What accounts for this ten-centrism? My first thought is an old joke. You’ve probably heard it: There are ten 10 kinds of people, those who get binary numbers, and those who don’t. Part of what I like about this joke is that it captures a bit of the arbitrariness of our penchant for counting in tens rather than twos. There is, on the other hand, the non-arbitrariness of how many bony appendages jut out of our pentadactyl palms. But, a list of the “Two things you need to know today” doesn’t seem to do justice to the complexity of modern life. So herewith is my list of the Ten Reasons We Are Seeing An Excess of Lists of Ten Things We Should Know:

1. We don’t have time to read anymore. Knowing we are going to get just ten things to process is comforting in its promise not to drain our attention from facebook and twitter.

2. Ten is close to the approximate size of our working memory. The size of our working memory, the amount of stuff we can recall from lists of things to which we’ve been recently exposed, is about seven (at least for numbers). I seem to recall there being a “plus or minus 2” factor here, in which case the upper limit for most of us mortals is nine items.

3. Since writers can’t make a living any more, we are sliding into an era of bullet point-ism. Anyone who has had a teacher who cares about writing has been warned by this teacher that making lists of bullet points in our essays is no substitute for actual writing in which thoughts are carefully connected to one another with transition sentences. This takes far too much time to work in any feasible business model for writers today (I’m trying not to use the word “nowadays” because the very same teacher who warned me not to write in bullet points also told me that this word was to be avoided). For one thing, they have to compete with bloggers like me who write for basically nothing. Ergo, the era of the articles of “ten things you should know,” which are typically not much more than bullet points.

4. In many cases, there’s more than ten things that you should know, or fewer than ten things that you should know. But, like “decades,” “centuries,” and other arbitrary anchors in the otherwise continuous flux of events and time, the writer doesn’t have to justify ten, because that’s what every other writer is chunking things we should know into.

5. It’s a way for pentadactyl animals to feel superior to unidactyl animals. No doubt if the planet were run by one-fingered/toed creatures, we would live in a George-Bush-like world of black and white. Downside: it takes longer to read “Top Ten” lists than “Top Two” lists. Over evolutionary timescales, this problem could result in unidactylism eventually reigning supreme.

6. At this point in the list, with four more to go, we enter the fat and boring midsection of the list of top ten things you should know about lists of ten things. It’s basically not remembered, so there’s really no point in putting anything here. Ditto for 7, and 8.

9. Because of the well documented recency effect, it’s time to start having content in our list of ten things again. I recall reading an apropos adage in a publication like Business Week that was like a pina colada to my information overloaded brain: “the value added is the information removed.” When it comes to digits, it seems that “the functionality added is the digits removed” – at least if our evolutionary history is any kind of guide. Our Devonian (350 million years ago) ancestors had 6-8 digits. In going down to five, and therefore lists of ten points, we’ve gone from fairly low achieving vertebrates to the spectacular successes of most subsequent animals by reducing our digits to what’s really needed.

10. If we’ve maintained our concentration to this point in the list, we will be rewarded with a bit of humorous fluff that helps bind some of our anxiety about the essential meaninglessness of our lives, and — especially — our time spent on reading yet another list of ten things we should know.

Image: Logo of a home and garden show in Australia. Correction: “didactylism” in #5 changed to unidactylism – thanks to @Matt for pointing out the miscount!

At night in the rivers of the Amazon Basin there buzzes an entire electric civilization of fish that “see” and communicate by discharging weak electric fields. These odd characters, swimming batteries which go by the name of “weakly electric fish,” have been the focus of research in my lab and those of many others for quite a while now, because they are a model system for understanding how the brain works. (While their brains are a bit different, we can learn a great deal about ours from them, just as we’ve learned much of what we know about genetics from fruit flies.) There are now well over 3,000 scientific papers on how the brains of these fish work.

Recently, my collaborators and I built a robotic version of these animals, focusing on one in particular: the black ghost knifefish. (The name is apparently derived from a native South American belief that the souls of ancestors inhabit these fish.  For the sake of my karmic health, I’m hoping that this is apocryphal.) My university, Northwestern, did a press release with a video about our “GhostBot” last week, and I’ve been astonished at its popularity (nearly 30,000 views as I write this, thanks to coverage by places like io9, Fast Company, PC World, and msnbc). Given this unexpected interest, I thought I’d post a bit of the story behind the ghost.

