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SAN FRANCISCO — When the sun is relatively inactive — as it has been in recent years — the outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere cools dramatically, new observations find.

New sunspot 1035 is growing rapidly and it is now seven times wider than Earth. This makes it an easy target for backyard solar telescopes. ... The magnetic polarity of the spot identifies it as a member of Solar Cycle 24--the cycle we've been waiting for to end the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century. One spot isn't enough to end the lull, but sunspot 1035 could herald bigger things to come.

Global warming 'caused by sun's radiation' Global warming is caused by radiation from the sun, according to a leading scientist speaking out at an alternative ‘sceptics conference’ in Copenhagen. By Louise Gray Published: 5:10PM GMT 08 Dec 2009 As the world gathered in the Danish capital for the UN Climate Change Conference, more than 50 scientists, businessmen and lobby groups met to discuss the arguments against man made global warming. Although the meeting was considerably smaller than the official gathering of 15,000 people meeting down the road, the organisers claimed it could change the course of negotiations. Professor Henrik Svensmark,...

As the world gathered in the Danish capital for the UN Climate Change Conference, more than 50 scientists, businessmen and lobby groups met to discuss the arguments against man made global warming. Although the meeting was considerably smaller than the official gathering of 15,000 people meeting down the road, the organisers claimed it could change the course of negotiations. Professor Henrik Svensmark, a physicist at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen, said the recent warming period was caused by solar activity. He said the last time the world experienced such high temperatures, during the medieval warming period, the Sun...

Irish ophthamologists are warning of a wave of blindness affecting religious pilgrims who are being encouraged to stare at the sun. The incidents are taking place at the Knock shrine in County Mayo in western Ireland. For the past 130 years, pilgrims have visited the holy site, hoping to see visions of the Virgin Mary. In recent months, a new series of visions has drawn thousands of visitors to the shrine on days prescribed by a clairvoyant named Joe Coleman Ten thousand gathered in early November when Coleman told them: "The Rosary is to be said at 3 p.m. and...

John Kerry, Orrin Hatch and 57 other senators have written to the European Commission accusing it of taking too long to approve Oracle's takeover of Sun in order to deliberately damage US business. In an open letter Senator John Kerry (Mass) said: "The EC is within its sovereign rights to set the rules for operation in its market [thanks John], but with our Department of Justice having made a compelling case that the merger does not pose a threat to competition, it is fair to ask the EC for the basis on which a delay on decision making is warranted...

Here's a seemingly simple solar power fact*: the sun bathes Earth with enough energy in one hour (4.3 x 1020 joules) to more than fill all of humanity's present energy use in a year (4.1 x 1020 joules). So how to convert it? In the world of solar energy harvesting, there's a constant battle between cost and efficiency. On the one hand, complex and expensive triple-junction photovoltaic cells can turn more than 40 percent of the (specially concentrated) sunlight that falls on them into electricity. On the other, cheap, plastic solar cells under development convert less than 5 percent. In...

Climate Change: A team of international scientists has finally figured out why sunspots have a dramatic effect on the weather. It shows the folly of fearing the SUV while dismissing that thermonuclear furnace in the sky.Mankind once worshiped the sun. Now the world studiously ignores it as nations prepare to hammer out a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, in Copenhagen in December. Something is indeed rotten in Denmark. Our own government is committed to fighting climate change whether it be though Son of Kyoto or our own growth-capping, job-killing cap-and-trade legislation known as Waxman-Markey. Despite...

Most people north of the equator have an observable suntan by August. Ironically, a desire to be outside is often coupled with another strong desire to get out of the sun, as indicated by sales of sun umbrellas and other types of sunshades. From a biological standpoint, energy from the sun always needs to be controlled. This means that there is complex biological machinery in place to manage sunlight in some way. The machinery itself would not exist without information in DNA prescribing its materials, manufacture, and operation. Suntans result from this special biological machinery and function like the skin's...

Unfortunately for Democrats, global warming is much more complicated science than what their theories predict. The greatest contributing factor to global temperatures isn’t atmospheric carbon dioxide, it’s the sun. The sun’s release of energy has natural variations and it is currently in a state known as solar minimum; the lowest energy output by the sun as it oscillates through an approximate 11 year cycle of activity, also known as the Schwabe cycle. This is the primary reason for the colder than normal temperatures recorded across the country this summer.

