'Women won’t like working in Antarctica as there are no shops and hairdressers’

From the Telegraph, UK:  'Women won’t like working in Antarctica as there are no shops and hairdressers’

As you fly into Rothera, the main British research station in Antarctica, you see the emptiness stretching in every direction. On a continent almost 60 times the size of Britain there's not a single permanent inhabitant – just thousands upon thousands of miles of snow and ice.

Last November Rosey Grant made the journey perched in the cockpit of a small propeller plane. 'It was cloudy,' the 29-year-old meteorologist recalled when I spoke to her by phone in March, one of a series of interviews I conducted with women working at the base.

'But every now and then a glacier or an iceberg would appear in little patches of clear. Just getting pieces of the picture was tantalising. I remember thinking, "I'm glad it's like this or I'd be overwhelmed."'

Grant had spent the months leading up to her departure writing a will, bulk-buying moisturiser, and packing it, along with a flute and ice axes, into a one-metre-cubed cardboard box. As her plane descended she was afforded her first glimpse of the place that would be her home for the next 15 months: a small cluster of green buildings dwarfed by the snow-covered landscape.

Rothera is Britain's largest research station on the continent. It is run by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), which undertakes scientific research into everything from evolutionary biology to climate change. In the 1980s it was BAS that discovered the hole in the ozone layer.

BAS operates four research stations year-round in the Antarctic (two on the island of South Georgia and two in Antarctica itself), all in British Antarctic Territory. Elsewhere countries such as America, Russia, Chile and Argentina have bases of their own. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of uninhabited miles separate each one.
Grant arrived at Rothera at the busiest time of the year, the height of the southern summer, which runs from October to March. But by the time this article is published the base will be in the depths of the Antarctic winter. The summer crew will have departed and a skeleton staff of 18 will be left over the long, dark months. Grant and her colleague, Mairi Fenton, a 22-year-old marine biologist, will be the only women among them.
When I visited Rothera in February 2011 to film a documentary, I found it hard to imagine that, until relatively recently, women weren't allowed to work at BAS's Antarctic bases at all.

Mike Pinnock, 58, who started at BAS in the 1970s as an engineer and now sits on its board, says the 'no women' rule can be traced back to the war when the British first established the stations: 'It was a military-naval operation, so we inherited a lot of Navy principles,' he tells me from his office in BAS's Cambridge HQ.

Janet Thomson, 69, worked as a scientist for BAS in Britain from the 1960s, and recalls how she and other female scientists were forbidden from joining male colleagues on trips to Antarctica. 'There was the most appalling letter sent back from personnel [to one female applicant] saying, "Women wouldn't like it in Antarctica as there are no shops and no hairdresser." It's just laughable now, but that's how they felt at the time,' she says.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Thomson was told, 'We don't have any facilities for women.' But it was about more than just bricks and mortar. The whole mindset, says Thomson, was 'men are men and they do these things and women stay at home'.

For 18 years Thomson argued her case 'round and round in a circle' until finally, in 1983, she was allowed on a research ship and became the first female BAS scientist to work inside the Antarctic Circle: 'I was very aware I was running a gauntlet and that if I did anything silly it would be, "Oh, well, that's what you expect of a woman,"' she says.

In 1986, at a small station called Signy, the first female scientists were allowed to work on British bases during the summer. In 1993 the first woman spent the winter there. In 1997 the first woman overwintered at Rothera.
Pinnock remembers being sent to another research station, expecting to have to 'crack the whip' and oversee the removal of pin-up photos from the walls in preparation. 'It would be foolish to deny that one or two people didn't feel, "This is the end of the world,"' he tells me. 'People were treading on eggshells a bit in the dining-room and bar. [But] it very quickly relaxed. And the women just became part of the team.'

Today, on average, a third of those who work at Rothera (100 or so during the summer months, about 20 in winter) will be women. This summer, not for the first time, a woman was commander in chief – Agnieszka Fryckowska, 41, originally the base meteorologist.

The fact that women today re now fully assimilated is, says Janet Thomson, exactly 'how it should be', but she's a little sad that people have forgotten what a struggle it was: 'I went to Rothera for a month in 1999 and we were in the queue for dinner and there was a young lass in front of me,' she remembers. 'I must have said something about how good it was that there were these opportunities for her now, and she just looked at me blankly and didn't understand.'

