Sunspots are dark spots on the sun, at least as we see them, caused by magnetic activity in the plasma on the surface of Sol.
For 200 years scientists have known that they occasional disappear but no one was sure exactly why. A trio writing in Nature say they have solved the mystery and now can even predict the next time. Piet Martens, Dibyendu Nandi and Andres Munoz-Jaramillo say they have discovered why sunspots were missing from 2008 to 2010, which coincided with an extra-long "solar minimum" and unusually weak magnetic fields at the sun's poles. The fields are ordinarily much stronger when solar activity is minimal.
My husband has an enormous head. Sometimes this concerns me, when I consider the degree to which skull size may have a genetic basis and the fact that we'll probably reproduce at some point. That has to fit through there? OW.
But maybe I should be grateful. I'll certainly have an easier time of it than female Atlantic bobtail squid (Sepiola atlantica). These mamas, according to a recent study on their spawning behavior, can lay up to one and a half times their own body weight in eggs. That would be like me, at 125 pounds, producing 187.5 pounds of baby. WOW.
The results of a new Supersymmetry search have been released a few days ago by the ATLAS collaboration. They come from an analysis of events with large missing transverse energy and jets -the most classical signature of SUSY at hadron colliders, as well as the most sensitive one in a wide range of the complicated space of SUSY parameters.