Sun Microsystems Inc. on Tuesday updated guidance for what looks to be its final quarter as an independent company and set the date when shareholders will vote on its sale to Oracle Corp. The Santa Clara computer company said it expects to lose between 24 cents and 34 cents in the quarter ended June 30 on revenue of between $2.6 billion and $2.7 billion. In the same quarter last year, Sun reported a loss of 12 cents a share on $3.8 billion in revenue. Adjusting for one-time events, Sun (NASDAQ:JAVA) said it expects a loss of between 6 cents and...

The total solar eclipse of July 22 2009 will be visible across south-east Asia and the western Pacific. This will be a spectacular total eclipse, lasting over 6½ minutes at maximum and visible to millions of people over a path up to 258 km wide. The total eclipse begins just off the coast of India at 00:51:17 UT on July 22, and ends in Polynesia at 04:19:26 UT on July 22. The maximum eclipse is at 02:35:21 UT on July 22, when the total phase will last a stunning 6 minutes and 39 seconds. The partial eclipse will be visible...

Climate Change: Channeling King Canute, G-8 leaders agree to wreck the world's economy, and ours, by pledging to prevent temperatures from rising more than 4 degrees by 2050. What if the Earth has other plans?Canute was the legendary king whose sycophantic followers praised his power and wisdom. He was The One of his time. He once stood on the shore and commanded the waves to halt. As the story goes, he was exercising his ego when in fact he was giving his followers a dose of reality — the power of man over nature is finite and inconsequential. We were...

Washington, June 28: The sun, a star at the centre of the solar system, is known to provide ideal conditions for life to thrive on Earth. But, astronomers have claimed that it also leaves the planet wide open to harmful cosmic rays. A joint team from University of Arizona and University of Texas in the US has found that the sun periodically leaves Earth open to assaults from interstellar nasties in a way that most stars do not. The sun protects humans from cosmic rays and dust from beyond the solar system by enveloping in the heliosphere -- a bubble...

Climate Change: A suppressed EPA study says old U.N. data ignore the decline in global temperatures and other inconvenient truths. Was the report kept under wraps to influence the vote on the cap-and-trade bill? This was supposed to be the most transparent administration ever. Yet as the House of Representatives prepared to vote on the Waxman-Markey bill, the largest tax increase in U.S. history on 100% of Americans, an attempt was made to suppress a study shredding supporters' arguments.

When a person thinks about light, usually the first thing that will come to mind is the sun. We have been taught that the sun is the center of the solar system and thus it is the light of the world. This ball of fire that life on earth depends upon, is so massive in size that it contains 99.85% of all the matter in the Solar System, or 332,800 times that of earth. The distance from earth to the sun is 93,000,000 miles, which would take you 71 years to travel going 150 mph. The sun creates energy...

NASA'S space shuttle Atlantis has been caught in a stunning snap silhouetted against the sun. The pic — the first ever image taken of a solar transit of a space shuttle and Hubble Space Telescope — was taken by an amateur astronomer from his back garden.

Impressive, very beautiful photo's on this solar cycle 24 thread. Short-lived man-made sunspot.

TUSTIN – A 19-year-old Tustin man and a friend were arrested by Tustin police Wednesday night on suspicion of pointing a laser at commercial aircraft landing at John Wayne Airport. Mengyang Sun and an underage girl were arrested around 11 p.m. after Tustin police were sent to the area of El Camino Real and Parkcenter Lane to check out reports that someone was shining a laser at passing cars. (snip) Sun and the girl were arrested and taken to the Tustin Police Department. The girl was released to a parent. After FBI investigators interviewed Sun, he was booked into...

The sun is still in the pits of a deep solar minimum. Lately, however, attentive observers of solar activity have noticed a certain "busy-ness" on the solar disk.

