The UK is not well prepared for a severe space weather event, despite some investment in developing forecasting capabilities. The government does not yet understand the full range of possible impacts and cascading effects well.
This system is truly extraordinary. We're seeing the radio equivalent of a laser halfway across the universe. Fundamentally, masers and lasers are focused beams of light in the same frequency. In the realm of astrophysics, these can arise from clouds of dust being excited into a higher energy state from the light emitted by other sources, like stars and black holes.
In November 2025, a massive storm rolled across the lower Mekong River delta, dumping multiple inches of rain onto the wide, flat river plain that covers much of Cambodia. The river rose and rose. The force of the water churned up mud from the river bottom. The muddy water flowed downstream and rushed into the many farming and fishing towns that line the Mekong's banks.
Stellar activity such as solar storms and plasma turbulence from a star near a transmitting planet can broaden otherwise ultra-narrow signals. That spreads the power of any such transmission across more frequencies, the institute's scientists say, which makes it more difficult to detect using traditional narrowband searches.
At least 170 million Americans are under winter weather alerts. "Bitterly cold temperatures and dangerously cold wind chills" will linger even after the storm is done dumping heavy snow, sleet, and freezing rain across the Southern Rockies all the way to New England through Monday, the National Weather Service (NWS) warned Friday. Forecasters expect low temperatures to break numerous records, with wind chills as frigid as -50 degrees Fahrenheit in the Northern Plains.
The sun is putting on a show. On Sunday the star unleashed several strong and bright solar flares, including one of the most powerful eruptions seen in decades. Far from the steadily glowing orb we sometimes picture, the sun's surface is made up of roiling plasma thrown about by twisting magnetic fields. When these fields snap, they can throw out huge bursts of energy and charged particles into spacea solar flare.
Our new study suggests that the Apollo samples are biased to extremely rare events that lasted a few thousand years - but up to now, these have been interpreted as representing 0.5 billion years of lunar history. It now seems that a sampling bias prevented us from realizing how short and rare these strong magnetism events were.
The sun's rhythmic rise and fall in the sky can make it easy to forget that our star is unpredictablea roiling, burbling mass of magnetically knotted plasma that governs the entire solar system. But a new video from the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Proba-3 mission that shows a string of fountainlike explosions on the sun offers a powerful reminder of our home star's active nature.
Earlier this week, the Sun unleashed a powerful X-class solar flare, a major burst of electromagnetically charged particles that lit up the Earth's night sky as they entered our planet's atmosphere. The effect was stunning: a dazzling display of auroras reaching as far as southern California. Forecasters that it was one of the largest solar storms in decades, making for a particularly unique opportunity to watch the show unfold.
Auroras are nature's most special light show: when charged particles from the sun hit our atmosphere, they can generate bright colors that dance across the night sky near the Earth's poles. Auroras can come in various forms, including bands, rays, patches and more. But why auroras form these patterns is less clear. Now, researchers say they've identified the battery that powers at least one kind of auroraaurora arcs.
Now say you want to run some modest AI stuff. That's a bigger job, so let's scale up our cubical computer with edges twice as long as before. That would make the volume eight times larger (2 3), so we could have eight times as many processors, and we need eight times as much power input-2,400 watts. However, the surface area is only four times (2 2) larger, so the radiative power would be about 4,000 watts.