Our first desire for this robot was to provide a kind of telescope. Let me explain. Watching how animals behave so that we can learn how the brain works is challenging. They almost never do the same thing twice and you can’t ask them to please repeat what they just did. But, we scientists love repeatability: only through repetition can we assess whether something is statistically significant. Without repetition, we are at a loss. Enter the robots. With a robot, commanded to move in the same ways as our animal, we can get at previously very difficulty issues. For example, with our robot, we can tell it to repeat a strange and unexpected movement we’ve observed in the fish over and over until we have precisely figured out the underlying mechanical principles of the movement.

So using this approach, we were able to convincingly demonstrate the basis of something quite special. As you know, fish usually swim forward, mostly in a horizontal plane. Our fish is very different. Because it hunts in total darkness and can sense in all directions, it doesn’t really care which way it swims. It’s as agile and responsive swimming backward as it is swimming forward. See below for a sense of how it moves (this high speed video is from my collaboration with George Lauder at Harvard, who shot it):

The ability to swim in the dark forward and backward with equal agility depends on two special abilities: first, the weak electric field I mentioned provides a kind of underwater sonar (think of these fish as underwater bats). Second, the strange way they swim means they can shift from forward to reverse almost instantly. If you look at the photo or video above, you see a long fin along the body. The fish simply wiggles this fin in one direction or the other to swim forward or reverse — all while keeping the body straight! (Very handy if you want to build an underwater robot that is practical, since flexing a body is troublesome to implement.)

Now we watch this fish move forward and backward all the time and we’ve published studies on how it works. But when you watch them, it’s clear they have more tricks than that up their fins. They are quite acrobatic. It really hit us one day when my then student, Oscar Curet, observed the fish moving vertically without any difficulty. But wait! How can a fin, that usually only moves a body forward or back, move a body vertically? This is the mystery that the robot helped us solve—the fish doesn’t do it frequently enough, for a long enough time, for us to really nail it by observation of the animal itself.

So the GhostBot was born. It’s very advanced, with 32 independently controllable motors in a package the size of your forearm (for comparison, industrial robot arms typically have less than 10 independently controllable motors). Because we needed to pack things so tightly, Kinea, a company we are affiliated with who built the robot, designed 32 custom “fish steaks”—circuit boards for each of the 32 motors, which stack together through a spine-like bus connector. These printed circuit board steaks are an integral part of the structure of GhostBot. Here’s what they look like, with one of the motors and a quarter for scale:

A stack of these fish steaks, along with 32 small Swiss-made motors, goes into a cylindrical water proof hull, and then we attach 32 very fine rods and a lycra fin to the bottom to make the artificial ribbon fin. We currently send control signals via a tether so we can move the fin in exactly the way we tell it, allowing us to recreate the fish fin’s motion on command. Finally we get to wash, rinse, and repeat, all while measuring complex mechanical effects in the comfort of our lab.

Here’s a video of the robot swimming in a flow tunnel (an artificial stream). It doesn’t look like it’s moving, because we’ve adjusted the stream speed to match the swimming speed. The rods going up suspend the robot on a frictionless air rail (think of it being suspended from two hovercraft floating on a surface that is out of view), so it is free to move forward, backward, and sideways:

With that done, we can go back and program our robot to do the strange and complex motion we witnessed. The fish sends a wiggle from tail to head, and, at the very same time, a wiggle from head to tail. These two wiggles collide (thankfully, not creating anti-wiggles!) in the middle of the fin. So the propulsion in the horizontal direction is completely canceled out. But the fluid jets that those wiggles had created live on – they collide as well and the result is a spout of fluid going in a downward direction. Like every other animal, this one moves thanks to Newton’s third (to every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction)—so the spout of fluid downward pushes the fish upward.

We can see that spout by putting a bunch of reflective particles in the water, and shining a very powerful laser sheet at it. Here’s what we first saw when we did this, a little over a year ago in George Lauder’s lab (note that the robot is being held rigidly, so we can measure how hard it is pushing up):

A beautiful mushroom-cloud like structure, with an inverted jet. The ghost knife has tamed some very complex fluid mechanics to make the fluid do its bidding. For an animal that hunts in the dark, frequently in large tree root masses alone rivers, the maneuverability this buys it is likely to be essential to its survival.