Rosey Grant agrees: 'I think our generation is not at all aware because it's not how it's been [for us]. I've never been aware of being a girl in a male-dominated environment.'

Grant's summer room-mate, Sharon Duggan, 35, who manages the marine laboratories down on the wharf from October to March, points out that the women who come to Antarctica aren't 'ultra-feminine girlie girls'. 'You are required to get your hands dirty, muck in and help out. I don't think a certain type of woman – or indeed man – would be interested in that.'

But, while climbing gear and ice axes tend to clutter the cupboards in some rooms, in others make-up and hair-straighteners line the shelves.

Every woman I spoke to had a different reason for coming south. For Grant it was a passion for snow and ice. For Alison Massey, the 32-year-old summer base assistant, it was a love of David Attenborough documentaries. For Mairi Fenton it was personal: her mother, a scientist, had wanted to work in Antarctica back in the 'no women' days, while her father, a botanist, did manage to get down in the 1970s and 'a lot of the stories my dad tells me are about how hard it was for him and how we've got it easy,' she said.

He might have a point. But, while there are plenty of modern comforts today – central heating, en suite showers, internet access (though too slow to Skype) – there's no escaping the fact that much of the work is still done outside in freezing conditions (it goes down to minus 40 degrees Celsius in winter, and when Fenton dives to collect marine samples she has to chainsaw through half a metre of ice).

Soon Fenton and Grant will have to cope with the added psychological pressures brought on by the fact that from May to July the sun won't appear above the horizon and the weather will have grounded all transport in and out.
In a medical emergency BAS would attempt evacuation, but such rescue missions aren't always possible. In 1999 an American doctor had to treat herself for breast cancer. In 1961 a Soviet doctor removed his own appendix. 'A lot of people tell you to expect a feeling of panic about the fact that you won't be able to get out,' Fenton told me. 'I haven't had that yet.'

She has, however, already experienced one of the unfortunate realities of life on the continent: relationships with those at home often crumble under the strain. Soon after her arrival she broke up with her boyfriend of three years: 'I went thinking it would last, but you feel yourself growing apart, as it's not like anywhere else on earth and you can't really describe it.'

Life at Rothera is not dissimilar to that at an expensive boarding-school. Five meals a day are served to ensure people have enough calories to work in the cold, and each Saturday there's a three-course dinner where people dress up, candles are lit and wine is served.

'It marks the end of the week,' Isabelle Gerrard, the chef, told me. 'Here, days just kind of meld into each other and so it's almost like a marking point.' And those at Rothera play as hard as they work.
One room is filled with musical instruments for the base band, another with fancy dress. Perhaps a lack of television drives you to create your own costume drama because it is, Alison Massey told me, 'one of the biggest things in people's luggage'. She brought a horse costume and her brother sent a fake beard so she could keep up with the men.

It was another pastime, however – and fear of how it might affect life on base – that made BAS initially so wary of sending women south. 'Let's be frank,' says Mike Pinnock. 'Living in Antarctica is not easy. There's the environment, the isolation. There are problems getting on in a small group. The moment you put women in, that adds another dynamic.'

He is, of course, right; many people do get together. Indeed, BAS turns out to be rather successful as a dating service. Of the eight people working at the small King Edward Point base in South Georgia in 2010, four returned as couples.

Such close-knit relations haven't upset the balance as some originally feared. Anyone who becomes pregnant must be sent home for safety reasons, but BAS says it's not yet happened. Any other problems arising from relationships, and break-ups, are just considered a messy fact of life.

Combining work here with motherhood is an altogether bigger challenge. Arriving at Christmas, Joanne Johnson, a 34-year-old geologist, spent six weeks working from a small tent out on the ice, desperately missing Phoebe, her three-year-old daughter, whom she had left at home with her husband.

'I was camping with one other person,' she tells me, now back in Cambridge. 'A man. Who doesn't have children. And who's single. So I don't think he had any idea [what I was going through]. I did feel quite alone in that, if I'm honest.'

