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March 12, 2010: What in the world is the sun up to now? In today's issue of Science, NASA solar physicist David Hathaway reports that the top of the sun's Great Conveyor Belt has been running at record-high speeds for the past five years. I believe this could explain the unusually deep solar minimum we've been experiencing," says Hathaway. "The high speed of the conveyor belt challenges existing models of the solar cycle and it has forced us back to the drawing board for new ideas." The Great Conveyor Belt is a massive circulating current of fire (hot plasma) within...

(0) An SUV remains embedded in the wall of a fast-food restaurant after it slammed into the building in Renton early Tuesday morning. The crash happened at the Burger King at Sunset Boulevard North at Northeast Third Street shortly after 3 a.m., leaving a gaping hole in the building. The SUV will not be removed from the building until engineers can inspect the building's stability. No one is allowed inside the restaurant for safety reasons, police said. Renton police said the crash occurred when the driver lost control of the vehicle as she came careening down the hill on Northeast...

Enlarge ImageFickle. The predicted coming solar maximum (red line) compared with the past three solar maxima (blue line). Inset: The sun's face, showing dark sunspots. Credit: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center Fans of solar storms and power failures are in for some bad news. Today, a panel of the world's solar scientists announced that the next solar maximum--when the sun's irradiance, solar wind, and sunspots are most volatile--is not coming as soon and will not be as strong as predicted. That means fewer solar storms, which can cause power outages here on Earth. For the past 3 centuries, the...

Sunspots could be seen by the Soho telescope in 2001 (l), but not this year (r) There are no sunspots, very few solar flares - and our nearest star is the quietest it has been for a very long time. The observations are baffling astronomers, who are due to study new pictures of the Sun, taken from space, at the UK National Astronomy Meeting. The Sun normally undergoes an 11-year cycle of activity. At its peak, it has a tumultuous boiling atmosphere that spits out flares and planet-sized chunks of super-hot gas. This is followed by a calmer period. Last...

A New Zealand man got the fright of his life when a runaway SUV crashed into his house and knocked him off the toilet, a newspaper reported Friday. The vehicle had been parked with its emergency brake only half on, and rolled backward down a 32 foot bank into the house Thursday in the southern city of Christchurch, "The Press" newspaper reported. Police said a building contractor working next door had parked the vehicle at the top of the bank minutes earlier. "He came back to his vehicle and found it next door, basically," Christchurch police Sgt. Kim Reid was...

CBS) LOS ANGELES A 70-year-old Tarzana man riding a bicycle Wednesday was struck and killed by an SUV, authorities said. Joseph Miller was riding in the 3500 block of Reseda Boulevard shortly before 9 a.m. when he was struck by an SUV driven by a woman who was uninjured, according to city fire official Brian Humphrey and Capt. Ed Winter of the county coroner's office. The circumstances of the death were under investigation.