The GhostBot, and its future offspring, have a promising future. It has a number of compelling attributes compared to other fish for use in robotics, such as being able to near instantaneously change directions, and swimming while keeping the body rigid, making robotic implementation and deployment more practical. Another key advantage arises due to how smoothly the force the fin generates varies as we change things like amplitude of the wiggle down the fin. This adds to other advantages that the robot shares with other fish-based propulsion systems, such as resistance to getting stuck in weeds and other debris, which conventional propulsive technologies like propellers are prone to.

We’ve also built an artificial version of how the fish’s electric sonar works and put that on the robot. We are about to start experiments in which the robot is able to autonomously approach an object, sense it with its electrical field, and then position itself nearby. We are designing a new version of the GhostBot that will have additional capabilities, including fins at the front of the body for pitching and rolling.

Having underwater vehicles powered by such bio-inspired technology will enable new capabilities, such as detailed inspection work in cluttered quarters (a sunken ship, or an exploded well head undersea), and situations where only divers can be used because of the need for up close work near delicate structures (coral reef health monitoring, for example.)

Our ultimate goal is to simultaneously improve our understanding of how to process sensory information for agile movement and develop two stand-alone technologies: robotic undulators for propulsion of highly maneuverable underwater vehicles, and artificial electrosense for use in all kinds of devices where vision may not work. Stay tuned!

For all the details, you can check out the study, published by the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

At least that’s the logic being used to advance the whole 2012 mythos.

For both of you who haven’t heard about this, the ancient Mayan calendar ostensibly comes to an end in 2012, and there are no shortage of doomsayers who claim that the Mayans somehow had advance knowledge of the end of the world, and their calendar reflects this.  With 2012 slightly over a year away, you can be certain that this is a topic to which we’ll be turning here fairly regularly, even though it more correctly falls under the purview of “Fiction not Science”.

It’s understandable, actually.  From an evolutionary standpoint, it was practically yesterday that we hunted/gathered our own food, and lived in constant fear of being eaten by the saber toothed cat.  So in some senses our bodies are still wired for a way of life that hasn’t existed for several thousands of years. Most of us, with varying frequencies and intensities, still need to feel that primal surge of adrenaline. Some of us, myself among them, enjoy violent games like football, rugby, or hockey. Some of us, myself sometimes among them, get the ol’ adrenaline pumping through extreme sports. Some of us, myself rarely among them, enjoy roller coasters (not a fan). Many of us in all the previous categories scare ourselves by watching horror or action movies.

Some, myself definitely not among them, worry about the End of the World Scenario Du Jour. This is neither uncommon nor surprising, humans have worried about the end of the world since somebody first realized that it might, in fact, have an end. With 2012 now a year away, The End seems to be more of a player in the zeitgeist and is an ever-increasing topic of relevance in media and popular conversation. The popularity of my friend (and fellow Discover blogger) Phil Plait’s book Death From the Skies:  These are the Ways the World Will End speaks to this. Even mainstream media outlets like Fox News, LiveScience , and Fox News again, recently ran pieces examining end of the world scenarios (and even though the second Fox entry was about debunked scenarios for the End, it still implies that it’s in the forefront of thought).

Of course there was the movie 2012, but then again you can always count on Roland Emmerich to latch onto something like this and base a movie on it.

Mr. Emmerich’s goal is simply to tell a good story, to make a film that makes him and his sponsors lots of money, and he’s latched onto a formulaic way of doing it–one that feeds our primal need for adrenaline. As much as I find his films scientifically cringe-inducing, I simply won’t argue with his success. This kind of science fiction is fun but, at the same time, nobody leaves one of his movies believing that they were predictive.

There are others, though, whose goals are somewhat more grey, and who stand to gain by preying upon ignorance and our collective primal adrenaline addiction. While many legitimate scientists work to spread understanding (and you’ll see a lot more attempts to do just that here in the future), and hence reduce anxiety, some opportunistic types propagate fear and disinformation on 2012 because they claim to know “The Truth”.  Really!  Just buy their book, their video, or raise the hit count on their web site and learn “The Truth” (despite what they’re peddling is just as much science fiction as the works of Mr. Emmerich). I believe that these types of writings need to be examined and systematically debunked in as many places, and in as many ways, as possible (see also my recent diatribe blog entry on science literacy). Scientists have our work cut out for us.

