president obama cannot break energy stalemate

Video - Obama on Alternative Energy

Guardian | Barack Obama's hopes of leveraging public anger at the Gulf oil spill into political support for his clean energy agenda fell flat today after he failed to rally a group of Democratic and Republican senators around broad energy and climate change law.

The standoff suggests the Senate would formally give up on climate change law, and recast energy reform as a Gulf oil spill response, that would roll in far more limited proposals such as a green investment bank, or a measure to limit greenhouse gas emissions that would apply only to electricity companies.

Such a move would come as a personal rebuff to Obama who has put energy and climate change at the top of his agenda, and who called on the 23 senators at the White House meeting to establish a cap and trade system.

"The president was very clear about putting a price on carbon and limiting greenhouse gas emissions," John Kerry, the Democratic senator leading the push for climate change proposals in the Senate said after the meeting.

"He was very strong about the need to put a price on carbon and make polluters pay," said senator Joe Lieberman.

White House officials say the spill is a wake-up call for the urgency of breaking the US economy's dependence on fossil fuels, and had hoped to build momentum behind a cap-and-trade bill now before the Senate.

Supporters of action on climate change had been pressing Obama to make a strong push for legislation.

bringing people together

Video - Second City Bringing People Together.

boycotted station owners want BP help...,

AP | Tension is mounting between BP and the neighborhood retailers that sell its gasoline. As more Americans shun BP gasoline as a form of protest over the Gulf oil spill, station owners are insisting BP do more to help them convince motorists that such boycotts mostly hurt independently owned businesses, not the British oil giant.

To win back customers, they'd like the company's help in reducing the price at the pump.

BP owns just a fraction of the more than 11,000 stations across the U.S. that sell its fuel under the BP, Amoco and ARCO banners. Most are owned by local businessmen whose primary connection to the oil company is the logo and a contract to buy gasoline.

In recent weeks, some station owners from Georgia to Illinois say sales have declined as much as 10 percent to 40 percent.

Station owners and BP gas distributors told BP officials last week they need a break on the cost of the gas they buy, and they want help paying for more advertising aimed at motorists, according to John Kleine, executive director of the independent BP Amoco Marketers Association. The station owners, who earn more from sales of soda and snacks than on gasoline, also want more frequent meetings with BP officials.

"They have got to be more competitive on their fuel costs to the retailers so we can be competitive on the street ... and bring back customers that we've lost," says Bob Juckniess, who has seen sales drop 20 percent at some of his 10 BP-branded stations in the Chicago area.

Owners and distributors put forth their demands at a meeting in Chicago with BP marketing officials. BP's reply could come as early as this week, says Kleine, whose group represents hundreds of distributors.

Station owners are locked into contracts that can last seven to 10 years in some cases. So, switching to a competing brand if BP refuses to help may not be an option.

BP spokesman Scott Dean declined to offer specifics about the discussions when contacted by The Associated Press.

beyond petroleum - the good times...,

Video - Beyond Petroleum - the good times back in the day...,

bp point - counterpoint

Video - Shepard Smith vs Andrew Napolitano discussing BP oil spill.

the anosognosic's dilemma

NYTimes | In one of his first e-mails, David Dunning wrote to me about the mediocre detective who is unaware of significant clues littered all around him. A thousand unnoticed purloined letters easily within reach. Cluelessness could be just another way of expressing our relationship to the unknown unknowns. We don’t know what questions to ask, let alone how to answer them. I sent an e-mail to Dunning: “If you were to make a Venn diagram of cluelessness, self-deception and denial, what would it look like?”

Shortly afterwards, Dunning responded.

I’ve attached a PDF with how I see it. Cluelessness is clearly the biggest circle, in that there is so much knowledge and expertise that lies outside everybody’s personal cognitive event horizon. People can be clueless in a million different ways, even though they are largely trying to get things right in an honest way. Deficits in knowledge, or in information the world is giving them, just leads people toward false beliefs and holes in their expertise.

That is not to dismiss or belittle self-deception. A caveat to begin: The traditional academic definition of “self-deception” is technical and a little stodgy. It requires that, to self-deceive, a person both know “X” and deceive himself or herself into believing “not-X.” But how can a person both believe and disbelieve “X” at the same time? This is for philosophers to argue about (and they have, for centuries) and for experimental nerds like me to try to figure out how to demonstrate decisively in the lab (so far, we haven’t).

