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A solar wind stream flowing from the indicated coronal hole should hit Earth's magnetic field on July 13th or 14th.
© NASAAn artist's concept of Earth's magnetic field connecting to the sun's--a.k.a. a "flux transfer event"--with a spacecraft on hand to measure particles and fields.
"It's called a flux transfer event or 'FTE,'" says space physicist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "Ten years ago I was pretty sure they didn't exist, but now the evidence is incontrovertible."
Indeed, today Sibeck is telling an international assembly of space physicists at the 2008 Plasma Workshop in Huntsville, Alabama, that FTEs are not just common, but possibly twice as common as anyone had ever imagined.
Sunspot 1087 is developing into a behemoth many times wider than Earth. It now has dozens of dark cores with a long magnetic filament snaking among them:
"What amazing active region!" says Britta Suhre, who took the picture from her backyard observatory in Rosenheim, Germany: "It is real fun to photograph."
The filament is crackling with B- and C-class solar flares, as shown in these movies from the Solar Dynamics Observatory. The biggest and most spectacular eruption so far was a C3-flare on July 9th (movie).
© Britta Suhre
"What amazing active region!" says Britta Suhre, who took the picture from her backyard observatory in Rosenheim, Germany: "It is real fun to photograph."
The filament is crackling with B- and C-class solar flares, as shown in these movies from the Solar Dynamics Observatory. The biggest and most spectacular eruption so far was a C3-flare on July 9th (movie).
© Press AssociationVlad the Impaler: bloodthirsty tyrant or victim of bad PR?
The show, which has just opened in Bucharest, attempts to rehabilitate Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad Dracula or Vlad the Impaler, who ruled Wallachia in the 15th century.
"Vlad Dracula was doubtlessly cruel, but not more so than other princes of his time," said Margot Rauch, the Austrian curator of the exhibition, entitled "Dracula - Voivode and Vampire".
Vlad was born in the town of Sighisoara, in Transylvania, in 1431. He ruled over Wallachia, now a region of Romania, between 1456 and 1462 and was reputed to have killed thousands of political opponents, common criminals and captured Turkish soldiers by having them impaled on sharp wooden stakes. It is estimated he had 50,000 people put to death.
© photolibrary.comHistorians claim to have found the site of Camelot
Researchers exploring the legend of Britain's most famous Knight believe his stronghold of Camelot was built on the site of a recently discovered Roman amphitheatre in Chester.
Legend has it that his Knights would gather before battle at a round table where they would receive instructions from their King.
But rather than it being a piece of furniture, historians believe it would have been a vast wood and stone structure which would have allowed more than 1,000 of his followers to gather.
Historians believe regional noblemen would have sat in the front row of a circular meeting place, with lower ranked subjects on stone benches grouped around the outside.
Russian astronomers have developed an innovative satellite network that would alert people when any space objects are on a collision course with the Earth. Some argue the system isn't effective and is too expensive. A large asteroid hitting the Earth could mean the worst natural disaster in millions of years - and threaten most forms of life.
© TechCrunch
With the funding, Abengoa will build a solar plant in Arizona that can power 70,000 homes. When completed in 2013, the plant will be one of the largest in the world. It will also store part of the energy it produces, becoming the first plant in the U.S. to do so.
Emotional scenes expected in New Orleans
The last space shuttle external tank rollout will take place later today in New Orleans, as Endeavour's STS-134 mission fuel beast is waved on its way to Florida by "hundreds of handkerchief-waving" Lockheed Martin Space Systems employees.
The ceremony, featuring local brass band the Storyville Stompers, marks the end of an era which has seen Lockheed Martin deliver "135 flight tanks to NASA during the 25 years of flying the space shuttle".
The last space shuttle external tank rollout will take place later today in New Orleans, as Endeavour's STS-134 mission fuel beast is waved on its way to Florida by "hundreds of handkerchief-waving" Lockheed Martin Space Systems employees.
The ceremony, featuring local brass band the Storyville Stompers, marks the end of an era which has seen Lockheed Martin deliver "135 flight tanks to NASA during the 25 years of flying the space shuttle".
Private Google scraper in SCO-like refusal to die
Scroogle has once again returned from the dead, continuing to serve up its privacy-friendly Google search results after another programming tweak from founder Daniel Brandt.
Brandt and the not-for-profit Scroogle have been scraping Google search results since 2002, allowing netizens to use Mountain View's search engine without being tracked by the company. But in May, after Google removed an interface page where Brandt was scraping results, the service went offline. It returned a day later, as Brandt tapped a slightly different interface, only for this interface to vanish as well.
Scroogle has once again returned from the dead, continuing to serve up its privacy-friendly Google search results after another programming tweak from founder Daniel Brandt.
Brandt and the not-for-profit Scroogle have been scraping Google search results since 2002, allowing netizens to use Mountain View's search engine without being tracked by the company. But in May, after Google removed an interface page where Brandt was scraping results, the service went offline. It returned a day later, as Brandt tapped a slightly different interface, only for this interface to vanish as well.
© Reuters, For Canwest News ServiceDevices such as the iPhone may actually be changing the way we think.
A message from outer space or a text about a fun weekend and the promise to touch base soon? If you're a digital immigrant -- Statistics Canada says only 27 per cent of Canadians don't text, tweet and Google away their hours -- chances are, it sounds like a foreign language spoken by a generation you can't fathom.
But according to prominent American neuroscientist Dr. Gary Small, this lack of understanding is more than just a generation gap. In fact, spurred by the technological web of mobile phones, computers, the Internet and video games, we are in the midst of what he calls "a brain gap," in which the younger generation doesn't just look and sound different; their brains are rapidly evolving to such an extent they actually function differently, too.
"Because of the current technological revolution," says Small, author of iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind (HarperCollins, 2009), "our brains are evolving right now -- at a speed like never before."
And it's starting at a very early age. While every human is born with the same circuitry, give or take some genetic variations, "studies show that our environment moulds the shape and function of our brains, as well, and it can do so to the point of no return," he says.
In fact, by adolescence, 60 per cent of the brain's synapses, or connection sites between cells, have been pruned to suit dominant learning experiences. In other words, for "digital natives" who have grown up with constant, daily exposure, technology stimulates brain cells and neurotransmitter release, sparking the evolution of new neural pathways -- and weakening old ones.