Any astronomical event that will (or may) occur in 2012 is being rolled into the 2012 mythos– from impacts to solar flares to tidal disruption from cosmic conjunction (I’m working on a post about the latter which you’ll see in a day or two). Even the spectre of the return of the planetoid Niburu is being recycled. (the fact that it was predicted to pass Earth in 2003 and that failed to occur doesn’t seem to dampen any of the doomsayers enthusiasm). In fact, in a cheeky case of verbage straight out of the book 1984, here are some awesome–from a comedic standpoint–Niburu calculation and predictions by a group called “The Church of Critical Thinking” (Apparently Niburu also orbits retrograde–perhaps some critical thinking on the conservation of angular momentum is in order?).

Does this mean that the world won’t end in 2012? Absolutely not! Asteroid and comet impacts, solar flares, and other astronomical hazards have threatened life on Earth for over 3.8 billion years. That said, events that threaten the existence of Earth, or its biosphere, are very low-probability ones–the odds of more than one occurring in a given year, multiplicatively less so. For those among us who’d prefer to get our adrenaline through alternate means than worrying about the end of the world, 2012 represents an excellent opportunity to calibrate our sources. In the runup to 2012 just pay attention to who has said what, and keep that in mind the NEXT time somebody (who’s probably selling a book, video, or hyping their web site) predicts an astronomical end of the world. Keep that in mind after January 1st, 2013. Let me help you with that: it looks like even the Mayan Calander doomsayers were wrong, and the end of the Mayan Calendar may not be for another 50 years (or it may, in fact, have already happened).

Sorry if that hurts book or video sales.

In theory, geoengineering seems like the ideal remedy for our climate ills. Some white reflective roofs here, a little ocean fertilization there, a few simulated volcanic eruptions, and voilà! you have a potential fix for one of the world’s most intractable problems.

But there’s good reason to believe that many of these proposed schemes would prove much costlier to the planet over both the short- and long-term than more mainstream approaches to addressing climate change—and leave a number of critical problems, like ocean acidification, in the lurch.

Take the injection of sulfate aerosol particles into the stratosphere, which I alluded to earlier. The idea would be to recreate the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption by blanketing the sky with a thin layer of particles that would reflect a fraction of incoming sunlight back into space. For this method to put a crimp on greenhouse warming, studies estimate that it would have to cut solar radiation by roughly 1.8 percent—not an easy feat by any means, but not entirely out of the question either.

In addition to being (relatively) cheap, costing around several billion dollars a year according to some projections, stratospheric geoengineering would actually be doable. In a recent paper, Alan Robock of Rutgers University and his colleagues suggested that it could be done by sending fleets of military planes to dump large quantities of sulfur gas into the lower stratosphere several times a year. While it all sounds good on paper, it’s worth emphasizing, as if it wasn’t obvious already, that much of this is still highly speculative. The rapidly changing nature of climate models, from which most of these findings are drawn, also makes it inherently difficult to predict with any uncertainty what this scheme’s exact outcome will be. What is certain, however, is that it would have a fair number of unintended consequences—almost all of which would be bad.

According to a new paper in Nature Geoscience, stratospheric geoengineering, or “solar-radiation management,” as the authors refer to it, would affect different parts of the world differentially (go figure), helping to cool down some countries while cooking others. It would deal a particularly harsh blow to many parts of Africa and Asia, disrupting rainfall and storm patterns and fomenting drought-like conditions. The particles would also spur the destruction of the already vulnerable ozone layer, hindering the recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole and blasting a few new ones.

To compound matters, the cooling effects would be short-lived—a few years at best—and many of the problems would only become worse with time. In other words, it’s mostly a lose-lose situation: stop short and you lose the benefits; keep going and you continue to dig yourself into a hole. It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise then that the authors’ main takeaways are that: 1) regional geoengineering isn’t such a great idea and that 2) reaching any sort of agreement on the “right” amount of geoengineering needed will be, shall we say, tricky.

