"I've been a solar physicist for 30 years, and I've never seen anything quite like this," says Richard Harrison, head of space physics at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.
He shows me recent footage captured by spacecraft that have their sights trained on our star. The Sun is revealed in exquisite detail, but its face is strangely featureless.
"If you want to go back to see when the Sun was this inactive... you've got to go back about 100 years," he says.
This solar lull is baffling scientists, because right now the Sun should be awash with activity.
Earth Changes
Giant squid
According to the Tottori prefecture fishing cooperative, the squid was caught on Monday evening off the prefecture's coast, when fishermen were trawling for flatfish and crabs.
The squid measured 11 feet long, and was found missing both its longest tentacles.
Though it was caught alive, the squid died before reaching shore on Tuesday.
Local residents said they immediately wondered how many people the 220 pound squid could feed if cut into sashimi.
Unfortunately the ammonium content of the squid is said to make it rather unpleasant to eat.
While East Coast freezes, West Coast burns: crews battle wildfire in Rural Placer County, California
As of 4L30 p.m. Wednesday afternoon, the fire had burned 120 acres, according to Cal Fire spokesman Daniel Berlant.
The fire is burning in Pleasant Grove, near South Brewer Road and Phillips Road. No structures were threatened.
The lack of rain in California has led to summer-like conditions, causing agencies like Cal Fire to beef up their staff earlier than usual.
A swirling storm clobbered parts of the mid-Atlantic and the urban Northeast on Tuesday, dumping nearly a foot and a half of snow, grounding thousands of flights, closing government offices in the nation's capital and making a mess of the evening commute.
The storm stretched 1,000 miles between Kentucky and Massachusetts but hit especially hard along the heavily populated Interstate 95 corridor between Philadelphia and Boston, creating perilous rides home for millions of motorists.
The National Weather Service said Manalapan, N.J., got 16 inches of snow and Philadelphia's airport saw 13.5. It said parts of New York City had 11 inches.
The snow came down harder and faster than many people expected. A blizzard warning was posted for parts of Massachusetts, including Cape Cod.
© Gordon Donovan/Yahoo News
People head home in Times Square in New York City on January 21, 2014 as a major storm walloping the tri-state area has prompted a state of emergency in both New York and New Jersey.
People head home in Times Square in New York City on January 21, 2014 as a major storm walloping the tri-state area has prompted a state of emergency in both New York and New Jersey.
The National Weather Service said Manalapan, N.J., got 16 inches of snow and Philadelphia's airport saw 13.5. It said parts of New York City had 11 inches.
The snow came down harder and faster than many people expected. A blizzard warning was posted for parts of Massachusetts, including Cape Cod.
Into the first part of next week, the polar vortex will hover just north of the United States border causing waves of frigid air to blast into the Midwest and much of the East.
The polar vortex is a commonly used term among the meteorological community to describe an intense storm with frigid air and strong winds that spends much of its time above the Arctic Circle. Occasionally, during the autumn, winter and spring, this storm can dip farther south, approaching the mid-latitudes.
© Accuweather
On Sean Hannity's radio show on Tuesday, Weatherbell Analytics meteorologist Joe Bastardi predicted today's severe winter weather is just the beginning of a 10 to 15 day outbreak to hit the Midwest, the Great Lakes region and the Northeast.
"I think this is blizzard conditions on [Long Island] tonight, coastal New Jersey, southeastern New England," Bastardi said. "Severe and extreme cold developing at the tail end of this storm. And this is the beginning of a siege that I'm very concerned is going to have an immense impact on the country economically. I'm very concerned, and I hope I'm wrong, about the power grid. That Arctic outbreak that came for three to four days earlier in the month, led to blackouts. We've got 10 to 15 days of this coming now, where one shot after another comes in and more storms are coming. And you know, this is not trying to be doom and gloom. You don't need to hype the weather. It will hype itself naturally."
Livingston County - For the past two days in a row, people in the Local 6 area have reported hearing loud, jolting booms.
It's one of our most popular stories on facebook. The story we first posted Saturday night has more than 500 comments from people who say they have all heard and felt the same thing in counties across western Kentucky and southern Illinois. Public safety officials are trying to figure out what's causing the noise while people brace themselves for the next big boom.
