The ground we stand on seems permanent and unchanging, but the rocks that make up Earth’s crust are actually subject to a cycle of birth and death that changes our planet’s surface over eons. Now scientists have found evidence that this cycle is quicker than thought: 500 million years instead of 2 billion.

The tectonic plates that make up Earth’s crust are constantly jostling against each other: brushing past one another in some places, moving apart in other areas, and butting head-on in still other places.

Where these head-on collisions occur, denser oceanic crust is shoved beneath lighter continental crust, causing it to melt in the ferocious temperatures and pressures of Earth’s mantle. This oceanic crust gets mixed into the rest of the mantle, which because of its high temperature and pressure slowly flows and fuels the world’s volcanoes.

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Confidence among U.S. consumers plunged in August to the lowest level since May 1980, adding to concern that weak employment gains and volatility in the stock market will prompt households to retrench.

The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan preliminary index of consumer sentiment slumped to 54.9 from 63.7 the prior month. The gauge was projected to decline to 62, according to the median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey.

The biggest one-week slump in stocks since 2008 and the threat of default on the nation’s debt may have exacerbated consumers’ concerns as unemployment hovers above 9 percent and companies are hesitant to hire. Rising pessimism poses a risk household spending will cool further, hindering a recovery that Federal Reserve policy makers said this week was already advancing ‘considerably slower

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President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law suffered a setback on Friday when an appeals court ruled that it was unconstitutional to require all Americans to buy insurance or face a penalty.

The U.S. Appeals Court for the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta, ruled 2 to 1 that Congress exceeded its authority by requiring Americans to buy coverage, but it unanimously reversed a lower court decision that threw out the entire law.

The legality of the individual mandate, a cornerstone of the healthcare law, is widely expected to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. Opponents have argued that without the mandate, which goes into effect in 2014, the entire law falls.

The law, adopted by Congress in 2010 after a bruising battle, is expected to be a major political issue in the 2012 elections as Obama seeks another term. All the major Republican presidential candidates have opposed it.

Obama has championed the individual mandate as a major accomplishment of his presidency and as a way to try to slow the soaring costs of healthcare while expanding coverage to the more than 30 million Americans without it.

The White House voiced confidence the law would be upheld. ‘We strongly disagree with this decision and we are […]

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The Arctic’s summer ice coverage could hold its ground or even bounce back slightly, even as global average temperatures rise. But like a Guns ‘n’ Roses tour, the comeback will be short lived and eventually doomed to disappear.

A computer climate model created by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) found that in some of the runs of the simulation, Arctic summer sea ice actually halted its retreat or even expanded for a decade or so. But in the long run, climate change won out and most of the summer ice melted away completely within 50 to 60 years.

‘One of the results that surprised us all was the number of computer simulations that indicated a temporary halt to the loss of the ice,

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Following is the text of the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor as released by the National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln, Nebraska:

The discussion in the Looking Ahead section is simply a description of what the official national guidance from the National Weather Service (NWS) National Centers for Environmental Prediction is depicting for current areas of dryness and drought. The NWS forecast products utilized include the HPC 5-day QPF and 5-day Mean Temperature progs, the 6-10 Day Outlooks of Temperature and Precipitation Probability, and the 8-14 Day Outlooks of Temperature and Precipitation Probability, valid as of late Wednesday afternoon of the USDM release week. The NWS forecast web page used for this section is: http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/forecasts/./

Summary: Exceptional drought continues its hold on the southern states of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and neighboring states. Recent extreme high temperatures have combined with below average precipitation over the last few weeks to create drought impacts in the Corn Belt states of Iowa, Illinois and Indiana.

Northeast and Mid-Atlantic: An area of abnormally dry conditions is expanded in the states of Vermont and New Hampshire. Over the last 30 days, rainfall totals of one to five inches below average have been reported across much of the northern tier […]

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