Headline News Jan 8/09

Perfect Space Storm Could be Catastrophic on Earth, Study Concludes

The race is on for better forecasting abilities, as the next peak in solar activity is expected to come around 2012. While the sun is in a lull now, activity can flare up at any moment, and severe space weather -- how severe, nobody knows -- will ramp up a year or two before the peak.
The report was commissioned and funded by NASA.

Danger ahead as the sun goes quiet

THE sun's ability to shield the solar system from harmful cosmic rays could falter in the early 2020s, just in time to threaten the health of NASA astronauts as they return to the moon.

Strange and mysterious sounds from the earth

"frequency over about one minute was detected at 50 degrees S, 100 degrees W. Scientists dubbed it the “Bloop” the sound matches the profile of a living animal, it is much louder than any known creature can produce. Any creature that could produce such a sound would have to be many times larger than the largest whale.
Some people link the Bloop to Cthulhu , a mythical creature from an H.P. Lovecraft story as the noise originated from an area near the mythical sunken city of R’lyeh from the same story. The Bloop also makes an appearance in the game promoting the movie Cloverfield, and was also seen in the movie “The Loch”, coming from a giant eel. A 2001 album by Dntel (”Life is full of possibilities “) uses the bloop as a repeating sample through the piece. The actual origination of the sound is not known and remains a mystery to this day although it is suspected to be biological in origin."

Black Holes "preceded galaxies"

A cosmic chicken-and-egg question may have been solved by astronomers who now say black holes came before galaxies.