Leon Cunningham has been living in Livingston County for more than 25 years and says he's familiar with the sights and sounds in his neighborhood. But, over the weekend, he heard something different. He said, "It was just... boom! I mean, you could hear it. It was loud." It was also jarring. "It just shook this whole neighborhood and shook all these houses. In here, stuff rattled on the shelves."
It wasn't just 17 cows dropping hooves. It's been an ongoing problem.
This is the only known video news report on the topic with a great rundown. After two minutes, it becomes more of an opinion piece.
The Resident's report in the video below was not kidding about Zilmax's claims. They call it a supplement and say it will help the environment, strategically mixing the words "nutrition" and "nutritionist" in with the review.
© Getty
Fatal: Pet owners suspecting the illness should visit their vet straight away
Fatal: Pet owners suspecting the illness should visit their vet straight away
A killer dog disease, which has already claimed 16 lives, is spreading across Britain.
Posters have been put up across New Forest, Hampshire, after nine cases in the area - with another seven affected in other parts of the country including Cornwall, Surrey, Worcestershire and County Durham.
The canines suffer fatal symptoms including lesions on the lower legs followed by kidney failure between two and seven days later.
Vet David Walker said the deaths have similarities to a disease called Alabama rot which was first reported in the United States in the 1980s and also causes nasty skin legions.
He said the cause of this was toxins from the E. coli bacteria but this had not yet been traced in the UK.
There is no specific medical treatment for Alabama rot but pet owners are encouraged to seek help as soon as they see any of the symptoms for this new mystery disease, to try and stop it developing.
A new assessment by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has revealed that a quarter of the world's sharks and rays are at risk of extinction.
The latest update to the IUCN's "Red List" of threatened species, which found ray species to be at higher risk than sharks, is part of a first-ever global analysis of these marine species.
Researchers assessed the conservation status of 1,041 shark, ray and chimaera species, which are all so-called "cartilaginous fish," meaning they have skeletons made of cartilage rather than bone. A chimaera is type of jawed fish closely related to sharks and rays.
The researchers found that sharks, rays and chimaeras face a substantially higher risk of extinction than do most other animals.
In fact, only 23 percent of shark, ray and chimaera species are categorized as being safe, or of "least concern," IUCN officials said.
Nick Dulvy, co-chair of the IUCN Shark Specialist Group and Canada Research Chair at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, said in a statement that the analysis shows that sharks and their relatives are facing an alarmingly elevated risk of extinction, LiveScience reported.
He said that in greatest peril are the largest species of rays and sharks, especially those living in shallow water that is accessible to fisheries, where they can become entangled in fishing gear a phenomenon known as bycatch.
Source: Asian News International
Comment: Not complicated enough, if one is to spend time educating oneself on this topic.
Here's what is known to us so far: The surface of the planet was, for a period of time (as reported in numerous stories back some 5/6 years ago) actually warming. There were reports of many hot-spots in various places, in some cases, hot enough to ignite. This is now being countered by surface cooling due to other factors, like global dimming/induction of colder air, etc. This heating of the lithosphere is probably due to the slowing of rotation which generates internal heat between the lithosphere and the mantle, and leads to increased volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, sinkholes, etc, and is probably also responsible for many of the strange sounds.
It is the upper atmosphere - the stratosphere - that is cooling and that is the reason for sun pillars, rings around the sun, double/triple/quadruple images of the sun, contrails, etc.
Volcanic dust does not heat the upper atmosphere by "trapping heat" in the stratosphere. That the stratosphere is colder and has dropped lower has been reported by scientists, though that information gets sidelined. The AGW folks would LOVE people to believe that nonsense.
Then, there is the comet dust/smoke in the upper atmosphere that further contributes to the cooling as you can see from the dramatic increase in noctilucent clouds.
At the same time that is going on, the quiescent sun and the earth's weakened magnetic field allow more cosmic radiation to reach the troposphere where it forms cloud nuclei and increases precipitation from the increased evaporation from the oceans caused by the increasing heat within the earth caused by the slowing of rotation.
These are all the conditions for the initiation of an ICE AGE: heat at the lower levels, troposphere where "weather" takes place, extreme cold at the upper levels of the atmosphere, which can then create interesting effects including polar vortices.