The Earth’s crust is a restless body.  The massive plates covering the planet’s mantel move a few very measurable inches per year. Why some plates are more slothful than others remains a mystery, but one group of geophysicists has come up with a compelling explanation—the wider the plate, the faster the movement.

Wide plates tend to slip under the adjoining plate more easily than narrower ones, the researchers discovered from their computer simulations. At the boundaries, plates either sink down toward the core or slide into the mantle more or less diagonally.  Plates with a wide edge slip sideways more quickly than they sink because the subducted portion of the plate pulls it along.  Narrower plates, on the other hand, sink more readily than they slide because friction at the margins of the plate’s edge slow horizontal motion.

Though still a theory, many geophysicists think the new idea holds promise. In an interview with ScienceNOW, Donald Forsyth, a Brown University geophysicist unaffiliated with the study, said, “It’s a nice, really simple concept.”

Image courtesy of NOAA.

The authors investigated the economic conditions of people living near parks in Thailand and Costa Rica and found significantly less poverty in those areas. Though the data are averaged across the communities—some individuals or families may not benefit from the parks—they are a heartening result for conservation biologists.

This is not the first study to find some human benefit in protecting wilderness. An extensive earlier study found that protected areas attract capital for development, which in turn fosters population growth at the park edges and places greater pressure on the parks themselves.

The giant Palouse earthworm is the stuff of legends. Reportedly growing up to three feet in length, the worm is also notoriously difficult to track down—so difficult that scientists in the 1990s believed it was extinct. And it supposedly smells like lillies.

But the recent discovery of two specimens of Driloleirus americanus by pedologist Karl Umiker and graduate student Shan Xu has undermined the veracity of the worm’s fairy tale-like qualities. Rather than unearthing two yard-long monsters, the pair found a small juvenile and an adult that “when we stretched it out and relaxed it,” Jodi Johnson-Maynard, Umiker’s supervisor and an associate professor of soil science, told the New York Times, “got bigger…between nine and ten inches.”

And the smell? Nothing like lillies, they report.

The adult worm had to be sacrificed in the name of science (the only sure way to identify the species is through dissection), but its DNA should enable less invasive IDs. The researchers coaxed (if that’s the word) the worms out of the dirt with electric current, placing eight electrodes in a foot-wide circle before giving them the juice. Umiker and Xu were likely surprised when the translucent worms emerged topside—giant Palouse earthworms can burrow 15 feet below the surface.

Photo courtesy of the University of Idaho.