People who don’t know their history are fated to repeat their mistakes. It has always been assumed by solar scientists that our sun does not emit the same sort of superflares seen bursting out of similar stars. But now it appears that the sun did emit a superflare in 774 AD, and, as Whitley Strieber points out in his new e-book, Solar Flares, it may have emitted an even LARGER one 14,000 years ago.
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We know that the sun is only partly the cause of climate change (most of it, alas, is caused by us), but periodic solar flares (or coronal mass ejections–CMEs) can have profound "space weather" effects on power grids and the communication satellites that power our cell phones and (in some cases) cable TV. They can also be dangerous to astronauts.
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A mysterious dark band has appeared on the surface of the sun that is almost 500 miles long and is getting bigger every day. Astrophysicists think it’s a cluster of dense cold gas. The formation may look dark because it’s so much colder than the surface of the sun.
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Do you dread tomorrow? There are lots of things we can ingest can to cheer us up, and one of these is vitamin D. New research shows that the link between low levels of vitamin D (which we get mainly from sunlight) and depression is established in childhood and that making sure that children have enough vitamin D could help reduce depression in adolescence, when the majority of suicides occur.
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