been built by Spanish explorer Juan Pardo were unearthed in the foothills of the Applachians. Experts date the fortress to 1567, decades before the four Englishmen perished in Jamestown.

Saturday, August 1, 2015

Archaeologists discover 1,000-year-old weak spot in Earth's magnetic field

Patches of ground in southern Africa where huts were once burned down reveal surprising clues about the history – and future – of our planet's geomagnetic shield.

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The fiery demise of ancient huts in southern Africa 1,000 years ago left clues to understanding a bizarre weak spot in the Earth's magnetic field — and the role it plays in the magnetic poles' periodic reversals.  Patches of ground where huts were burned down in southern Africa contain a key mineral that recorded the magnetic field at the time of each ritual burning. Those mineral records teach researchers more about a weird, weak patch of Earth's magnetic field called the South Atlantic Anomaly and point the way toward a possible mechanism for sudden reversals of the field.
"It has long been thought reversals start at random locations, but our study suggests this may not be the case," John Tarduno, a geophysicist from the University of Rochester in New York and lead author of the paper, said in a statement. [How Earth's Magnetic Field Shielded Us from 2014 Solar Storm]   Tarduno told Space.com in an interview that data from the huts suggest that the strange weak patch "forms, and it decays away, and it forms, and it decays away; eventually, one might form and get really large, and then we might actually have a geomagnetic reversal."

Something strange in the South Atlantic

The South Atlantic Anomaly is a dent in Earth's shield against cosmic radiation, 124 miles above the ground (200 kilometers). It may be the most dangerous place in the Earth's sphere for satellites and spacecraft to traverse, because anything electronic traveling through it is vulnerable to strong radiation from space and tends to malfunction.
Even the Hubble Space Telescope takes no measurements when passing over  the anomaly. It's an area where, instead of pointing outward, part of the Earth's magnetic field actually ushers energetic particles down instead of repelling them, weakening the overall field in the area. And it has been growing.  "Some have postulated that the Earth's magnetic field is leaking out the wrong way at that particular spot," Rory Cottrell, a geologist also at the University of Rochester and co-author of the new paper, told Space.com. "One theory is that changes in the South Atlantic Anomaly could be responsible for the decrease in the overall magnetic field that we're seeing, because these patches are growing or changing over time."
Many researchers have speculated that this kind of anomaly is temporary, caused by changes of flow within the Earth's outer, iron core, which generates the planet's magnetic field. Such anomalies, in weakening the magnetic field, may bring the Earth closer to a magnetic reversal — when the magnetic north and south poles on Earth switch places, rearranging the magnetic field over the course of 1,000 to 10,000 years (although it can happen faster). The process generally happens every 200,000 to 300,000 years, after the magnetic field weakens enough, but the last magnetic-field reversal occurred 780,000 years ago.  The new data from the African burnings suggests that the South Atlantic Anomaly was up to its same field-weakening tricks over 1,000 years ago; if it's caused by something permanent near the Earth's core, it might play an important role in the Earth's magnetic-pole reversals.  Modern magnetic records only stretch back for the past 150 years or so, and within that time frame, researchers have seen the Earth's magnetic field rapidly decrease in intensity. But the researchers used the Iron Age remnants of African villages to extend their view even further back, from A.D. 1,000 to A.D. 1,850 — and the record reveals that the South Atlantic Anomaly was going strong at that time, too. [Earth Quiz: Do You Really Know Your Planet?]
Throughout that time, the inhabitants of ancient African villages would burn down the huts and grain bins in their villages on a regular basis, giving scientists key, consistent data throughout that time period.  "They had this ritualistic burning of villages," Tarduno told Space.com. "Particularly in times of drought, the conclusion would be that there might have been some offence in the village, so the solution was to have a burning down of the village." The process was intended to cleanse the village, their collaborator archaeologist Thomas Huffman, from Witwatersrand University in South Africa, said in the statement.  At the very least, it cleansed the ground: The burning villages would reach temperatures of over 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius), which would melt the magnetic compounds like magnetite in the clay floors. The magnetite would become remagnetized by the Earth's magnetic field at the precise instant it cooled, ready to be analyzed centuries later.  "The hut floors are actually very good magnetic recorders," Tarduno said. "Sort of like minimagnetic observatories back in time."
Researchers had obtained very little historical data in the southern hemisphere, and none in southern Africa before these findings. The new baked-clay records revealed an eerily familiar picture of the Earth's magnetic field: Just like today, the Earth's magnetic field at the time was steadily weakening, with a focus on that same South Atlantic Anomaly. The effect did not appear to be continuous, but rather seemed to be a recurring event in that part of the globe, whose weakening power comes and goes over time.  To Tarduno's group, that consistently recurring spot of weakening suggests that a permanent feature deep below the Earth's surface may be generating the South Atlantic Anomaly and might therefore play a role in the reversal of the Earth's magnetic field.
That feature is a section of particularly hot and dense mantle rock just above the Earth's outer core. The section is 1,860 miles (3,000 km) below southern Africa and the Atlantic, and it's about as wide as the distance between New York and Paris. Scientists call it the Large Low Shear Velocity Province, and Tarduno's group suspects that its sharp boundaries might disrupt the flow of iron within the Earth's core, creating a strange, field-weakening eddy that could lead to reversals time and time again.  The researchers' model is only one of many theories about magnetic pole reversal, and they're focusing on refining the mathematics and gathering more, even earlier data from southern Africa to further track the weak spot.  "No one knows what causes reversals, and there is no agreement on whether we can ever even find convincing evidence to forecast a reversal," Ron Merrill, a geophysicist from the University of Washington, who was not involved in the study, told Space.com in an email.
While the new magnetic field records in Africa are useful in their own right, he wrote, it will take much more testing and theory to make a solid connection between the feature near the Earth's core and the magnetic field's weakening and reversal (and the long-lasting nature of the South Atlantic Anomaly).  The new research can't predict the next magnetic field reversal, but finding a connection between the ancient irregularity near the Earth's core and a weakening magnetic field would be one more step toward deciphering the incredibly complex magnetic system that protects humanity from the harsh radiation of space.
This research is detailed in the July 28 edition of the journal Nature Communications.