The most recent solar minimum was both long and pronounced. But why?

Miami, Florida - In very rough terms, the sun's activity ebbs and flows in an 11-year cycle, with flares, coronal mass ejections and other energetic phenomena peaking at what is called solar maximum and bottoming out at solar minimum. Sunspots, markers of magnetic activity on the sun's surface, provide a visual proxy to mark the cycle's evolution, appearing in droves at maximum and all but disappearing at minimum. But the behavior of our host star is not as predictable as all that - the most recent solar minimum was surprisingly deep and long, finally bottoming out around late 2008 or so.

Solar physicists here at the semiannual meeting of the American Astronomical Society this week offered a number of mechanisms to shed light on what has been happening on the sun of late, but conceded that the final answer - or more likely answers - remains opaque. Beyond scientific understanding, motivations for better solar weather forecasts include hopes to use them to safeguard against electrical grid disruptions, damage to Earth-orbiting satellites and threats to the health of space travelers posed by solar radiation flare-ups.

For more than two centuries, scientists have wondered how much heat and light the sun expels, and whether this energy varies enough to change Earth's climate. In the absence of a good method for measuring the sun's output, the scientific conversation was often heavy with speculation.

By 1976, that began to change when Jack Eddy, a solar astronomer from Boulder, Colo., examined historical records of sunspots and published a seminal paper that showed some century-long variations in solar activity are connected with major climatic shifts.

A bullet-shaped object can be seen rocketing out of the huge explosion from a dying star in a new image taken by a powerful X-ray space telescope.

The new image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows N49, the aftermath of a supernova explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that neighbors our own Milky Way.

The cosmic bullet in the scene was caught when astronomers used Chandra for over 30 hours to get a long exposure. [Gallery - The X-ray Universe.]

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg today announced new simple privacy settings on the Facebook blog. He acknowledged that too many control options can make some users feel out of control and agreed improvement was needed.

New settings begain rolling out today, offering a single control for user content, more powerful controls for basic information and an easy control to turn off all applications.

One- click control

Facebook users can submit and share everything from favorite quotations to their home address, adding up to hundreds of personal facts and preferences. Until now these facts could be made public or shared with a select few or anything in between. While this offered users point by point control, many complained the granular privacy settings were cumbersome and time consuming.

Archaeologists in northwest China's Shaanxi province have revealed that they have found a primitive "icebox" dating back at least 2,000 years in the ruins of an emperor's residence.

Tian Yaqi, a researcher with the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology said on May 26, that the "icebox", unearthed in Qianyang county, contained several clay rings 1.1 meters in diameter and 0.33 meters tall, reports Xinhua.

"The loops were put together to form a shaft about 1.6 meters tall," Tian said.

The shaft was unearthed about 3 meters underground within the ruins of an ancient building which experts believed was a temporary imperial residence during the Qin Dynasty (221 - 207 BC).

"The shaft led to a river valley, but it could not have been a well," Tian revealed.

"Nor would it have been possible to build a well inside the house," he said.

Tian and his colleagues believe the shaft was an ice cellar, known in ancient China as "ling yin", a cool place to store food during the summer.

"If ice cellars were popular more than 2,000 years ago, it certainly sounds reasonable that the emperor and court officials would have one in their residence," Tian added.

A 505-million-year-old fossil may be a two-tentacled predecessor of today's squids, octopi and other cephalopods, paleontologists reported Wednesday.

In the journal Nature, the University of Toronto's Martin Smith and the Royal Ontario Museum's Jean-Bernard Caron, describe Nectocaris pteryx, a puzzling soft-bodied creature found in the Burgess Shale, a renowned fossil site in Canada.

Long thought perhaps a shrimp ancestor, a newly-found fossil reveals the creature was instead an ancestral cephalopod, albeit with two-tentacles instead of eight seen in modern octopi. The find, "extends the cephalopods' fossil record by over 30 million years, and indicates that primitive cephalopods lacked a mineralized shell, were hyperbenthic (seabed-dwelling), and were presumably carnivorous," says the study.

Introduction

In "Digital Maosim", an original essay written for Edge, computer scientist and digital visionary finds fault with what he terms the new online collectivism. He cites as an example the Wikipedia, noting that "reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure".

His problem is not with the unfolding experiment of the Wikipedia itself, but "the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous".

And he notes that "the Wikipedia is far from being the only online fetish site for foolish collectivism. There's a frantic race taking place online to become the most "Meta" site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites".

Where is this leading? Lanier calls attention to the "so-called 'Artificial Intelligence' and the race to erase personality and be most Meta. In each case, there's a presumption that something like a distinct kin to individual human intelligence is either about to appear any minute, or has already appeared. The problem with that presumption is that people are all too willing to lower standards in order to make the purported newcomer appear smart. Just as people are willing to bend over backwards and make themselves stupid in order to make an AI interface appear smart (as happens when someone can interact with the notorious Microsoft paper clip,) so are they willing to become uncritical and dim in order to make Meta-aggregator sites appear to be coherent."

Read on as Jaron Lanier throws a lit Molotov cocktail down towards Palo Alto from up in the Berkeley Hills...

- JB

Dr Gasson admits that the trial is a proof of principle

A British scientist says he is the first man in the world to become infected with a computer virus.

Dr Mark Gasson from the University of Reading contaminated a computer chip which was then inserted into his hand.

Exposure to specific bacteria in the environment, already believed to have antidepressant qualities, could increase learning behavior, according to research presented at the 110th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego.

NASA 's Phoenix Mars Lander has ended operations after repeated attempts to contact the spacecraft were unsuccessful. A new image transmitted by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows signs of severe ice damage to the lander's solar panels.

"The Phoenix spacecraft succeeded in its investigations and exceeded its planned lifetime," said Fuk Li, manager of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Although its work is finished, analysis of information from Phoenix's science activities will continue for some time to come."