Photo Credit: GizmodoEarth’s magnetic field is constantly shifting, and roughly every 200,000 to 300,000 years it flips north and south completely. We’re currently overdue for a switcheroo—and scientists now say it could happen in a time as short as 100 years, potentially altering life in unexpected ways.

It was long thought that these reversals took as many as 7,000 years to completely switch, according to a 2004 study funded by the National Science Foundation. But over the past few years, other scientists have suggested that the shifts have occurred at speeds previously unimagined. And a brand-new study published in the Geophysical Journal International by a team of scientists from Europe and the U.S. sheds even more light on these speedy changes—suggesting that the last 180-degree flip only took about 100 years.

How did they discern changes in the magnetic field that date back hundreds of thousands of years? By testing layers of ash deposited by volcanic eruptions over the course of 10,000 years, found in a lakebed near Rome. According to a release from Berkeley, the magnetic field directions are “frozen” into these layers of ash, which could be reliably dated to find out when the reversals occurred and how long they took to complete. “We don’t know whether the next reversal will occur as suddenly as this one did, but we also don’t know that it won’t,” said Berkely’s Paul Renne, one of the study’s authors.

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Photo Credit: BEN BIRCHALL / PA WIRE VIA AP FILEBy Chanelle Bessette.

Facebook and Apple AAPL have both announced an uncommon program to help their women employees lean all the way in. The tech giants will now cover the cost of egg-freezing treatments for women (and their male partners) who want to delay their family plans in favor of advancing their careers.

Facebook began their program in January of this year, and Apple will begin offering the perk in early 2015. The oocyte cryopreservation procedure currently costs an estimated $10,000, with an average additional cost of $500 per year to maintain frozen egg storage. The companies, NBC News reports, will each offer up to $20,000 for the procedure under their health benefit programs for fertility and surrogacy.

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Perk Up: Facebook and Apple Now Pay for Women to Freeze Eggs

By DANIELLE FRIEDMAN.

Two Silicon Valley giants now offer women a game-changing perk: Apple and Facebook will pay for employees to freeze their eggs.

Facebook recently began covering egg freezing, and Apple will start in January, spokespeople for the companies told NBC News. The firms appear to be the first major employers to offer this coverage for non-medical reasons.

“Having a high-powered career and children is still a very hard thing to do,” said Brigitte Adams, an egg-freezing advocate and founder of the patient forum Eggsurance.com. By offering this benefit, companies are investing in women, she said, and supporting them in carving out the lives they want.

When successful, egg freezing allows women to put their fertility on ice, so to speak, until they’re ready to become parents. But the procedure comes at a steep price: Costs typically add up to at least $10,000 for every round, plus $500 or more annually for storage.

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Photo Credit: AP / Jay ReevesAnimal control officer Wanda Snell knows what she saw: A veterinarian inserted a needle into the black-and-brown mutt and injected a chemical meant to euthanize the dog no one had adopted. The animal moved a bit and was still and quiet by the time she left the shelter for home.

What Snell can’t explain is how or why a mixed-breed dog that nobody wanted recovered overnight and has since bounced back fully from what should have been a lethal injection.

Less than a month later, the dog lives with a family in a suburb of the Alabama city of Birmingham, where the animal romps and plays with another rescue dog. His survival seemed all the more surprising since the same dog already been struck by a car before arriving at the Ozark City Animal Shelter.

A rescue worker who retrieved the roughly 4-year-old male dog after the failed procedure named him “Lazarus” after the man the Bible says Jesus brought back to life. Snell has another name for that escape artist of a dog. “I call him Houdini,” she said.

No one connected with the shelter is exactly sure what happened to prevent Lazarus’ death, and officials declined to release the name of the contract veterinarian who performed the injection.

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