I was reading an article (The (Other) Secret: Scientific American) and they used some strange notation when they gave magnetic field strengths for the human brain and the earth.

For example, the article says that the earth's magnetic field is but I've never seen the notation before.

From (Earth's magnetic field - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia): the earth's magnetic field is somewhere between "less than 30 microteslas ... to over 60 microteslas".
I'm not sure how one would get such a value from that notation.
How does equal somewhere between 0.00003 and 0.00006?

Is anyone familiar with this notation? Or does anyone have any plausible explanations for how it works?

Looks like it's meant to be 10^-5, but they've used some weird way of rendering it, i get a square (missing character) instead of the! You describe.

gal? :/ that's not any notation I've seen before either...

Ok. I think I tend to agree with Capuchin after reading it again. Even though 10^-5 is outside the range given by wikipedia I do think that's what they were going for. The key is that they say is 10 orders of magnitude larger than . It's strange that I got! But Capuchin got a box because the html is actually

HTML Code:

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10<sup>5 </sup>

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at least for me.

10^-5 is the same order of magnitude as the wikipedia numbers. They weren't being accurate.