But if we imbue self-deception with a looser definition, we have a lot to talk about. Psychologists over the past 50 years have demonstrated the sheer genius people have at convincing themselves of congenial conclusions while denying the truth of inconvenient ones. You can call it self-deception, but it also goes by the names rationalization, wishful thinking, defensive processing, self-delusion, and motivated reasoning. There is a robust catalogue of strategies people follow to believe what they want to, and we research psychologists are hardly done describing the shape or the size of that catalogue. All this rationalization can lead people toward false beliefs, or perhaps more commonly, to tenaciously hang on to false beliefs they should really reconsider.

Denial, to a psychologist, is a somewhat knuckle-headed technique in self-deception, and it is to merely deny the truth of something someone does not want to confront.

Clearly, Dunning believes that we are incarcerated in a prison of cluelessness. But is there any possibility of escape? I had some additional questions for Dunning, and so we arranged to speak again. Fist tap Dale.

the youth pill

The Scientist | No scientific advances inspire more media hype than ones in gerontology, the study of aging. Even the crustiest editors have been known to turn giddy when new light is shed on the topic and take to blowing raspberries at the Reaper with headlines suggesting immortality elixirs are just around the corner.

Biologists aren't so easily wowed, though, and before the mid-1990s they generally saw gerontology as a dismal bog where once-promising peers sank out of sight, or worse, re-emerged clutching beakers of snake oil. Compelling logic underlay the dismissiveness: Natural selection has sculpted our genes to care about getting to the next generation, not about keeping our bodies youthful for a long time. Thus, soon after we reach reproductive age, our genes' preservative influence fades, and escalating random damage sets in. Studying the details of this inexorable, chaotic decay seemed a waste of time to most life scientists. And attempting to block or slow it seemed utterly quixotic. In 1957, evolutionary biologist George Williams encapsulated the conventional wisdom by equating the anti-aging quest to the hunt for perpetual motion.

Then in 1988 a miracle happened -- the University of Colorado's Thomas Johnson reported that a gene mutation in nematodes could more than double their life spans. Five years later, Cynthia Kenyon at the University of California, San Francisco, nailed a similar worm "gerontogene" dubbed daf-2. These flabbergasting discoveries revealed that not everything about aging is intractable chaos -- worms, at least, apparently possessed gene-encoded modules poised to oppose the ravages of advancing age when activated by a single mutation. Optimists soon speculated that similar modules exist in mammals.

But for several years after the discovery of worm gerontogenes, it wasn't at all clear that mammals possess such modules. After all, daf-2 and related genes were known to work by activating a semblance of the "dauer phase," a kind of suspended animation that enables nematode larvae to ride out food shortages, and there's a lack of evidence that we warm-blooded types similarly turn into living mummies when the larder is bare. But then two remarkably persistent scientists settled the burning issue -- and solved a murine murder mystery in the process.

lab-grown lungs

The Scientist | Two new lab-grown versions of lungs may one day serve as a way to sidestep both animal testing and organ transplantation.

One engineered rat lung, described in Science Express today (June 24), even successfully helped rats breathe for brief periods.

"This is the first ever published paper that really demonstrates that regenerative medicine can provide an alternative to clinical transplantation of the lungs," said translational medical researcher Paolo Macchiarini of Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, who was not involved in the research.

Currently, the only treatment for the lung diseases that cause some 400,000 deaths each year is to transplant a new, healthy organ -- a procedure that is hampered by organ rejection complications and a severe shortage of donors. But now, bioengineer and vascular biologist Laura Niklason of Yale University and her colleagues may have developed a way to eventually address both of these issues.

Treating adult rat lungs with detergent solutions to remove their cellular components gave the researchers their starting point -- a lung skeleton, or the extracellular matrix that gives the lungs their structure. The team then repopulated the lungs with epithelial and endothelial cells from rat lungs, which grew over the scaffolds to create brand new lungs.

The researchers then implanted the new lungs into rats for up to two hours, during which time they found evidence that the engineered lungs were successfully participating in gas exchange. However, they also started to see some blood clots form in the vasculature of the lungs, as well as small amounts of leakage of blood into the airways, which most likely stemmed from an imperfect matrix and incomplete covering of new cells, Niklason said.

