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The Northern Lights were visible much farther south than usual this year, and pictures of the colorful hues filled social media. Now, imagine an aurora hundreds of times brighter – except no one would be able to snap a photo of it, as the onslaught of particles rushing in from the sun would instantly turn smartphones into bricks. Such extreme solar storms are rare – only six are known to have left their traces on Earth in the past 14,500 years, and none have been witnessed since the height of the Assyrian Empire nearly 2,700 years ago. A research team led by Irina Panyushkina of the University of Arizona Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research and Timothy Jull at U of A Department of Geosciences has now pinpointed the last time there was a burst of cosmic radiation so powerful that if it happened today, it would wreak havoc on power grids, satellites and communication networks around the globe. The team published its findings in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. Analyzing tree-rings for carbon-14, a naturally occurring radioactive variant of carbon, the team discovered a spike dating to the year 664 B.C., pinpointing the only extreme solar storm event whose timing had long eluded researchers. Panyushkina, lead study author and a research associate professor of dendrochronology at the Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research. said determining the precise timing of a massive solar eruption event provides important data for scientists who study and develop models of the sun’s activity over time. Carbon-14 continually forms in the atmosphere as a result of cosmic radiation, Panyushkina said. Eventually, carbon-14 reacts with oxygen to form carbon dioxide. “After a few months, carbon-14 will have traveled from the stratosphere to the lower atmosphere, where it is taken up by trees and becomes part of the wood as they grow,” Panyushkina said. It wasn’t until 2012 that extreme solar storms, known as Miyake events, were known to exist. That year, Fusa Miyake, a Japanese physicist and collaborator of Panyushkina’s team, published a paper reporting the storms’ telltale signature: spikes in radioactive carbon isotopes in the growth rings of trees. Miyake events happen when the sun’s electromagnetic field weakens, allowing plasma from the sun’s surface to escape into space. With the increased solar activity, protons bombard Earth’s atmosphere and trigger chemical reactions leading to a spike in radioactive isotopes. “Thanks to radiocarbon in tree-rings, we now know that six Miyake events happened over the last 14,500 years,” Panyushkina said. “If they happened today, they would have cataclysmic effects on communication technology.” Panyushkina and her team used surgical knives to dissect individual tree rings from ancient wood samples, including samples from dead trees buried in riverbanks and timbers excavated during archeological digs. The researchers then burned the cellulose – the main component of wood – to determine the radiocarbon content. To pinpoint whether solar storms caused the radiocarbon spikes, the researchers compared the tree-ring data to spikes other researchers found in a different isotope, beryllium-10, locked in ice cores taken from glaciers and ice sheets. Much like carbon-14, beryllium-10 forms in the atmosphere due to an onslaught of particles from the sun. Rain and snow capture the isotope and lock it into ice sheets similar to how trees absorb carbon-14. “If ice cores from both the North Pole and South Pole show a spike in the isotope beryllium-10 for a particular year corresponding to increased radiocarbon in tree-rings, we know there was a solar storm,” Panyushkina said. Although tree-rings can act like ‘archivists’ recording Miyake events, researchers so far have not been able to find evidence of a pattern in the events, Panyushkina said. “Tree-rings give us an idea of the magnitude of these massive storms, but we can’t detect any type of pattern, so it is unlikely we’ll ever be able to predict when such an event is going to happen,” she said. “Still, we believe our paper will transform how we search and understand the carbon-14 spike signal of extreme solar proton events in tree rings.” “The energy from this type of event not only changes the atmosphere’s radiocarbon content but also the atmosphere’s chemistry,” she added. “We are trying to figure out how those short-lived and powerful events affect the Earth system as a whole.” Astrobiology, Space Weather,slot game background 。

A Peter Dutton-led government would deport non-citizens who voice rhetorical support for terror groups and demand the Australian Broadcasting Corporation avoid bias on Israel, according to a keynote speech home affairs spokesman James Paterson will deliver outlining the Coalition’s pledges. Portraying the bloody war in Gaza and Lebanon as a battle for democracy, Paterson will say Australian Jews were being held responsible for “difficult choices” Israel was forced to make in its fight against terror groups supported by Iran. Liberal frontbencher James Paterson. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen Paterson will say that a Coalition government will strengthen the laws used by police to lay charges on incitement and displaying terror symbols if they prove too difficult to enforce. “I am deeply troubled by the number of Jews who have told me they are contemplating moving to Israel because they think they may feel safer in a country under attack from three terrorist organisations and a genocidal nation state than they do in Melbourne or Sydney,” he will say in a speech to the Executive Council of the Australian Jewry’s annual general meeting in Melbourne on Sunday. “But I understand it.” The Coalition has sought to tie community unrest in Australia over Gaza to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s actions, portraying him as soft on antisemitism as Labor has gradually shifted support away from Israel through key United Nations votes and actions such as blocking the visa of a former Israeli minister, Ayelet Shaked, on character grounds. The opposition has refrained from criticising Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s military campaign even as the United Nations, European