Johnson needs to travel south every few years to collect rock samples, but if Phoebe hadn't coped with their time apart, she was contemplating a change of career. BAS says Johnson is one of just four female employees who have managed to combine their jobs with motherhood, whereas men with families are not uncommon.
When I asked other women if they'd combine children and Antarctic life the response was mixed. Sharon Duggan said she doesn't want 'marriage and family', so it 'isn't an issue' for her.

I emailed the base commander, Agnieszka Fryckowska. 'I guess I am one of those who won't jump into anything just because society tells me I should,' she wrote back. 'I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. As for women making this work [when they have] children to think about – I don't think it's fair to generalise. Is it really sensible for a mother with young children to come south for six to 18 months at a time?'

Janet Thomson never had children. 'The prospect of going to Antarctica materialised,' she says, 'and I didn't want to say goodbye to that, and then one gets too old.' Does she wish she could have had both? 'Yes,' she says quietly. 'It would have been the best of both worlds.'

 

A scrap of history resurfaces

Okay, not science related, but fascinating.

From Boston.com:  A scrap of history resurfaces

PLYMOUTH — When the Mayflower II sailed from England to Plymouth in 1957, the crew of the replica 17th-century vessel tossed some bottles overboard into the Atlantic Ocean. Each bottle contained a message signed by everyone aboard the ship, including their mascot, a little kitten named Felix. As the men watched the bottles float away and disappear into the waves, many wondered where the notes would end up, or if they would ever reach the shore.

Somehow, two bottles survived. The first Mayflower II message turned up in 1961 on the coast of Norway, and a few years later, a second one was located in the Bahamas. Then the two documents disappeared from public view. Their fate remained unknown until January of this year, when one of the crew’s signed letters resurfaced at a flea market in Florida. It is now on display in the lobby of Plimoth Plantation.

And just last week, a Plimoth Plantation employee made a surprising new discovery: More bottled messages were dropped overboard the Mayflower II than previously thought.

Historians had believed that only two bottles containing messages were thrown overboard during the Mayflower II’s maiden voyage, but actually there were four, according to Marietta Mullen, the associate director of Plimoth Plantation’s Colonial Interpretation department. She made the discovery last week while studying detailed journal entries written by the crew on the Mayflower II’s trans-Atlantic voyage.

That means two bottles are still unaccounted for, according to Mullen. It is the latest development in the story of the Mayflower II, which is about to undergo an extensive restoration.

The wooden vessel has endured a lot in its 55 years of existence. Originally designed to be a full-scale replica of the Mayflower that carried the Pilgrims here in 1620, it was built in a shipyard in the town of Brixham, in Devon, England, between 1955 and 1957. The project was the brainchild of Warwick Charlton, an English journalist who raised the money to fund the ship’s construction, which he viewed as a tribute to the United States and a symbolic gesture of thanks to Americans for helping Britain during World War II. In the spring of 1957, the replica 17th-century ship embarked on its trans-Atlantic voyage, which took nearly two months to complete.

Along the way, the crew signed four pieces of paper that were tucked into empty cider bottles. The tops were corked and sealed with candlewax, then tossed into the ocean.

Fast-forward to January 2012: John Varndell, a 63-year-old resident of Cocoa, Fla., was rummaging through antiques at a flea market with his friend Patrick McConnon when he came across a box containing old pictures and documents.

“I took them home and thought, you know, this may be important,” said Varndell.

He inspected the contents more closely at home. He picked up a frame from the box. Inside the frame was a weathered piece of lined paper. In typewritten letters, it said: “This document was dropped overboard in a sealed bottle from the barque MAYFLOWER II during her maiden voyage, which was from Plymouth England towards Plymouth Massachusetts.” The message was dated May 9, 1957, and included a typewritten list of all the crew members, from the captain to the ship’s mascot, Felix, along with their signatures (and the cat’s paw print). Another document in the box explained the origins of the Mayflower II letter, and how it had been found on the shore of Abaco Island, Bahamas, in 1965.

Intrigued, Varndell investigated further, hoping to track down one of the younger passengers who had signed the document in 1957.

“I got online and I found a gentleman who was on the ship and looked up his name in Massachusetts,” said Varndell.

