{"id":9282,"date":"2011-07-19T03:00:26","date_gmt":"2011-07-19T08:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=9282"},"modified":"2011-07-19T03:00:26","modified_gmt":"2011-07-19T08:00:26","slug":"getting-it-spectacularly-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/9282","title":{"rendered":"Getting it Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Scientific American claims <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/blog\/post.cfm?id=nuclear-fission-confirmed-as-source-2011-07-18\">Nuclear Fission Confirmed as Source of More than Half of Earth&#8217;s Heat<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Nuclear fission powers the movement of Earth&#8217;s continents and crust, a consortium of physicists and other scientists is now reporting, confirming long-standing thinking on this topic. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>But \u2026 there&#8217;s a problem.  The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/ngeo\/journal\/vaop\/ncurrent\/abs\/ngeo1205.html?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureGeosci\">paper&#8217;s abstract<\/a> says nothing of the sort.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[U]ranium-238 and thorium-232 together contribute  20 (<em>\u00b1error<\/em>)\u2009TW to Earth\u2019s heat flux. The neutrinos emitted from the decay of potassium-40  are below the limits of detection in our experiments, but are known to contribute 4\u2009TW. Taken together, our observations indicate that heat from radioactive decay contributes about half of Earth\u2019s total heat flux. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That&#8217;s radioactive decay, not fission.  While they are both nuclear interactions, they are very different, and any science journalist writing on the topic should know the difference.  David Biello and Scientific American screwed the pooch on this, and need to issue a <em>mea culpa<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>edit:  maybe the body of the paper says something different, but it would be strange to not include it in the abstract<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scientific American claims Nuclear Fission Confirmed as Source of More than Half of Earth&#8217;s Heat Nuclear fission powers the movement of Earth&#8217;s continents and crust, a consortium of physicists and other scientists is now reporting, confirming long-standing thinking on this &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/9282\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9282\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}