Union and International Criminal Court condemn his actions, marking the Coalition as one of the most pro-Israel centre-right parties in the Western world. Israel launched its assault on Gaza after Hamas-led terrorists stormed across the border, killed 1200 people and seized more than 250 hostages on October 7, 2023. Since then, the Israeli attack has killed nearly 44,000 Palestinians in Gaza, much of which has been laid to waste. On Friday, the Coalition released a statement saying Australia should reject the ICC’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas leader Mohammed Deif. As a signatory to the agreement recognising the court, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said on Friday Australia respected the court’s independence but did not endorse or oppose its decision or say what the government would do if any of the men set foot here. Paterson is incredulous about Australia’s decision to deny entry to Shaked, a former minister for justice who made headlines last year calling for all Gazans to be deported and the southern city of Khan Younis turned into a soccer field. Israel’s foreign ministry on Friday night posted a statement describing the decision as “deeply offensive”. “We will not – and I can’t believe I need to say this – ban former Israeli ministers from centrist governments from visiting Australia,” Paterson will say, according to a version of the speech provided to this masthead. “Nor would we – and again I can’t believe this needs to be said – arrest the democratically elected head of a friendly government for the crime of defending his country. We will never abandon our ally in international forums like the United Nations.” Paterson singled out protests on campus and reporting on public broadcasters as a focus for any future Coalition government. “We will not allow antisemitism to fester on campus unchecked. We will not allow our taxpayer-funded arts and cultural institutions to be hijacked. We will make clear we expect accurate and impartial reporting from our publicly funded broadcasters,” Paterson will say in the speech. “We will do this not only for the Jewish community but for our country. Because a country that is not safe for Jews is not safe for anyone.” Palestinian and Israeli supporters confront each other at Monash University on May 8, 2024. Credit: Justin McManus Labor had equivocated on the antisemitism outbreak, Paterson will argue, by “always” mentioning Islamophobia in the same breath as antisemitism. “There is no other form of racism we treat like this. If there is an instance of racism against Indigenous Australians, for example, no political leader says, ‘I condemn anti-Indigenous racism and anti-Asian racism.’ All forms of racism should be called out when it occurs,” he said. In the six months from October 1, 2023 to March 31, 2024 figures from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry show there was a 42 per cent increase in the number of anti-Jewish incidents from the same period the year before. Reports to the Islamophobia Register Australia had risen by 1300 per cent compared with the same period the year before. Signalling there could be Coalition funding cuts to the UN agency responsible for aid for Palestinians , Paterson said no money would be given to agencies employing terrorists. Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter .China's military supercomputer tops global AI efficiency testA popular Thanksgiving dinner staple in the United States is banned in several European countries and Japan due to two ingredients being linked to cancer. Stove Top Stuffing, an instant boxed stuffing mix that is popular to have with Thanksgiving dinner, contains two ingredients, butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) and butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT), that are “known human carcinogens and may cause other health problems,” Dr. Neha Pathak, MD, who serves on the Medical Team for WebMD explained to the New York Post . The product is banned in the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Japan. Pathak explained that “these types of preservatives” are banned due to the “cancer risk.” “A lot of countries have much stricter rules around what’s allow[ed] in food,” Pathak told the outlet. The ingredient list for the Stove Top Stuffing turkey version shows that, along with BHA and BHT, the product contains “enriched wheat flour (wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate [vitamin b1], riboflavin [vitamin b2], folic acid), high fructose corn syrup, salt, onion” along with other ingredients: Enrich wheat flour (wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate [vitamin b1], riboflavin [vitamin b2], folic acid), high fructose corn syrup, salt, onion*, contains less than 2% of hydrolyzed soy protein, cooked turkey*, yeast, interesterified soybean oil, celery*, parsley*, potassium chloride, spice, sugar, caramel color, maltodextrin, turkey broth*, disodium guanylate, disodium inosinate, silicon dioxide, natural flavor, with bha, bht, and rosemary extract as preservatives, *Dried “These types of preservatives are banned in the European Union, and mostly it’s because of the cancer risk,” Pathak explained. “The cancer risk is something that is concerning and certainly reasonably anticipated based on the studies we have.” Pathak noted that there were “lots of animal studies that show that high doses” of BHA and BHT “can cause tumor development in rats and hamsters.” That’s not the only cause for concern. Dr. Pathak said that the chemicals may also be endocrine disrupters, meaning they might interfere with our hormonal functioning, impacting reproductive or developmental health. “We’re still studying what it means in regard to endocrine disruption specifically,” Pathak told the outlet. “We know it can interfere with how our hormones talk to different parts of our body. Is it fertility, is it early menstruation? We’re still trying to figure out exactly what these downstream effects are going to be.” In a statement to the outlet, a spokesperson for the Stove Top Stuffing brand highlighted how, “For over 50 years, Stove Top Stuffing has been a trusted favorite on family meal tables,” adding that each “box is crafted with care.”

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