But what is the alternative? Sure, there are a number of other proposed methods on the docket, ranging from solar shields in space (I kid you not) to carbon dioxide-sucking artificial trees, but most researchers would point to stratospheric geoengineering as being the one with the most promise. Which isn’t exactly encouraging. Of course, very few scientists are genuinely enthusiastic about the prospects of unleashing geoengineering unto the world. Most would argue that much more research is needed before we can engage in a serious conversation about relying on it and, even then, it should only be deployed in conjunction with other time-tested mitigation strategies.

Given the global community’s sluggish, half-hearted response to climate change, it is unfortunately probably only a matter of time before a few governments decide to take matters into their own hands. And, if anything, I can easily imagine some variant of these techniques being eventually used to “terraform” (i.e. make more Earth-like) Mars and other currently inhospitable planets—think Star Trek II’s Genesis device but much slower and less cool and advanced. That is, unless an alien race gets to us first and reverse-terraforms our planet like in The War of the Worlds.

Image: NASA

It turns out that  group of 8th Graders have discovered what appears to be a “skylight” — a caved-in lava tube–on Mars. This isn’t the first such discovery, but they’re not overly common, either. The students’ work was done as part of the Mars Student Imaging Project through Arizona State University. The program allows students, 5th graders through college sophomores, to pose a question about Mars and then have a Mars-orbiting spacecraft take the observations necessary to answer it. The team that found the skylight was from Evergreen Elementary School in Cottonwood, CA, and initially they sought to examine erosional features on Martian Volcanoes, in particular Pavonis Mons (at right) one of the Tharsis Volcanoes.

Although this discovery was serendipitous, given the team’s stated aims, it underscores an important point.  Each instrument on a planetary probe has associated with it an entire science team–scientists well-versed in the types of questions that instrument is uniquely capable of answering. It’s tempting to think that, because they often have “first crack” at the spacecraft imagery, the members of these instrument science teams may be making all the important discoveries in the future, but that’s not necessarily a given. Owing to the titanic amounts of data and imagery being returned by spacecraft like Cassini or Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, it could turn out that instrument teams may simply be “skimming the cream.” Would it surprise anybody if graduate students were getting Ph.D. dissertations out of existing imagery for 50 years? It’s almost certainly the case that there are discoveries waiting to be uncovered in existing data sets for future researchers, even student-researchers, who are willing to invest some time, patience, and, yes, perspiration.

Where are there snowballs in Hell?

Where is the surfing the most extreme, dude?

If you’re extremely intrigued by those questions, I’m extremely excited to announce an extremely interesting book coming this Fall, written by two extremely fascinating gentlemen.  It’s  The 50 Most Extreme Places in the Solar System by Dave Baker and Todd Ratcliff. Like any good scientist, I’ll admit my bias up front: the authors were graduate students with me at UCLA. Still, both of them are extremely knowledgeable and I’ve no doubt that the book will be extremely fun and interesting and…

…I’ve overdone the running gag to the extreme.

The Internet may be crumbling, but think of the time that would free up! [via Futurismic]

“Junk DNA” science may cure HIV, probably won’t create race of superhuman mutants.   [via SciFi Scanner]

Migrant workers may soon be able to telecommute.  [via SciFiWire ]

SciNoFi is not alone.  Terminator TV fans mobilize to save their show. [via eonline.com]

And the first Star Wars may have been 30+ years ago, but its spirit lives on in the hearts of harp music loving pre-teens everywhere [via The Website at the End of the Universe] :

Most planets featured in science fiction tend to be rather generic. These planets are usually convenient celestial bodies upon which to pitch a narrative tent for a few scenes before the plot moves on. Generic planets also tend to be one-note, reflecting some particular environment on Earth. You have your ice-worlds, desert worlds, lava worlds, jungle worlds, water worlds, city worlds, forest worlds (in particular, forests that look like those near the city of Vancouver), earthquake worlds, and so on.