Varndell said he successfully reached Joseph Meany, one of the Mayflower II cabin boys, by phone and asked, “Are you the gentleman who was on the Mayflower II?” And Meany replied: “Yes, I was.”

After Varndell explained what he had found at a flea market, Meany urged him to report his discovery to Plimoth Plantation, the museum that maintains the Mayflower II. Soon enough, Varndell was in touch with Mullen, who has worked at Plimoth Plantation for 31 years.

Mullen has extensive knowledge of the Mayflower II, and has interviewed surviving crew members and read their journals. Of the 33 crew members who were aboard the ship, only seven are still alive today, she said.

As soon as she saw Varndell’s document, she confirmed the signatures.

“I knew right away. . . . I knew this was the real thing,” said Mullen.

After she verified its authenticity, Varndell agreed to donate his find to Plimoth Plantation, so it could be put on display.

“It’s amazing that after all these years this man goes to a flea market” and finds a piece of missing history, said Mullen. “What are the chances?”

“It was amazing. It was really exciting,” she said.

Since Varndell’s discovery, Mullen has taken extra time to review journal entries from the Mayflower II’s 1957 voyage more closely. That’s how she found out that four messages were signed and bottled by the Mayflower II crew, so two more are out there, somewhere, waiting to be discovered.

“Are they at the bottom of the ocean somewhere? Are they buried on shore somewhere?” said Mullen, her eyes widening as she pondered the possibilities in her office at Plimoth Plantation.

“Is someone going to find one?”

 

Sunburst Six: The Sun Part 9

Faint young Sun problem
Theoretical models of the Sun's development suggest that 3.8 to 2.5 billion years ago, during the Archean period, the Sun was only about 75% as bright as it is today. Such a weak star would not have been able to sustain liquid water on the Earth's surface, and thus life should not have been able to develop. However, the geological record demonstrates that the Earth has remained at a fairly constant temperature throughout its history, and that the young Earth was somewhat warmer than it is today.

The consensus among scientists is that the young Earth's atmosphere contained much larger quantities of greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide, methane and/or ammonia) than are present today, which trapped enough heat to compensate for the smaller amount of solar energy reaching the planet.

Present anomalies
The Sun is currently behaving unexpectedly in a number of ways.

* It is in the midst of an unusual sunspot minimum, lasting far longer and with a higher percentage of spotless days than normal; since May 2008.

* It is measurably dimming; its output has dropped 0.02% at visible wavelengths and 6% at EUV wavelengths in comparison with the levels at the last solar minimum.

* Over the last two decades, the solar wind's speed has dropped by 3%, its temperature by 13%, and its density by 20%.

* Its magnetic field is at less than half strength compared to the minimum of 22 years ago. The entire heliosphere, which fills the Solar System, has shrunk as a result, thereby increasing the level of cosmic radiation striking the Earth and its atmosphere.

Sunburst 6: The Sun Part 10

Observation and effects
The brightness of the sun can cause pain from looking at it with the naked eye, although doing so for brief periods is not hazardous for normal, non-dilated eyes. Looking directly at the Sun causes phosphene visual artifacts and temporary partial blindness. It also delivers about 4 milliwatts of sunlight to the retina, slightly heating it and potentially causing damage in eyes that cannot respond properly to the brightness.

UV exposure gradually yellows the lens of the eye over a period of years and is thought to contribute to the formation of cataracts, but this depends on general exposure to solar UV, not on whether one looks directly at the Sun. Long-duration viewing of the direct Sun with the naked eye can begin to cause UV-induced, sunburn-like lesions on the retina after about 100 seconds, particularly under conditions where the UV light from the Sun is intense and well focused; conditions are worsened by young eyes or new lens implants (which admit more UV than aging natural eyes), Sun angles near the zenith, and observing locations at high altitude.

Viewing the Sun through light-concentrating optics such as binoculars may result in permanent damage to the retina without an appropriate filter that blocks UV and substantially dims the sunlight. An attenuating (ND) filter might not filter UV and so is still dangerous. Attenuating filters to view the Sun should be specifically designed for that use: some improvised filters pass UV or IR rays that can harm the eye at high brightness levels.

