Quote:Some people have a guard dog. This house has a pharaoh standing watch.
With the enormous statue of Ramses II in front of it, the 6-story, 17,000 square foot Gold Pyramid House in Wadsworth, Illinois, transports visitors back to ancient Egypt.
In the 1970s "pyramid power" was a popular trend, with some people believing in the supernatural powers of the pyramids. Jim and Linda Onan were two such people, and at the time, their house was full of pyramids. Linda used to joke to her husband that he should build their next house in a pyramid shape so she could stop looking at all of the little ones inside of it, and in 1977 he did, painting it gold and surrounding it by a moat.

Quote:SimonNRicketts ‏@SimonNRicketts 2h
This sign is supposed to show you which things are forbidden. But it actually creates the coolest dog ever.

Quote:nasa
2 weeks ago
Here's another look at the summer sun and solar flare on Aug. 24, 2014. The sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 8:16 a.m. EDT on Aug. 24. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured images of the flare, which erupted on the left side of the sun. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. This flare is classified as an M5 flare. M-class flares are ten times less powerful than the most intense flares, called X-class flares. Image Credit: NASA/SDO #nasa #sun #solarflare #solar #sdo #solardynamics #space

Quote:nasa
Our researchers discover new clues to determining the solar cycle. Approximately every 11 years, the sun undergoes a complete personality change from quiet and calm to violently active. The height of the sun’s activity, known as solar maximum, is a time of numerous sunspots, punctuated with profound eruptions that send radiation and solar particles out into the far reaches of space. However, the timing of the solar cycle is far from precise. Since humans began regularly recording sunspots in the 17th century, the time between successive solar maxima has been as short as nine years, but as long as 14, making it hard to determine its cause. Now, researchers have discovered a new marker to track the course of the solar cycle—brightpoints, little bright spots in the solar atmosphere that allow us to observe the constant roiling of material inside the sun. These markers provide a new way to watch the way the magnetic fields evolve and move through our closest star. They also show that a substantial adjustment to established theories about what drives this mysterious cycle may be needed. Image Credit: NASA #nasa #space #sun #solarsystem #solar #science

Quote:...In fact, the biggest solar storm on record—the 1859 blast—happened during a solar maximum about the same size as the one we're entering, according to NASA.

That storm has been dubbed the Carrington Event, after British astronomer Richard Carrington, who witnessed the megaflare and was the first to realize the link between activity on the sun and geomagnetic disturbances on Earth.

During the Carrington Event, northern lights were reported as far south as Cuba and Honolulu, while southern lights were seen as far north as Santiago, Chile. (See pictures of auroras generated by the Valentine's Day solar flare.)

The flares were so powerful that "people in the northeastern U.S. could read newspaper print just from the light of the aurora," Daniel Baker, of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, said at a geophysics meeting in December 2010.

In addition, the geomagnetic disturbances were strong enough that U.S. telegraph operators reported sparks leaping from their equipment—some bad enough to set fires, said Ed Cliver, a space physicist at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in Bedford, Massachusetts.

In 1859, such reports were mostly curiosities. But if something similar happened today, the world's high-tech infrastructure could grind to a halt.

"What's at stake," the Space Weather Prediction Center's Bogdan said, "are the advanced technologies that underlie virtually every aspect of our lives."...

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/03/120308-solar-flare-storm-sun-space-weather-science-aurora/

Quote:Alibaba Live Blog: Tracking The Biggest IPO In History
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By Liyan Chen, Ryan Mac and Brian Solomon

Chinese e-commerce powerhouse Alibaba priced shares on Thursday for its initial public offering at $68 each, putting the finishing touches on the largest IPO for a U.S.-listed company ever.

Alibaba and its selling shareholders will raise a combined $21.8 billion, a figure that could rise to $25 billion if underwriters exercise an option to buy more shares at the IPO price. At $68 per share, Alibaba valued itself at about $167.6 billion, making it one of the most valuable technology companies on the planet, ahead of Amazon.com AMZN +1.94%, which had a market capitalization of $150.2 billion as of the close of Thursday trading, and behind Facebook, at $200.2 billion.