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Astronomers have detected one of the most powerful cosmic rays ever observed – and it was beamed at Earth from a mysterious part of deep space.The cosmic phenomenon carried the energy of 240 quintillion electron volts – that’s 240 billion billion (followed by 18 zeros).For comparison, a typical lightning bolt is about 300 million volts.The cosmic ray – named Amaterasu, after the sun goddess in Japanese mythology – was detected by a telescope system in Utah in May 2021 by scientists who described it as ‘unprecedented’ in modern times.

A very strange thing happened this week. I use two almost identical laptops in my home office, a HP Pavilion, and a Compaq Presario 2500. Each runs Windows XP - one Home, one Professional. Both are net-connected through their built-in wireless adapters via the NetGear router. Both have worked fine until earlier this week. This evening my wife and I went out to Office Depot to purchase a new router. Obviously, the NetGear router had failed. This had happened with the previous wireless router (a generic brand) which lasted a year. We got home and set up the new LinkSys...