Auroras versus Thunder-Storms

The thunder of distant Net storms

Computers and routers on the Internet send each other error messages (called ICMP datagrams) to signal conditions such as network congestion or blackouts. While these datagrams are very rare, less than 0.001% of total traffic, they hold very important global information about problems and congestions elsewhere in the Net. A measurement of the flow of such error messages in our local cluster sho...

Gathering thunder

It’s common to accompany the rollout of a new biomedical journal with an explanation for its coming into being, usually by suggesting there’s an unmet need, despite the panoply of existing journals. I’m not going to do that, at least not exactly. The biomedical literature is almost unimaginably vast already, much more than even the most diligent speed-reading scholar-who-listens-to-science-blog...

Saturn’s equinoctial auroras

[1] We present the first images of Saturn’s conjugate equinoctial auroras, obtained in early 2009 using the Hubble Space Telescope. We show that the radius of the northern auroral oval is 1.5 smaller than the southern, indicating that Saturn’s polar ionospheric magnetic field, measured for the first time in the ionosphere, is 17% larger in the north than the south. Despite this, the total emitt...

Inferences concerning Auroras.

shown in the seventh column of the table is little affected by differences in the limiting brightness. This divergence indicates that, as compared with both Kapteyn and Mount Wilson, their results are not homogeneous; and noting, further, that the numerous and careful guages of the Herschels which extend to the 14th magnitude give a galactic condensation agreeing closely with Kapteyn (Herschel ...

Learning the thunder.