"Clearly we're close, but not all the way there yet," she said. "We really view this work as laying a scientific and technological basis for regenerating lungs in the long term."

plastic antibodies?

The Scientist | Antibodies are the main ingredient in a wide range of biopharmaceuticals, but making them is no picnic. Now, chemists have good evidence there may be an easier way: plastic.

Currently, in order to manufacture antibodies, mice (or other live animals) are injected with a foreign antigen over several weeks, stimulating B cells in the bloodstream to produce antibodies. Those B cells must then be harvested from the mouse's spleen and transferred to a bioreactor where they are often fused with another cell type, like immortal tumor cells, that allows them to replicate and survive outside the animal. The cultured cells then produce the antibody. If the antibody is for human use, at some point it must be humanized -- modified through recombinant DNA technology to resemble natural human antibodies. The process is long, difficult, and expensive.

But what if a substance introduced years ago as a cheap, durable replacement for natural materials could replace yet another one of nature's materials?

In a landmark paper published earlier this month in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, synthetic chemists at the University of California, Irvine, report the first successful use of a plastic antibody in vivo. The synthetic counterpart seems to work just like a natural antibody, binding and neutralizing a toxin in the bloodstream. Such molecules could someday make a splash in the clinic as well as in pharmaceutical and biotech companies for protein purification and diagnostic applications, scientists believe.

the lonely robot

Video - Adam Curtis BBC Documentary The Trap - The Lonely Robot
This is another brilliant Adam Curtis documentary originally produced for the BBC. It talks about the modern political realities, where the policies came from and the massive failures of those ideals and how they have ended up exactly where they did not want to be. This episode focuses on the 1990's and how the politicians decided to apply the model of a free market economy to the rest of society and consequences of these actions being felt all over the world in western democracy's.

we will force you to be free

Video - Adam Curtis BBC Documentary The Trap - We Will Force You to be Free.
This is another brilliant Adam Curtis documentary originally produced for the BBC. It talks about the modern political realities, where the policies came from and the massive failures of those ideals and how they have ended up exactly where they did not want to be. In this episode we discuss the alternative idea to freedom that currently exists and traps the western societies in which we live.

the adjustment bureau

Video - The Adjustment Bureau Trailer

steeped in misinformation, ignorance, and denial

Video - Rick Santelli's Tea Party rant.

Monbiot | The rightwing movements thrive on their contradictions, the leftwing movements drown in them. Tea Party members who proclaim their rugged individualism will follow a bucket on a broomstick if it has the right label, and engage in the herd behaviour they claim to deplore. The left, by contrast, talks of collective action but indulges instead in possessive individualism. Instead of coming together to fight common causes, leftwing meetings today consist of dozens of people promoting their own ideas, and proposing that everyone else should adopt them.

It would be wrong to characterise the Tea Party movement as being mostly working class. The polls suggest that its followers have an income and college education rate slightly above the national mean(1). But it is the only rising political movement in the US which enjoys major working class support. It voices the resentments of those who sense that they have been shut out of American life. Yet it campaigns for policies that threaten to exclude them further. The Contract from America for which Tea Party members voted demands that the US adopt a single-rate tax system, repeal Obama’s health care legislation and sustain George W Bush’s reductions in income tax, capital gains tax and inheritance tax(2). The beneficiaries of these policies are corporations and the ultra-wealthy. Those who will be hurt by them are angrily converging on state capitals to demand that they are implemented.

The Tea Party protests began after the business journalist Rick Santelli broadcast an attack from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on the government’s plan to help impoverished people whose mortgages had fallen into arrears(3). To cheers from the traders at the exchange, he proposed that they should hold a tea party to dump derivative securities in Lake Michigan in protest at Obama’s intention – in Santilli’s words - to “subsidise the losers”. (I urge you to watch the broadcast – it is the most alarming example of cheap demagoguery you are likely to have seen. It continues to be promoted by Santelli’s employer, CNBC(4)).

The protests which claim to defend the interests of the working class began, in other words, with a call for a bankers’ revolt against the undeserving poor. They have been promoted by Fox News, owned by that champion of the underdog Rupert Murdoch, and lavishly funded by other billionaires(5). Its corporate backers wrap themselves in the complaints of the downtrodden: they are 21st Century Marie-Antoinettes, who dress up as dairymaids and propose that the poor subsist on a diet of laissez-faire.

