Meanwhile, Some Chaos in the Neighborhood
Dec 22 at 5:05pm by Aileen
There have been some interesting events going on in our solar system since the turn of the new millennium, just coming up on being 8 years old (when counted as the New Year’s transition 2000 to 2001). And the most recent situation here on planet earth bodes ill for sunbathers and electronic communications.
Our sun (Old Sol) has a predictable 11-year cycle of magnetic pole-flipping – with accompanying sunspots and coronal mass ejections [CMEs] of high-energy ions. The most recent pole-flip occurred between 2000 (north pole) and 2002 (south pole). Our planet has also been known to flip its poles, but on a much longer period cycle that averages ~500,000 years. It’s been about 780,000 years since this last occurred, so it’s probably not too surprising that by 2004 scientists were noticing that our field was fading fast.
Back then scientists were fairly convinced that the process of field reversal takes hundreds or thousands of years to accomplish, so the panic level wasn’t high. Earth’s magnetic field produces a “magnetosphere” that shields the surface and lower atmosphere from incoming solar wind, CMEs and cosmic rays by directing them around the planet. Occasional solar radiation does break through and wreak temporary havoc to our electrical grids and communications technologies. And some birds, turtles and bees rely on the magnetic field of the earth in order to navigate.
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Your Cell Phone is Stalking You, and So Is the Government
Sep 21 at 8:08pm by Aileen
…should we be feeling safer yet?
The science news this week had some really odd articles that looked a lot like heavy-handed preferential placements by some junior government official trying to scare home-grown dissidents and tech-savvy terrorists writing bomb-making instructions for the internet from a cave in Afghanistan (or maybe Pakistan). My guess is that we’ll have this from time to time in the modern world, as our reliance on science and technology increases and can be used by anyone to promote whatever someone deems it pertinent to promote.
The trick is to figure out what’s real science news, what’s purposely planted disinformation, and what the ‘trial balloons’ being floated are. Then we could try to figure out what in the world the desired effect of such things might be. From the looks of our first story, the wisdom of having hundreds of millions of people “on-call” 24-7 via cell phones isn’t looking quite so desirable all of a sudden…
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