Enormous solar outburst could dazzle your weekend

Auroras may dazzle more people than usual this weekend as Earth receives a glancing blow from an enormous solar outburst that erupted on Jan. 19.

Auroras may dazzle more people than usual this weekend as Earth receives a glancing blow from an enormous solar outburst that erupted on Jan. 19.

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The outburst, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), was detected by sun-watching satellites.

Researchers at the University of Alaska's Geophysical Institute predict that auroras should be visible from Seattle, Des Moines, Chicago, and Cleveland, to Boston and Halifax, Nova Scotia Saturday and Sunday nights, weather permitting.

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Space-weather forecasters initially were concerned that Earth would take a direct hit, notes Joe Kunches, a space scientist at the National Weather Service's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo.

"Indications at the time were that this could be a fairly energetic event," says Mr. Kunches, a former operations chief at the center. The solar flare that triggered the coronal mass ejection covered a relatively large patch of the sun and released a lot of energy. Where other flares during the week lasted an hour or two, the flare that launched the CME lasted roughly 18 hours.

And the CME "was in the right spot," he adds. It emerged from just about the middle of the sun's disk.

It's the "just about," however, that led to the prediction of a glancing blow, rather than a direct hit. The CME emerged from a location just north of the sun's equator, so for the most part it will hurtle past Earth far above the North Pole.

Space Weather Center forecasters say they expect the encounter to generate a weak geomagnetic disturbance beginning around 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time Sunday Jan. 22 and lasting through Jan. 23. It could trigger weak fluctuations in electricity flowing through the long-distance transmissions lines and have a minor effect on satellites.

Coronal mass ejections represent the sudden release of a vast, searingly hot cloud containing up to 200 billion tons of electrons and protons, as well as heavy atomic nuclei forged in the sun's nuclear-fusion furnace.

Hurtling from the sun at speeds of up to 2 million miles an hour, CMEs can generate intense disturbances in Earth's magnetic field that can trigger power and radio blackouts and disable satellites ? as well as generate spectacular aurora over the North and South poles.?

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Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/DZTRnfwm4-Y/Enormous-solar-outburst-could-dazzle-your-weekend

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Gingrich Surges into Lead in South Carolina (Taegan Goddard's Political Wire)

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WWE.com Exclusive: Drew McIntyre expresses his frustration about the possibility of getting fired, following another SmackDown defeat

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Popular file-sharing website Megaupload shut down

This undated image obtained by The Associated Press shows the homepage of the website Megaupload.com. Federal prosecutors in Virginia have shut down one of the world's largest file-sharing sites, Megaupload.com, and charged its founder and others with violating piracy laws. (AP Photo)

This undated image obtained by The Associated Press shows the homepage of the website Megaupload.com. Federal prosecutors in Virginia have shut down one of the world's largest file-sharing sites, Megaupload.com, and charged its founder and others with violating piracy laws. (AP Photo)

McLEAN, Virginia (AP) ? One of the world's most popular file-sharing sites was shuttered Thursday, and its founder and several company officials were accused of facilitating millions of illegal downloads of films, music and other content.

An indictment accused Megaupload.com of costing copyright holders at least $500 million in lost revenue. The indictment was unsealed one day after websites including Wikipedia and Craigslist shut down in protest of two congressional proposals intended to make it easier for authorities to go after websites with pirated material, especially those with overseas headquarters and servers.

Megaupload is based in Hong Kong, but some of the alleged pirated content was hosted on leased servers in Virginia, which gave federal authorities jurisdiction, the indictment said.

The Justice Department said in a statement said that Kim Dotcom, 37, and three other employees were arrested Thursday in New Zealand at the request of U.S. officials. Three other defendants are at large.

Before Megaupload was taken down, it posted a statement saying allegations that it facilitated massive breaches of copyright laws were "grotesquely overblown."

"The fact is that the vast majority of Mega's Internet traffic is legitimate, and we are here to stay. If the content industry would like to take advantage of our popularity, we are happy to enter into a dialogue. We have some good ideas. Please get in touch," the statement said.

The indictment may have prompted a response from the loose affiliation of hackers known as "Anonymous," which claimed credit for attacking the Justice Department's website. The site was inaccessible Thursday evening.

A spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America said in an emailed statement Thursday that the group's site had been hacked, although it appeared to be working later Thursday evening.

"The motion picture and television industry has always been a strong supporter of free speech," the spokesman said. "We strongly condemn any attempts to silence any groups or individuals."

Megaupload was unique not only because of its massive size and the volume of downloaded content, but also because it had high-profile support from celebrities, musicians and other content producers who are most often the victims of copyright infringement and piracy. Before the website was taken down, it contained endorsements from Kim Kardashian, Alicia Keys and Kanye West, among others.

The company listed Swizz Beatz, a musician who married Keys in 2010, as its CEO. He was not named in the indictment and declined to comment through a representative.