A new active period of Earth-threatening solar storms will be the weakest since 1928 and its peak is still four years away, after a slow start last December, predicts an international panel of experts led by NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center. Even so, Earth could get hit by a devastating solar storm at any time, with potential damages from the most severe level of storm exceeding $1 trillion. NASA funds the prediction panel. Solar storms are eruptions of energy and matter that escape from the sun and may head toward Earth, where even a weak storm can damage satellites and...

Spotless Days A spotless day is a day without sunspots, a day when the face of the sun is utterly blank. Spotless days never occur during Solar Max when the sun is active, but they are common during solar minimum, the opposite phase of the 11-year sunspot cycle when the sun is very quiet. By counting spotless days, we can keep track of the depth and longevity of a solar minimum. By the standard of spotless days, the ongoing solar minimum is the deepest in a century: NASA report. In 2008, no sunspots were observed on 266 of the year's...

Much to the industry’s surprise, Oracle has bought Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion following the breakdown in talks with IBM. Sun’s future appeared to be uncertain and few expected Oracle to be waiting patiently in the wings (although it does explain why Sun was prepared to walk away from IBM’s offer). There are several good reasons why Oracle wanted Sun… * Sun’s hardware and backup solutions could be good for Oracle’s software * the Java programming language * VirtualBox Virtual Machine software * OpenOffice * and MySQL - the world’s most popular open-source database. Whilst MySQL and Oracle are not...

LAST week's audacious $US7.4 billion ($10.2 billion) play by Oracle to acquire Sun Microsystems has drawn comparisons with General Motors' moves in the 1950s to consolidate the US car industry. Oracle has touted the bid as a game changer that will help establish it as the first company to sell software and hardware products end-to-end. Rivals are sceptical of the rhetoric and believe the real motive is to kill off Sun's competing software products, which they say has been a theme of Oracle's buying spree, which has reportedly cost $US34.5 billion since 2005. If approved, Oracle will acquire Sun's global...

Over the past 13 years, Sun Microsystems' Java language has become one of the computer industry's best known brands—and underappreciated assets. The tension wasn't lost on Sun's new owner, Oracle, which on Apr. 20 said it will purchase Silicon Valley pioneer Sun for $7.4 billion in cash. If Oracle has its way, Java will emerge not only as a strong revenue source but also a key component of plans to keep customers loyal for years to come. During a conference call with analysts Apr. 20, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison called Java "the single most important software asset we have ever...

Today is the day for Birchat HaChamma, the once every 28 years blessing of the sun. I confess to not knowing about this 28 years ago, but I decided to join my synagogue group near Highlawn Pavilion in the Eagle Rock Reservation in West Orange, NJ. This location was chosen because it affords a clear view of the eastern horizon, blocked only by the buildings of Manhattan about ten miles away. Supposedly this date is chosen because the sun only returns to some astronomical point once every 28 years and this point is the one where the sun was at...

As sunrise broke over New York City on the morning of April 8, 1981, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi—at the time he was known just as Zalman Schachter—stood on the observation deck of the Empire State Building and sounded the shofar. For more than two hours after, Shachter-Shalomi led some 300 mostly young adults in an obscure Jewish ritual known as Birkat Hachamah, or blessing over the sun, a prayer recited once every 28 years when, the Talmud says, the sun reaches the same spot in the firmament as when it was created. According to an account of the service in The...

G‑d made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night . . . And it was evening and it was morning, a fourth day.—Genesis 1:16, 19 One who sees the sun at its turning point should say, "Blessed is He who reenacts the works of Creation." And when is this? Abaya said: every 28th year.—Talmud, Tractate Berachot 59b Every 28 years the sun returns to the same position, at the same time of the week, that it occupied at the time of its creation—at the beginning of the fourth...

Mark your calendar for Judaism's once-in-28-year special event.The fact that you're reading this article is a minor miracle. Think of all the things that needed to fall into place: the computer, the hard drive, the labyrinth of the Internet, the web browser -- even the electrical power driving it all. There is incredible complexity built into the simple act of reading this article. And yet, we sit before these machines every day without giving them a moment's thought. Until they stop working. When that blue screen appears and the computer freezes, we hold our breath hoping that nothing has failed,...

