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GLOBAL NEWS NORTH MAGNETIC POLE IS SHIFTING RAPIDLY Fans north magnetic pole is racing toward Russia at almost 40 miles (64 kilometres) a year due © magnetic changes in the planet's core, new research says. The core is too deep for scientists o detect its magnetic field directly, but researchers can infer the field's movements by tracking how Earth's magnetic field has been changing at he surface and in space. Now, newly analysed data suggest hat there's a region of rapidly changing magnetism on the core's surface, possibly being created by a mysterious "plume" of magnetism arising from deeper in the core. And it's this region that could be pulling the magnetic pole away from its long-time location in northern Canada, said Arnaud Chulliat, a geophysicist at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris in France. SIMPLE CURE FOR MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS? n Italian doctor has been getting dramatic results with a new type of treatment for multiple sclerosis MS), which affects up to 2.5 million people worldwide. In an initial study, Dr Paolo Zamboni took 65 patients with relapsing-remitting MS and performed a simple operation o unblock restricted bloodflow out of the brain. Two years after the surgery, 73 per cent of the patients ad no symptoms. Dr Zamboni's thinking could turn he current understanding of MS on its head and offer many sufferers a simple yet complete cure. MS has ong been regarded as a life sentence of debilitating nerve degeneration. More common in females, it's generally accepted that there's no cure for MS; there are only treatments that mitigate the symptoms. Dr Zamboni has put forward the idea that many types of MS are actually caused by a blockage of the pathways that remove excess iron from the brain—and by simply clearing out a couple of major veins to reopen the blood flow, the root cause of the disease can be eliminated. Dr Zamboni's revelations came as part of a very personal mission: to cure his wife as she began a downward spiral after her MS diagnosis. Reading everything he could on the subject, Dr Zamboni found a number of century-old sources citing excess iron as a possible cause of MS. He immediately took to the ultrasound machine to see if the idea had any merit, and he made a staggering discovery. More than 90 per cent of people with MS have some sort of malformation or blockage in the veins that drain blood from the brain. Including, as it turned out, his wife. He formed an hypothesis on how this could lead to MS: iron builds up in the brain, blocking and damaging these crucial blood vessels. As the vessels rupture, they allow both the iron itself and immune cells from the bloodstream to cross the blood-brain barrier into the cerebrospinal fluid. Once the immune cells have direct access to the immune system, they begin to attack the myelin sheathing of the cerebral nerves and MS develops. Dr Zamboni has named the problem "chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency", or CCSVI. (Source: Gizmag, 26 November 2009, http://tinyurl.com/ybsoncp) Magnetic north, which is the place where compass needles actually point, is near but not exactly in the same place as the geographic north pole. Right now, magnetic north is close to Canada’s Ellesmere Island. The north magnetic pole had moved little from the time that scientists first located it in 1831. Then in 1904, the pole began shifting northeastward at a steady pace of about nine miles (15 km) a year. In 1989 it sped up again, and in 2007 scientists confirmed that the pole is now galloping toward Siberia at 34 to 37 miles (55 to 60 km) a year. A rapidly shifting magnetic pole means that magnetic field maps need to be updated more often to allow compass-users to make the crucial adjustment from magnetic north to true north. Nobody knows when another change in the core might pop up elsewhere, sending magnetic north wandering in a new direction. (Source: National Geographic News, 24 December 2009, http://tinyurl.com/yoqy3ke) _—— BET YA THEY BLAME us, Somervi/le NEXUS ¢ 7 FEBRUARY - MARCH 2010 www.nexusmagazine.com