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Island Time

A magnetometer whirs in the background when we reach Noah, one of two Dartmouth recipients this year of a Rhodes Scholarship. He's in a lab at Harvard, under the earth sciences building. Over a summer expedition to the Gobi Desert, Noah collected rocks surrounding dinosaur digs and drilled out nickel-sized cores. These disks are fed into the noisy magnetometer, which interprets the magnetic field that existed when the rocks were formed, giving researchers a timeline for the dinosaur bones.