It used to be that mothers would tell their children, "Go out and play in the sunshine, it's good for you." In more recent years, saying something like that too loudly might have gotten a poor mom arrested and her children taken away from her. "The sun, good for you? Are you crazy? Are you trying to kill your kids with skin cancer?" At least, make sure the urchins are slathered all over in 45 SPF sunscreen, and preferably wearing hats and long sleeves. You might call this the Gospel of St. John the Dermatologist, and it has now been...

LONDON: Scientists have detected vast turbulent waves in the sun's lower atmosphere that at a time spew the energy equivalent of 10 billion nuclear warheads. Queen's University Belfast (QUB) scientists with researchers from the Universities of Sheffield and California State, have shed some light on why the corona, the region around the sun, has a much higher temperature than its surface - something of a puzzle to scientists. Their discovery has revealed the existence of a new breed of solar waves, called the Alfven wave, known to transport energy into the corona. The surface of the sun, known as the...

Commentary: Sale to IBM seems last, best hope for Sun Microsystems SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- It is ironic that an executive widely heralded for his technological brilliance likely will end up best known as a scavenger salesman. When Jonathan Schwartz became CEO at Sun Microsystems Inc. in 2006, the ponytailed software guru was expected to pull a struggling Silicon Valley icon away from its reliance on tech hardware and finally make some serious money out of the company's notable slate of software products, including the ever-popular Java programming language. Though Sun started to see revenue in the software business, Schwartz...

BANGALORE (Reuters) - IBM is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems Inc for at least $6.5 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported, in a deal that could bolster their computer server products against rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co. That would translate into a premium of about 100 percent over Sun's Nasdaq closing price Tuesday of $4.97 a share, the paper said, citing people familiar with the matter. Sun, which was not immediately available for comment, has long been cited as a takeover target for International Business Machines Corp, HP, Dell Inc or Cisco Systems Inc, which this week unveiled its...

On March 13, 1989 the entire province of Quebec, Canada suffered an electrical power blackout. Hundreds of blackouts occur in some part of North America every year. The Quebec Blackout was different, because this one was caused by a solar storm! On Friday March 10, 1989 astronomers witnessed a powerful explosion on the sun. Within minutes, tangled magnetic forces on the sun had released a billion-ton cloud of gas. It was like the energy of thousands of nuclear bombs exploding at the same time. The storm cloud rushed out from the sun, straight towards Earth, at a million miles an...

NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft are offering the first glimpse of the far side of the sun, the space agency announced today. The two spacecraft, launched Oct. 25, 2006, are beaming back over-the-horizon images "that have researchers and forecasters glued to their monitors," according to a statement. "This is a perspective we've never had before," says STEREO mission scientist Lika Guhathakurta of NASA headquarters. "We're now monitoring more than 270 degrees of solar longitude - that's 3/4ths of the star." Because the sun rotates, all of it is seen from Earth over time. But at any given time, only half of...

"Yesterday's sunspot (NOAA 1011) has rapidly faded away. The sunspot's low latitude suggests it may have been a member of old Solar Cycle 23; the sunspot's magnetic polarity was unusual and did not clearly identify it as a member of either Cycle 23 or Cycle 24."

In the first speech of his "whistle-stop" tour to Washington, Barack Obama talked global warming to a crowd of shivering Philadelphians who braved 18 degree (sub 10 degree wind-chill) temperatures on their journey to the 30th Street Train Station. It's hard to believe that, given the arctic-like temperatures the northeast has suffered through this winter, the president-elect didn't instruct his writers to reword this passage from his "historic" speech: [my emphasis] "Only a handful of times in our history has a generation been confronted with challenges so vast. An economy that is

Our Sun is muscling up again. According to NASA, it is beginning another 11-year cycle of activity. Considering that the Sun is to blame for some unfavorable climate changes on the Earth, the coming decade could spell more trouble for our planet. The first measuring instruments made their appearance 440 years ago. They showed that our nearest star treats the Earth to more than just solar eclipses. Sunspots, solar flares, faculae and other phenomena affect everything on the Earth: from atmospheric events to human behavior. These phenomena are known collectively as solar activity. This activity, expressing itself through bursts of...

