One in 2,000 people in the UK are estimated to be carrying variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) proteins, according to a study led by Professor Sebastian Brandner (UCL Institute of Neurology).
The research, published in this week’s BMJ, is based on samples from more than 32,000 people and provides the most robust prevalence measure to date. (more…)
*Berkeley Lab scientists join their KamLAND colleagues to measure the radioactive sources of Earth’s heat flow*
What spreads the sea floors and moves the continents? What melts iron in the outer core and enables the Earth’s magnetic field? Heat. Geologists have used temperature measurements from more than 20,000 boreholes around the world to estimate that some 44 terawatts (44 trillion watts) of heat continually flow from Earth’s interior into space. Where does it come from?
Radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium in Earth’s crust and mantle is a principal source, and in 2005 scientists in the KamLAND collaboration, based in Japan, first showed that there was a way to measure the contribution directly. The trick was to catch what KamLAND dubbed geoneutrinos – more precisely, geo-antineutrinos – emitted when radioactive isotopes decay. (KamLAND stands for Kamioka Liquid-scintillator Antineutrino Detector.) (more…)