Unfiltered binoculars can deliver over 500 times as much energy to the retina as using the naked eye, killing retinal cells almost instantly. Even brief glances at the midday Sun through unfiltered binoculars can cause permanent blindness.

Partial solar eclipses are hazardous to view because the eye's pupil is not adapted to the unusually high visual contrast: the pupil dilates according to the total amount of light in the field of view, not by the brightest object in the field. During partial eclipses most sunlight is blocked by the Moon passing in front of the Sun, but the uncovered parts of the photosphere have the same surface brightness as during a normal day.

In the overall gloom, the pupil expands from ~2 mm to ~6 mm, and each retinal cell exposed to the solar image receives about ten times more light than it would looking at the non-eclipsed Sun. This can damage or kill those cells, resulting in small permanent blind spots for the viewer. The hazard is insidious for inexperienced observers and for children, because there is no perception of pain: it is not immediately obvious that one's vision is being destroyed.

During sunrise and sunset sunlight is attenuated due to Rayleigh scattering and Mie scattering from a particularly long passage through Earth's atmosphere, and the Sun is sometimes faint enough to be viewed comfortably with the naked eye or safely with optics (provided there is no risk of bright sunlight suddenly appearing through a break between clouds). Hazy conditions, atmospheric dust, and high humidity contribute to this atmospheric attenuation.

A rare optical phenomenon may occur shortly after sunset or before sunrise, known as a green flash. The flash is caused by light from the Sun just below the horizon being bent (usually through a temperature inversion) towards the observer. Light of shorter wavelengths (violet, blue, green) is bent more than that of longer wavelengths (yellow, orange, red) but the violet and blue light is scattered more, leaving light that is perceived as green.

Ultraviolet light from the Sun has antiseptic properties and can be used to sanitize tools and water. It also causes sunburn, and has other medical effects such as the production of vitamin D. Ultraviolet light is strongly attenuated by Earth's ozone layer, so that the amount of UV varies greatly with latitude and has been partially responsible for many biological adaptations, including variations in human skin color in different regions of the globe.

Back to our regualrly scheduled blogging

Visiting relative  has left, traveling has done, and I'm ready to devote myself to this blog again.

So thanks for  your patience!

I crave your indulgence

My mother's sister is visiting for three days. My mom's deaf as a post, my dad can't be bothered to get out of his chair, so I will be doing the entertaining - the chauffeuring and the talking and the communicating - for the next three days. So I'll be posting back here Thursday. Thanks for your patience.

Discover endangered animals, native plants in preserves tucked in South Florida neighborhoods

From Sun-Sentinel: Discover endangered animals, native plants in preserves tucked in South Florida neighborhoods
Get a glimpse into Florida's past — before the people, subdivisions, condo canyons and air-conditioned shopping malls wiped them out.

Just off bustling Oakland Park Boulevard, explore an ancient beach dune where endangered gopher tortoises burrow and roam the white sugar sand. Pluck delicious wild huckleberries off a bush as native Zebra Longwings flutter about.

These and other treasures are quietly waiting to be discovered inside preserves and forests hiding in neighborhoods in Oakland Park, Boca Raton, Coral Springs and other South Florida cities.

Lakeside Sand Pine Preserve in Oakland Park has 5.4 acres of white, sugar sand with flowering native plants and burrowing tortoises and other wildlife. The park is west of Interstate 95, just a block off the busy road.

"Most of these [lands] were destroyed through development," say Charles Livio, horticulturist for the City of Oakland Park.

"Forty thousand years ago, this was a coastal sand dune," he says, pointing to the snowy sand carpeting the rare scrubland. "What's unique about this preserve is its soil. It's acidic. Most soil in South Florida is alkaline. Acidic soil supports special native plants, like huckleberry, wild muscadine grape, staggerbush and fetterbush. This sand pine scrub is rare because these were the first lands developed in Florida during the building boom."

Native trees and shrubs include South Florida Slash and Sand Pines, Silver and Green Saw Palmetto, Sand Live Oaks and Myrtle Oaks. The preserve is bordered by two fresh-water lakes, surrounded by businesses and homes.

Back on the trail, Livio points out black and yellow Zebra Longwings, which are the state butterfly, and White Peacock butterflies feeding on the nectar of a beautyberry flower.