According to the indictment, Megaupload was estimated at one point to be the 13th most frequently visited website on the Internet. Current estimates by companies that monitor Web traffic place it in the top 100.

The five-count indictment, which alleges copyright infringement as well as conspiracy to commit money laundering and racketeering, described a site designed specifically to reward users who uploaded pirated content for sharing, and turned a blind eye to requests from copyright holders to remove copyright-protected files.

For instance, users received cash bonuses if they uploaded content popular enough to generate massive numbers of downloads, according to the indictment. Such content was almost always copyright protected.

The site boasted 150 million registered users and about 50 million hits daily. The Justice Department said it was illegal for anyone to download pirated content, but their investigation focused on the leaders of the company, not end users who may have downloaded a few movies for personal viewing.

A lawyer who represented the company in a lawsuit last year declined comment Thursday. Efforts to reach an attorney representing Dotcom were unsuccessful.

Megaupload is considered a "cyberlocker," in which users can upload and transfer files that are too large to send by email. Such sites can have perfectly legitimate uses. But the Motion Picture Association of America, which has campaigned for a crackdown on piracy, estimated that the vast majority of content being shared on Megaupload was in violation of copyright laws.

The website allowed users to download some content for free, but made money by charging subscriptions to people who wanted access to faster download speeds or extra content. The website also sold advertising.

The indictment was returned in the Eastern District of Virginia, which claimed jurisdiction in part because some of the alleged pirated materials were hosted on leased servers in Virginia. Prosecutors there have pursued multiple piracy investigations.

Steven T. Shelton, a copyright lawyer at the Cozen O'Connor firm in New York, said opponents of the legislation are worried the proposals lessen the burden for the government to target a wide variety of websites. Shelton said he expects to see the government engage in more enforcement in the future, as technology makes it easier to catch and target suspected pirates.

"I think we'll be seeing more of this," he said. "This is just the beginning."

Dotcom, a resident of both Hong Kong and New Zealand, and a dual citizen of Finland and Germany, made more than $42 million from the site in 2010 alone, according to the indictment.

Dotcom had his name legally changed. He was previously known as Kim Schmitz and Kim Tim Jim Vestor. He is founder, former CEO and current chief innovation officer of Megaupload.

Officials estimated it could be a year or more before Dotcom and the others arrested in New Zealand are formally extradited.

The others arrested were Finn Batato, 38, a citizen and resident of Germany, the company's chief marketing officer; Mathias Ortmann, 40, a citizen of Germany and resident of both Germany and Hong Kong, who is the chief technical officer, co-founder and director; and Bram van der Kolk, aka Bramos, 29, a Dutch citizen and resident of both the Netherlands and New Zealand, who oversees programming.

Still at large are Julius Bencko, 35, a citizen and resident of Slovakia, the site's graphic designer; Sven Echternach, 39, a citizen and resident of Germany, head of business development; and Andrus Nomm, 32, a citizen of Estonia and resident of both Turkey and Estonia, head of the development software division.

Several sister sites were also shut down, including one dedicated to sharing pornography files.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2012-01-19-Internet%20Piracy-Indictment/id-3371e70b329e4039b057bbfb198ff347

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Astrophile: How to spot a dark-matter galaxy

Object type: Dwarf galaxy
Mass: 190,000,000 times the mass of the sun
Composition: Mostly dark matter

If we could don dark matter glasses and look at the universe around us, we might see thousands of miniature galaxies swarming about the luminous spirals that make up the Milky Way and Andromeda.

We can't ? but we have the next best thing. A technique known as gravitational lensing has allowed one of these dark dwarfs to be glimpsed, suggesting the Milky Way isn't as lonely as it looks to us Earthlings.

Astronomers think that galaxies usually grow by devouring smaller nearby clusters of stars called dwarf galaxies, no bigger than 100 million times the mass of the sun. According to this theory, the Milky Way and all other full-size galaxies should keep company with thousands of dwarfs. However, only 30 such companions have been spotted in our neighbourhood.

Where are all the missing minis hiding? One explanation is that they're mostly made of dark matter, the mysterious, aloof substance thought to make up 83 per cent of the mass in the universe but which is reluctant to interact with regular matter.

"They are there, but we just don't see them," says Simona Vegetti of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Warped lens

Some of the Milky Way's known satellites, such as the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, do seem to be mostly dark matter, hosting just 100 or fewer visible stars. It's hard to know how many more are lurking undercover, though. And it's especially hard to know if distant galaxies host any dark satellites at all.

"When you're trying to test theories using the Milky Way, at a certain point you have to ask, is the Milky Way a special place or not?" Vegetti says. "It's important to test in other galaxies."