But sometimes an author will create a world whose presence has a weight and ring of truth, a world that feels like it could happily go on existing on its own terms, with or without a protagonist or antagonist strolling around on its surface. Setting aside obviously artificial habitats like ring words or hollowed out asteroids, here are my top ten best science fiction planets, in chronological order:

1. Solaris (1961): You may or may not have liked the films, but Stanislaw Lem’s conception of a world so utterly alien that it defies any genuine human comprehension still resonates.
2. Dune (1965): Best Planet Ever. At first glance, it’s just one of those one-note desert worlds. But Frank Herbert created a complete ecosytem, deep geological history, and a complex native society to go with his sand-covered planet. Dune is no mere backdrop, it drives the plot of Herbert’s complex saga as inexorably as the law of gravity.
3. Annares (1974): Ursula LeGuin’s novel The Dispossessed featured two worlds, a more-or-less straightforward analog for cold-war era Earth, and the far more interesting Annares, where settlers established an anarcho-syndicate-based society in a bid to be free from authoritarian government. LeGuin created a believable society for Annares—including the unpleasant side effects (such as intellectual conservatism) of trying to create a human utopia.
4. Mote Prime (1974): In Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye, this is the homeworld of the Moties, a species that, due to cosmic happenstance, has been bottled up in its solar system ever since it evolved. Mote Prime is planet which has become a palimpsest, mutely testifying to the endless cycles of technological development and collapse experienced by the trapped Moties.
5. LV-426 (1979): The dread planet that featured briefly in Alien, and was the location for 1986′s Aliens. In both movies, LV-426 is perfectly portrayed as part of a cosmos utterly indifferent to human concerns, such as staying alive.
6. Dagobah (1980): The Star Wars franchise is a planet-producing machine: Tatooine, Yavin IV, Alderan, Hoth, Endor, Coruscant, Naboo, etc, etc. But Dagobah sticks out for its organic messiness and claustrophobic atmosphere that stands in contrast to the typical open spaces that provide the large stages for the movies’ space opera.
7. Lusitania (1986): The setting of Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead, Lusitania is the exception that proves the rule—it is fascinating not because it is a rich world, but because its ecosystem has so little diversity, and the implications that has for the book’s characters.
8. Red, Green and Blue Mars (1993-1996): Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy has become the standard against which all hard science fiction books about Mars are weighed. Beginning in the near future, with the founding of the first permanent outpost on the red planet, and continuing for two centuries as Mars is terraformed, Robinson’s Mars is a meticulously researched and believable fictional version of our solar system neighbor.
9. P2 (2004): P2 is a world orbiting the nearby Barnard’s star, and it is settled by fantastically advanced exiles from the solar system in Wil McCarthy’s Lost in Transmission. Unfortunately, all their technology can’t make up for some basic deficiencies in the carrying capacity of the Barnard system, and what happens to P2 is reminiscent of Flowers for Algernon, but on a planetary scale.
10. Nasqueron (2004): A gas giant, home of the maddeningly unconcerned Dwellers, and location of much of Iain M. Banks’ The Algebraist. Nasqueron becomes not just the huge canvas the Banks requires for his sprawling tales, but also becomes an integral element in the plot, as the protagonist struggles to understand the Dwellers.

Image: promotional poster for Dune

As described by David Standish in his entertaining book Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth’s Surface, before Halley, most people assumed that the Earth underfoot was pretty much solid rock all the way through, with some lava and water thrown for good measure. In the late 17th century, Halley was interesed in observations that showed that the Earth’s magnetic poles wandered around. To explain this motion, Halley suggested that the Earth wasn’t solid, but instead composed of a series of concentric shells. One or more of these shells produced the Earth’s magnetic field, and its movement relative to our, outermost, shell resulted in the changes to the position of the magentic poles. Halley further went on to suggest that each of these shells could be inhabited.

The “inhabited” notion went on to provoke quite a bit of science fiction, as well as some real attempts to find an entrance to these inner worlds and get at their postulated wealth, but otherwise turned out to be a dud. But Halley’s basic idea that the Earth wasn’t a homogenous block of rock, but instead had a structure in the form of moving concentric spherical shells, ultimately did find expression in our modern understanding of Earth.

We now know our planet is composed of a thin outer crust wrapped around a thick mantle, which is in turn wrapped around a liquid outer core of molten rock, at the heart of which is the Earth’s solid inner core. Circulating electrical currents within the outer core gives rise to the Earth’s magnetic field and are responsible for the slow motion of the magnetic poles. It’s also believed that Earth’s inner core is “superrotating” — that is, turning faster on the Earth’s axis than the surface–and this rotation may also play a part in maintaining Earth’s maganetic field. So while the movie may be pure fantasy, its worth remembering a time when even the suggestion that we could really know what the center of the Earth is like was a fantastic thought.