Farther down the trail is a rare colony of Reindeer moss. "Those are tiny, primitive lichen that were used by Native Americas to thicken soups and stews," Livio says. "They absorb pollutants from the air like a sponge. They are uncommon to South Florida."

The park, which the city acquired in 2001 through a grant from the Florida Communities Trust overseen by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, is teeming with native fauna favored by burrowing gopher tortoises.

In December, the city adopted and released four of the endangered reptiles, the first in the state to do so under the Waif Tortoise Permit Adoption Program, according to city documents.

"The tortoises are our VIPs," Livio says. "They feast on gopher apple and flowering prickly pear cactus, which grows here in abundance. They only live in this type of habitat, which is hard to find."

Blazing Star
Until you arrive at the Blazing Star Preserve in Boca Raton, that is. Many of the same native plants and a colony of 25 or so tortoises can be found roaming free there, too. The preserve is one of seven in the city.

"Blazing Star is special because you can see how Florida was in the past. It's a little oasis in the middle of the city that's untouched by time," says Dawn Sinka, Boca Raton's horticulturist and arborist.

She says the 24-acre preserve was most likely a part of the same ancient sand dune found in Oakland Park. The land was acquired in 1997 through the Florida Communities Trust, she said.

"If you were standing at Blazing Star tens of thousands of years ago, you would have been looking at the ocean." Today, the view is I-95.

The preserve was named for the purple flowering plant that grows all over the open sunny areas in the park's sugar sand. They flower from September to October, she said.

Bordered by Sugar Sand Park to the west and noisy I-95 to the east, the preserve has 2 acres of wetland at its northeast end. The inaccessible 29-acre Cypress Knee Slough is to the south. The two were once connected before Palmetto Park Road separated them.

"It's special because you can see things that you can't see a quarter mile away. If you just open your eyes and look at them, they're just amazing and beautiful and rare. That makes it worth the trip to see it," Sinka says.

"Did you see the tortoise?" asks Nicolo Atria, pointing out the reptile basking just outside its underground nest. "I wonder how old he is."

Atria, who lives nearby, says he comes to the preserve twice a month. "I like the native trees. I visit botanical gardens and this is right in my own backyard."

Sandy Ridge
Head west to Sandy Ridge Sanctuary in Coral Springs and walk through a grove of more than 2,000 South Florida Slash Pines shading native plants and more than 30 gopher tortoises.

"It's [about] 40 acres of environmentally sensitive land right in the middle of the city," says Mark Westfall, Coral Springs' environmental coordinator.

The park, purchased by the city in 1996 through a bond program, is only open for guided tours on the first and third Saturdays of the month or by appointment. As you enter through locked gates, sweeping stands of native bracken ferns flank the paved trail. Blooming cardinal bromeliads blaze red and yellow high up in the Slash Pines.

"The lake at Sandy Ridge is one of the most beautiful places in the city. It's filled with fragrant water lily and 2,000 fish," Westfall said. Across the path, there's a stunning bald cypress standing sentry in the wetland. A wax myrtle grows nearby.

"The waxy cuticle of this fragrant plant was used by pioneers to make scented candles," Westfall explains as he cracks open a leaf. "It's special. It's intact habitat that's never been developed."

Lakeside Sand Pine Preserve
2820 NW 27th Ave., Oakland Park
954-630-4500; OaklandParkFl.org
Hours: 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday-Saturday; closed Sunday and holidays

Blazing Star Preserve
1751 W. Camino Real Road, Boca Raton
561-393-7810, CI.Boca-Raton.fl.us/rec/parks
Hours: 8 a.m. to sunset daily

Sandy Ridge Sanctuary
8501 NW 40th St., Coral Springs
954-345-2112, CoralSprings.org
Hours: Tours 9 a.m. on first and third Saturdays each month or by appointment only

Changing Pakistan from the bottom up

From CNN: Changing Pakistan from the bottom up
(CNN) -- This is a story affecting millions of Pakistanis — and it does not involve suicide bombings, honor killings, extremism or President Zardari's mustache.

"What would you like to be when you grow up?" I asked Sakafat, a boisterous 12-year-old girl, while visiting a remote Pakistani village in the Sindh province.