Before this movement had a name, its contradictions were explored in Thomas Frank’s seminal book What’s the Matter with Kansas?(6) The genius of the new conservatism, Frank argues, is its “systematic erasure of the economic”. It blames the troubles of the poor not on economic forces – corporate and class power, wage cuts, tax cuts, outsourcing – but on cultural forces. The backlashers could believe that George W Bush was a man of the people by ignoring his family’s wealth. They can believe that the media is a liberal conspiracy only by forgetting about the corporations (CNBC, Fox etc) and the conservative billionaires who run it. The movement depends on people never making the connection between, for example, “mass culture, most of which conservatives hate, and laissez-faire capitalism, which they adore” or “the small towns they profess to love and the market forces that are slowly grinding those small towns back into the red-state dust.”

The anger of the excluded is aimed instead at gay marriage, abortion, swearing on television and latte-drinking, French-speaking liberals. The working class American right votes for candidates who rail against cultural degradation, but what it gets when they take power is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

conservative incomprehension of peak oil

Video - DNC ad on how republicans would govern.

FCNP | The Barton incident, however, is instructive for it raises questions about the role of government and the force of political ideology in what soon will be an era of oil depletion and increasing economic hardship. Unlike most of the world, America has had 150 years of good times. Since the end of the Civil War, or if you prefer the War Between the States, no armies have crashed through our cities and except for the 1930s, which are remembered by only a few senior citizens, there has been relatively steady economic growth.

As generations went by, the distinction between resources that were vital for our way of life that come from nature, such as the sun, rain, moderate temperatures and breathable air, and those that were provided by our social organization and technology, such as electricity, running water, sewers, grocery stores, and gasoline, became increasingly blurred. Thus, for most, the neighborhood gas station providing unlimited cheap gas would and should always be there just as the sun will rise every day.

The degree to which government enables and facilitates the services that are vital to civilization is lost to many who have come to believe governments only collect taxes and waste money on dubious social projects. In the last few years, Washington's efforts to deal with the credit crisis, housing crisis, and the bankruptcy of the automobile industry, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, has only served to sharpen the ideological differences.

Under the "no new taxes" banner, conservatives in recent years have been content to watch the rapid erosion of state and local government services as withering revenues and inability to print or borrow money has forced unprecedented cutbacks. The ideology behind all this is that the economic growth that has been with us as long as anybody can remember will return soon and all will be well. Missing from this scenario of course is that for the last 150 years economic growth and the consumption of increasing amounts of oil have been inextricably linked. Take away steadily increasing oil supplies and the bedrock of conservative economic theory becomes a fantasy.

So far the erosion of government spending has not had a significant impact on political ideology. The problem will come when gasoline becomes unaffordable at current rates of use and many or most are forced to cut back, doing severe damage to our motorized society. At first there will be strident calls to deregulate, forget the environment and produce as much oil as possible. It may take a few years before a critical mass come to the realization amidst a stagnating economy and burgeoning social problems that more drilling is not going to work. Then the real debate can begin on how to keep civilization functioning with decreasing supplies of fossil fuels.

serial apologies, no contrition...,

Video - Rahm Emmanuel - GOP governing philosophy holds BP as the aggrieved party.

NYTimes | House Republicans had their chance to do the right thing and remove Joe Barton as the ranking Republican on the energy committee. Instead, they applauded him. Mr. Barton, you will recall, apologized to BP — saying it was a victim of a “shakedown” — after President Obama pressed the company to ante up a $20 billion compensation fund for all the people who have lost their jobs and businesses because of the oil spill.

After Mr. Barton tried apologizing again before his party’s private caucus, John Boehner, the Republican leader, said “the issue is closed.” Mr. Boehner showed his clear loyalties — protecting party hacks and the oil industry — when he decided that Mr. Barton should keep his central role in the Republican Party’s energy policy.

Mr. Boehner cited Mr. Barton’s “poor choice of words,” as if it were an oratorical gaffe and not a glimpse at deeper outrage that government dared to call Big Oil to account. Mr. Barton of Texas spoke a day after the Republican Study Committee caucus of House conservatives denounced Mr. Obama for applying “Chicago-style shakedown politics” against poor, defenseless BP.

