Gigantic Solar Eruption

Image of the eruption obtained using the C2 instrument on NASA's SOHO spacecraft. 

(NASA SOHO)

The Sun has been up to some pretty intense shenanigans lately, but a recent eruption on the far side looks to be absolute science gold.

On the evening of September 5 GMT, an enormous coronal mass ejection (CME) was recorded exploding on the far side of the Sun, sending a radiation storm out across the Solar System. It was a type known as a halo CME, in which an expanding halo of hot gas can be seen spewing out around the entire Sun.

Sometimes this means that the CME is headed straight for Earth. However, this eruption was on the far side, so it's heading away, and we won't see any of the usual effects of a solar storm here on our home planet.

But Venus was right in the path of the oncoming storm – and with it, Solar Orbiter, a space probe jointly run by the European Space Agency and NASA that is currently near Venus after a September 4 gravity assist on its mission to take closeup observations of our home star.

This has given us the rare opportunity to observe and measure a gigantic, farside CME, something that is usually rather difficult for us to do.

"This is no run-of-the-mill event. Many science papers will be studying this for years to come," solar physicist George Ho of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory told Spaceweather.  READ MORE...

Fighting COVID with Superstition

Columbia University reverted their COVID-19 policy, requiring students to mask indoors.

Gabriele Holtermann

Boy, is US higher education full of idiots: Columbia University, affiliated Barnard College and Pace University, among other schools, have all started requiring masking indoors again.

Columbia-Barnard only scrapped the mandate on March 14, so students got less than a month to breathe free, and now will be muzzled through June.

And all because campus administrators deem it more important to virtue-signal than to follow the actual science. They blame an uptick in COVID cases, though COVID poses no significant risk to their fully vaccinated student bodies.

Plus, as noted above, case numbers stopped being a useful indicator of coronavirus perils at least a year ago.

And just 0.001% of 15- to 24-year-olds are at risk of dying from COVID, per data from Johns Hopkins. And masking does very little to reduce transmission risks, anyway.

COVID is now endemic, not pandemic — meaning we’ll have to learn to live with the background risks it poses, just like the flu. It’ll help that learning process when the supposedly smartest folks in America stop relying on superstition to “fight” it.