Here's another way of looking at things: Global warming is good. And if there's any bad news at all about global warming, it's that it might be about over. The debate about global warming will go on forever. But while we may spend the rest of eternity trying to figure out where our weather is headed, one of the best ways of finding out where we're going is to simply look at where we came from. Some years ago I stumbled onto Charles Perry, with the U.S. Geological Survey in Lawrence, when I was trying to track down some information...

The final judgment [PDF] from Utah is here at last. It recites what the August 10, 2007 and July 16, 2008 orders said, but it also resolves the recent dispute over SCO's desire to voluntarily waive some claims and then bring them back to the table after an appeal, should it prove successful. Here's SCO's motion to voluntarily dismiss, and Novell's response, so you can verify that this judgment indeed represents another loss for SCO. You'll see that it was Novell that suggested the wording regarding SCO's voluntarily dismissed claims that we see in the judgment, that they be dismissed...

Nov. 7, 2008: After two-plus years of few sunspots, even fewer solar flares, and a generally eerie calm, the sun is finally showing signs of life. "I think solar minimum is behind us," says sunspot forecaster David Hathaway of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. His statement is prompted by an October flurry of sunspots. "Last month we counted five sunspot groups," he says. That may not sound like much, but in a year with record-low numbers of sunspots and long stretches of utter spotlessness, five is significant. "This represents a real increase in solar activity." Above: New-cycle sunspot group...

During the time it takes you to read this article, something will happen high overhead that until recently many scientists didn't believe in. A magnetic portal will open, linking Earth to the sun 93 million miles away. Tons of high-energy particles may flow through the opening before it closes again, around the time you reach the end of the page. "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 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. The Earth and the Sun each have magnetic fields, and it was thought that they had a somewhat continuous interaction -- With charged particles flowing from the Sun to Earth in a steady stream. But new data and theories from the THEMIS satellite constellation has shown this to not be so! It turns out that there are“portals“ that open and close. These portals are called Flux Transfer Events (FTE`s) by the scientists involved, the Earth and...

Has anyone used or is anyone out Free Republica using Open Office Suite? What has your experience been like? When did it switch from free to member fee based?

Astronomers who count sunspots have announced that 2008 is now the "blankest year" of the Space Age. As of Sept. 27, 2008, the sun had been blank, i.e., had no visible sunspots, on 200 days of the year. To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go back to 1954, three years before the launch of Sputnik, when the sun was blank 241 times. "Sunspot counts are at a 50-year low," says solar physicist David Hathaway of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. "We're experiencing a deep minimum of the solar cycle."

Data from the Ulysses spacecraft, a joint NASA-European Space Agency mission, show the sun has reduced its output of solar wind to the lowest levels since accurate readings became available. The sun's current state could reduce the natural shielding that envelops our solar system. "The sun's million mile-per-hour solar wind inflates a protective bubble, or heliosphere, around the solar system. It influences how things work here on Earth and even out at the boundary of our solar system where it meets the galaxy," said Dave McComas, Ulysses' solar wind instrument principal investigator and senior executive director at the Southwest Research...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The sun's winds are less blustery than they used to be, NASA said on Tuesday, revealing data from a solar probe that promises new insights about Earth's local star but poses few if any consequences for humans -- unless you're an astronaut. The data show the solar wind, a steady stream of charged sub-atomic particles emitted by the sun and blowing at 1 million mph (1.6 million kph), has dwindled to its lowest level in at least 50 years, reducing its strength as a shield against potentially harmful galactic cosmic radiation.

The record-setting surface of the sun. A full month has gone by without a single spot (Source: Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO)) Sunspot activity of the past decade. Over the past year, SIDC has continually revised its predictions downward (Source: Solar Influences Data Center) Geomagnetic solar activity for the past two decades. The recent drop corresponds to the decline in sunspots. (Source: Anthony Watts) A chart of sunspot activity showing two prior solar minima, along with heightened activity during the 20th century (Source: Wikimedia Commons)Drop in solar activity has potential effect for climate on earth. The sun has reached a...

The record-setting surface of the sun. A full month has gone by without a single spot (Source: Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO)) The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted. The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots -- is an influencing factor for climate on earth. According to data from Mount Wilson Observatory, UCLA, more than an entire month has passed without a spot. The last time such an event occurred was...