Garden gnome goes nomad to showcase gravity

Lisa Grossman, reporter

(Image: The Gnome Experiment)

A nomadic gnome is travelling the world to highlight a little-known quirk of our planet: gravity changes depending on where you are. Thanks to the Earth's bulginess, this globe-trotting garden gnome weighed significantly more at the South Pole than anywhere else in the world he has been weighed.

Rather than being a perfect sphere, the Earth bulges in the middle. That means points at the poles are closer to the core than points on the equator. That distance, plus some extra gravity-counterbalancing inertia from the Earth's spin, means that you - or a gnome - would weigh more at the South Pole than in Hawaii.

(Image: The Gnome Experiment)

But not all manufacturers realise this - and that could be a problem when comparing weights of objects, or precise amounts of chemicals, say, from different parts of the world. To raise awareness, Kern & Sohn, a Bavarian scale manufacturing company, is sending an acrylic garden gnome named Kern around the world, accompanied by a set of scales.

So far, the gnome has visited Lima, Mumbai, Mexico City, Durban, San Francisco, New Caledonia (in the southwest Pacific ocean), Sydney and the South Pole, where he weighed between 308.26 grams and 309.82 grams. He'll also visit the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.

If you'd like a visit from Kern the Gnome, you can fill out a form at the Gnome Experiment's website.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/1d95b97a/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A120C0A30Clisa0Egrossman0Ereportera0Enomadi0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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