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"Solar Rossby waves are gigantic in size, with wavelengths comparable to the solar radius," study co-author Laurent Gizon, of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, said in a statement. (The average radius of the sun is a whopping 432,450 miles, or 696,000 kilometers.) Even so, these waves move very slowly, with shallow troughs and peaks, so they aren't always easy to detect, especially amid the other swirls and disturbances on a body as lively as the sun. … Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, the University of Göttingen (both in Germany), New York University...

There are waves piling on waves in the weather.A new press release tells us that there have been an “exceptional” number of weather extremes in summer. Weather extremes in the summer — such as the record heat wave in the United States that hit corn farmers and worsened wildfires in 2012 — have reached an exceptional number in the last ten years. Human-made global warming can explain a gradual increase in periods of severe heat, but the observed change in the magnitude and duration of some events is not so easily explained. Heatwaves lend themselves to headlines. Not only are...