Representative Jo Bonner, a Republican of Alabama whose Gulf Coast constituents are incensed, said it best last week when he called for Mr. Barton to lose his ranking position on the energy panel: “I believe the damage of his comments are beyond repair.” After the party caucus ended with a forgiving round of applause, Mr. Barton’s Twitter feed proclaimed: “Joe Barton Was Right.” But wait, that message was soon deleted; it was a mistake, said the latest apology from Mr. Barton’s office.

the final words on military accountability..,

Video - Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ADM Mike Mullen speak with reporters at the Pentagon.

gene + virus + injury = disease?

The Scientist | One of the most detailed studies to date of how the interaction between genes and environment results in disease has demonstrated that an inflammatory bowel disease resembling human Crohn's needs a specific mutation, virus, and injury to develop in mice.

"Environmental genomic issues are tough to crack," said John Mordes, professor of endocrinology at the University of Massachusetts, who has previously characterized a gene-virus interaction in type1 diabetes. "This is a significant contribution to the evolving understanding of how the environment interacts with genomic predisposition."

The team, led by immunologist Thaddeus Stappenbeck and virologist Herbert Virgin of Washington University School of Medicine, found that the diseased state was brought about by the complex interplay among a mutation in an autophagy-related gene called ATG16L1, a specific virus, a toxic substance, microbes in the rodent's gut, and the rodent's own immune response. The findings appear in a paper that will be published tomorrow in Cell.

"It's a well-documented scientific example of how very particular environmental events and genes interact to result in disease," said Richard Blumberg, chief of gastroenterology at Brigham and Women's Hospital at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the study.

The researchers stumbled upon this discovery by accident. Two years ago, they had succeeded in describing how a mutation in mouse ATG16L1 wreaked havoc in a type of cell that inhabits the lining of the small intestine. These so-called Paneth cells are involved in mucosal immunity and secrete antimicrobial proteins. But in mice that carry the mutation, the cells grow abnormally and malfunction, similar to what's observed in human Crohn's patients with mutations in the same gene.

But then, in early 2009, the mutant mouse colonies with the abnormal Paneth cells were moved to a new super-sterile facility. To the researchers' surprise, the mutant mice that grew up in the new facility had normal-looking, healthy Paneth cells. It was as if the mice didn't carry the mutation at all. This led them to believe that something other than genetics was at play.

Enter the murine norovirus -- a family of small, RNA viruses discovered by Virgin in 2003. The viruses are practically found in almost all mouse facilities except the new one, which was designed expressly to keep them out.

Sure enough, when the researchers fed mutant mice different viral strains, they found that after exposure to one strain known as CR6, the Paneth cells transformed from healthy to abnormal.

This goes back to what doctors have observed for years. "It is not uncommon to find that inflammatory bowel disease follows some sort of gastric infection in a clinical setting," Stappenbeck explained. "So the connection between the disease and an infectious process has been around for a while."

"So really there were three environmental factors that were working together with the mutation: the viral infection, the composition of the microbiota (presumably induced by the viral infection), and a very specific inflammatory hit on the [intestinal lining]," Blumberg said.

old bonobos just nasty......,

Reuters | Disease risk higher for swingers than prostitutes. Scientists studying swingers -- straight couples who regularly swap sexual partners and indulge in group sex at organized meeting -- say they have higher rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) than prostitutes. Dutch researchers publishing their work in the British Medical Journal showed that older swingers -- those over the age of 45 -- are particularly vulnerable and yet are a group largely ignored by healthcare services.

With estimates that the swinger population could be many millions across the world, the scientists said there was a risk this untreated group could act as an STI "transmission bridge to the entire population."

"Although exact estimates are unavailable, the swingers' population is probably large," wrote Anne-Marie Niekamp, who worked on the study with colleagues from Maastricht University.

The Dutch study analyzed the numbers of patients seeking treatment in 2007 and 2008 at three sexual health clinics in South Limburg in the Netherlands.

The clinics have recorded whether a patient is a swinger since the start of 2007, in an attempt to track infection rates among this group.

During the study period, there were just under 9,000 consultations at the three clinics. One in nine of the patients was a swinger, with an average age of 43.

Overall, combined rates of Chlamydia and gonorrhea were just over 10 percent among straight people, 14 percent among gay men, just under 5 percent in female prostitutes, and 10.4 percent among swingers, they found. And female swingers had higher infection rates than male swingers.

One in 10 older swingers had Chlamydia and around one in 20 had gonorrhea.