Now, Vegetti and colleagues have tracked down a dark dwarf galaxy orbiting a massive elliptical galaxy 10 billion light years away. The invisible entity, part of a system called JVAS B1938+666, weighs in at about 190 million times the mass of the sun, making it similar in size to the Sagittarius dwarf.

The team found the dark galaxy by looking at the way its gravity warped the space-time around it, a technique called gravitational lensing. When the dwarf's vast companion passed in front of an even more distant galaxy, its gravity made the background galaxy look stretched out in a ring of light. Normally these rings, called Einstein rings, form nearly perfect circles. But the presence of the otherwise invisible dwarf galaxy introduced a small flaw, making the further galaxy look like a perfect china bowl with a chip in it.

Purely dark

"The great thing about the technique is that we can use it to detect satellite galaxies that are purely dark matter," says study co-author Chris Fassnacht of the University of California, Davis ? although it's hard to tell from here whether the galaxy has a handful of stars or not.

This is the second dark galaxy to be spotted outside our galactic system, but the first that is as small as the Milky Way's known companions. The other galaxy was just 2.6?billion light years away and 18 times as massive.

"These two together are telling us that it's not something special to have a satellite that small," Vegetti says. The universe may be swarming with small, dark galaxies, she says, though she and her team will have to keep looking to know for sure.

"We've found two, so everything looks promising," she says.

Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature10669

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China's growth ebbs in final quarter of 2011 (AP)

BEIJING ? China appears on track to avoid an abrupt economic slowdown with possible global repurcussions after growth eased to a still robust 8.9 percent in the last quarter of 2011.

The expansion in the world's second-largest economy was the slowest in 2 1/2 years but December retail sales and factory output accelerated, data showed Tuesday. Growth in the previous quarter was 9.1 percent.

"Today's outcome seems to confirm a `soft landing' scenario," said Frances Cheung of Credit Agricole CIB in Hong Kong.

China is one of the biggest importers and slower growth could have global repercussions if it cuts demand for iron ore, industrial components and other goods from Australia, Brazil, Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

Growth decelerated in 2011 as Beijing hiked interest rates and tightened investment curbs to prevent overheating and tame politically dangerous inflation. Communist leaders reversed course and started easing lending late in the year after plunging U.S. and European export demand raised the threat of job losses and unrest.

The slowdown was in line with government plans, said Ma Jiantang, commissioner of the National Bureau of Statistics. He said the "ideal situation" would be to keep growth between 8.5 percent and 9 percent, with inflation low.

In 2012, China faces "complexity and challenges" due to global malaise and pressure for prices to rise, Ma said at a news conference. Still, he said, "The fundamentals of China's longterm steady economic growth have not changed."

Growth in the three months ending in December was the slowest since the second quarter of 2009, when the economy expanded 7.9 percent.

Retail sales growth rebounded to 18.1 percent from November's 17.1 percent while factory output rose 12.8 percent, up from November's 12.4 percent.

"This all reaffirms our outlook on China for a soft landing," said Moody's Analytics economist Glenn Levine in a report. "Export demand has cooled, but domestic demand is still running strong."

Consumer inflation, a volatile element in a society where poor families spend up to half their incomes on food, edged down in December to 4.1 percent after hitting a 37-month high of 6.5 percent in July.

That could give Beijing leeway to stimulate the economy, helping small companies that have been hurt by plunging export demand and squeezed by lending curbs, forcing thousands out of business and wiping out jobs.

Analysts expect Beijing to try to stimulate growth with an interest rate cut, tax cuts or other measures. The central bank promised pro-growth measures this month to help entrepreneurs though it also pointed to inflation pressures and global uncertainties and said its monetary policy will stay "prudent."

Also in 2011, China's urban population exceeded the number of rural dwellers for the first time, rising to 51.3 percent of the nation's 1.3 billion people, the government reported.

Industry surveys show manufacturing and exports contracted in November and December, while a slowdown in real estate sales triggered by government efforts to stop speculation and cool surging housing prices has sparked concern about the impact on the overall economy. December import growth fell to 11.8 percent, barely half the previous month's 22.1 percent gain.

"The slowdown has yet to come to an end," said economist Zhang Xinfa at China Galaxy Securities in Beijing.

Analysts say Beijing still needs to boost consumer spending to reduce reliance on exports and investment to drive growth.

The communist government has pledged for years to reorient its economy but is only starting to make progress after its stimulus in response to the 2008 global crisis fueled a surge in construction spending.

Ma, the statistics official, pointed to the shift in population toward cities and said that might help to spur consumption growth.

"If we can rely more on domestic consumption," said Credit Agricole CIB's Cheung, "that will help the economy to sail through all these headwinds."

___

AP researcher Zhao Liang contributed.

___

National Bureau of Statistics (in Chinese): http://www.stats.gov.cn

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/asia/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120117/ap_on_bi_ge/as_china_economy

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[OOC] Keys of the Gate

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