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.

In February of 2007 NASA launched five satellites collectively called THEMIS to study the earth’s magnetic field, and by May of that year rumors started appearing in the press that our field flip was imminent. That could present issues due to the likelihood that the magnetosphere may essentially disappear during the period of the flip, leaving the sunny side of the planet exposed and vulnerable. There are of course ample caveats in the scenarios for such an event, given the fact that modern humans have never actually experienced one. Obviously, there is good reason to keep an eye on the process, as 5 satellites aren’t cheap to invent and deploy just for the purpose…

Just this past week we have finally been informed by NASA that indeed, the five THEMIS satellites flew through a ‘hole’ in the magnetosphere’s sun-side bow wave just as it was opening on June 3 of 2007. The hole, NASA tells us, is now 10 times larger than any such hole previously believed to exist, 4 times wider than the diameter of the planet. NASA’s description of this newly released but known for more than a year news is… colorful:

The event began with little warning when a gentle gust of solar wind delivered a bundle of magnetic fields from the Sun to Earth. Like an octopus wrapping its tentacles around a big clam, solar magnetic fields draped themselves around the magnetosphere and cracked it open. The cracking was accomplished by means of a process called “magnetic reconnection.” High above the Earth’s poles, solar and terrestrial magnetic fields linked up (reconnected) to form conduits for solar wind. Conduits over the Arctic and Antarctic quickly expanded; within minutes they overlapped over Earth’s equator to create the biggest magnetic breach ever recorded by Earth-orbiting spacecraft.

Worse, what’s going on bears little to no resemblance to sciences theories about such things. In fact, what’s happening is completely opposite to predictions!

Bottom line for our ‘interesting times’? Stock up on sunscreen, back up your hard drive regularly…

The years ahead could be especially lively. Raeder explains: “We’re entering Solar Cycle 24. For reasons not fully understood, CMEs in even-numbered solar cycles (like 24) tend to hit Earth with a leading edge that is magnetized north. Such a CME should open a breach and load the magnetosphere with plasma just before the storm gets underway. It’s the perfect sequence for a really big event.”

Links:
Sun does magnetic flip
Earth’s Magnetic Field is Fading Fast
A Giant Breach in Earth’s Magnetic Field

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…

Yes, it’s official: there is a new psychiatric disorder and it’s caused by your cell phone. It’s called “ringxiety”. A survey presented at the American Psychological Association’s annual convention in San Francisco reported that two-thirds of adults in the US hear their cell phone ring or feel it vibrate when it’s not actually ringing or vibrating.

As reported in Many hear ‘phantom ringing’ from cellphone, the more a person uses their phone, the more often they hear phantom ringing. And you thought it was just a modern comedy that so many people are now walking the streets of our towns and cities talking incessantly to themselves, the only indicator that they’re not all inpatients out on day passes being the little gadgets hooked to their ears.

Between this alarming suggestion of incipient mental illness and the notable problem that Drivers using cell phones are twice as likely to cause rear-end collisions, one might begin to wonder if being 100% ‘wired’ is particularly good for humans. Hmmm…

Of course, just because you’re imagining that your phone is talking to you when it’s not doesn’t mean nobody’s listening in on your communications. The frontier for that kind of surveillance seems to be the internet, and it’s all about the War on Terror. Scientists Use ‘Dark Web’ to Snag Extremists and Terrorists Online describes a project by computational scientists at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at UA designed to systematically collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the web.

Now, you might wonder – quite legitimately – how this ‘Dark Web’ knows what emails and which of the traffic at web sites and forums is “terrorist-generated,” as well as how it can claim to be intercepting “all” of it. Further, one might be reasonably concerned about how much of regular citizens’ communications are being monitored by such a project, and whether Holly Housewife and Joe Blow and Daphne Darling the teenager are getting labeled “Terrorist” by a machine that claims to be artificially intelligent. Don’t we have laws against this sort of thing?

Something to consider in light of the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution, since project director Chen has already planned expansions into other data-mining purposes:

Dark Web’s capabilities are also being used to study the online presence of extremist groups and other social movement organizations. Chen sees applications for this Web mining approach for other academic fields.

“What we are doing is using this to study societal change,” Chen says. “Evidence of this change is appearing online, and computational science can help other disciplines better understand this change.”

Maybe those little old Quaker ladies shouldn’t relax their legal challenges to unwarranted surveillance yet. Looks to me like the gub’ment still thinks recipes for chocolate chip cookies is reason to send in the Marines.

Meanwhile, across the pond, scientists at five British universities have joined with police and security services to develop a hoped-to-be-foolproof lie detector. Research to Assist in Investigation of Criminal and Terrorist Activity reports that by combining technologies for location based games with intensive communications monitoring researchers hope to determine whether deception can be identified reliably from suspects’ movements, communications and behaviors. An interesting tidbit of news:

The interactions will be studied by psychologists and analysed by data-mining specialists to determine where the team participants are applying deception or where the account of their activities is true. The researchers will also conduct interviews to assess public awareness of, and response to, monitoring and surveillance in counter-terrorism.

Perhaps if just owning and using a cell phone causes two-thirds of people to suffer schizophrenic-like symptoms of “ringxiety,” knowledge that all their online activity, television watching habits, physical movements, literary preferences and purchases are being constantly monitored and analyzed should make them feel much better. I wonder how much the government’s willing to pay someone to do nothing but monitor all my activities all the time, and if they could be persuaded to just pay me directly. I’ll promise to write it up once a week for them, and they should soon be able to get the Brits to verify whether or not I’m telling the truth…