Chlamydia is the most common sexually transmitted disease among women and in 70 percent of cases causes no symptoms. The bacterial infection can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy and infertility. Gonorrhea is another bacterial infection which can also lead to infertility if left untreated.

Niekamp said that while other high risk groups, such as young straight people, gay men and prostitutes, were relatively easy for healthcare service to identify and target for advice and help, swingers were generally a hidden community.

"That makes them very hard to reach," she said in a telephone interview. "Because they are so hidden and in some ways also stigmatized, it is hard for them to come forward for STI testing and treatment."

the hunt for the god particle

Guardian | We have all heard of 'dark matter'. But what about dark galaxies, dark planets - even dark people? Particle physicists have a problem, he says. They are an anthropocentric bunch, too preoccupied with the particles and forces that impinge on humanity. They have spent so much time unravelling mysteries such as the structure of atoms and why the sun shines that they have neglected other avenues of inquiry. They need to broaden their horizons, Wells says. To think beyond the world we see and touch.

If that was the stick, next came the carrot. Our knowledge of the cosmos tells us that the stuff around us, from plants and people to stars and planets, is made from just a handful of elementary particles. On top of these, there is a small number of forces that make nature run smoothly, doing things like keeping planets in their orbits and ensuring everyday objects don't suddenly collapse into a pile of atoms. But how do we know, asks Wells, that there isn't much more going on than this? Our knowledge of nature and how it works is based on observations. What if we can't see everything? What might we be missing out on? There could be a "hidden world" out there, Wells says, where particles and forces are busily at work, all around us, but beyond the realm of our senses.

The phrase "hidden world" sounds like a science-fiction cliche, but it simply means that there may be more particles and forces at work in the world – and the cosmos at large – than those we see when we look around. They are so aloof, so hidden from our daily experience, that they go completely unnoticed.

"It would be strange if we were so special that we could feel and observe everything that is going on out there," says Wells, who is one of a growing number of physicists working on the hidden worlds idea. "We are lumps of clay swirling on a little blue marble in an overwhelming vastness of universe. We have to envision that there is more going on. There really should be additional particles and forces," he says.

the calm before?

WaPo | Sunspots come and go, but recently they have mostly gone. For centuries, astronomers have recorded when these dark blemishes on the solar surface emerge, only to fade away after a few days, weeks or months. Thanks to their efforts, we know that sunspot numbers ebb and flow in cycles lasting about 11 years.

But for the past two years, the sunspots have mostly been missing. Their absence, the most prolonged in nearly 100 years, has taken even seasoned sun watchers by surprise. "This is solar behavior we haven't seen in living memory," says David Hathaway, a physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

The sun is under scrutiny as never before, thanks to an armada of space telescopes. The results they beam back are portraying our nearest star, and its influence on Earth, in a new light. Sunspots and other clues indicate that the sun's magnetic activity is diminishing and that the sun may even be shrinking. Together, the results hint that something profound is happening inside the sun. The big question is: What?

Groups of sunspots forewarn of gigantic solar storms that can unleash a billion times more energy than an atomic bomb. Fears that these giant eruptions could create havoc on Earth and disputes over the sun's role in climate change are adding urgency to these studies. When NASA and the European Space Agency launched the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory almost 15 years ago, "understanding the solar cycle was not one of its scientific objectives," says Bernhard Fleck, the mission's project scientist. "Now it is one of the key questions."

Sunspots are windows into the sun's magnetic soul. They form where giant loops of magnetism, generated deep inside the sun, well up and burst through the surface, leading to a localized drop in temperature that we see as a dark patch. Any changes in sunspot numbers reflect changes inside the sun. "During this transition, the sun is giving us a real glimpse into its interior," says Hathaway.

When sunspot numbers drop at the end of each 11-year cycle, solar storms die down and all becomes much calmer. This "solar minimum" doesn't last long. Within a year, the spots and storms begin to build toward a new crescendo, the next solar maximum.

What's special about this latest dip is that the sun is having trouble starting the next solar cycle. The sun began to calm down in late 2007, so no one expected many sunspots in 2008. But computer models predicted that when the spots did return, they would do so in force. Hathaway was reported as thinking the next solar cycle would be a doozy: more sunspots, more solar storms and more energy blasted into space. Others predicted that it would be the most active solar cycle on record.

The trouble was, no one told the sun.