"A scientist!" she immediately replied. "Why can't we be scientists? Why not us?"

The confident Sakafat lives in Abdul Qadir Lashari village, which is home to 500 people in Mirpur Sakro. It is in one of the most impoverished regions of Pakistan.

There was a characteristic resilience and optimism in this particular village. This should come as no surprise to anyone who knows anything about Pakistan's often dysfunctional, surreal yet endearing daily existence.

The 500 villagers live in 48 small huts, except for the one "wealthy" family who recently built a home made of concrete. The village chief, Abdul Qadir Lashari, proudly showed off his village's brand-new community toilets, paved roads, and water pump that brings fresh water to the village.

These simple, critical amenities, taken for granted by most of us in the West, resulted from the direct assistance of the Rural Support Programmes Network, Pakistan's largest nongovernmental organization. RSPN has worked with thousands of similar Pakistani villages to help them achieve economic self-sufficiency.

I visited the Sindh village with RSPN to witness the results of using community organizing to alleviate poverty. The staff told me its goal was to teach villagers to "fish for themselves."

Every household in the Abdul Qadir Lashari village was able to reach a profit by the end of 2011 as a result of professional skills training, financial management, community leadership workshops and microloans.

Specifically, a middle-aged, illiterate woman proudly told me how she learned sewing and financial management and was thus able to increase her household revenue, manage her bills, and use a small profit to purchase an extra cow for the family. She was excited to introduce me to her cow, but sadly due to lack of time I was unable to make the bovine acquaintance.

Women play a prominent role in this village's process toward empowerment and self-sustenance. Here, in one of the most traditional and rural regions of Pakistan, almost all of the presentations were led by women. All of their daughters from the ages of 6 to 12 are now 100% literate. In comparison, only 31% of the entire village and 12% of females 15 and older can read.

All this is particularly pertinent to Pakistan's wider sociopolitical context. In a country where change is so often top-down and directed by national elites mostly interested in maintaining the status quo for sake of sustaining their vice-like grip on power and wealth, grassroots empowerment can potentially change deeply ingrained feudal and tribal traditions. This power — to progressively change societal patterns and norms from the bottom up — is a rarity in Pakistan and a crucial counterweight to more extreme narratives currently sweeping the nation.

The village's local community manager — a woman — reflected some of this positive sentiment when she passed on a hopeful message to America: "We take pride in our traditional work and livelihood, and we hope you too can enjoy them. We hope to trade with you in the future and to have better relations. And we hope and believe we can be a developed nation like you."

Asked what single thing she felt was most important most for her village, she replied education. Upon asking another elderly lady what she wishes for Pakistan, she repeated one word three times: "sukoon," which means peace.

When it was time to depart, the people of the village presented me with a beautiful handmade Sindhi shawl, an example of the craftwork the villagers are now able to sell for profit.

As I left the village with the dark red, traditional Sindhi shawl adorned around my neck, my thoughts returned to the 12-year-old girl, Sakafat, who passionately asked why she couldn't become a scientist.

I looked in her eyes and could only respond with the following: "You're right. You can be anything you want to be. And I have every confidence you will, inshallah ("God willing"), reach your manzil ("desired destination").

By focusing on education and local empowerment to lift the next generation out of poverty, Sakafat's dream could indeed one day become a reality for all of Pakistan.

Clemson University Students Share the Joy of Herps with Girl Scouts

From Reptile Channel: Clemson University Students Share the Joy of Herps with Girl Scouts
Graduate and undergraduate students from Clemson University teamed up with Michelle Martin from the University of South Carolina to provide a public outreach demonstration for Girl Scouts and their parents (totaling 100 people) at Camp WaBak in Marietta, SC, on May 5, 2012. The demonstration involved pet leopard geckos, snakes, and museum specimens that were loaned out from the Campbell Natural History Museum at Clemson University.

Through a combination of hands-on interaction with live animals, museum specimens and visual media, both the Girl Scouts and parents learned the difference between amphibians and reptiles, wild versus pet animals, and played a fun game to bust myths about herps.

"The main goal of the demonstration was to familiarize the younger generation with herps, educate them about their biology, and to instill a sense of appreciation for herps," said Sandy Kawano, Ph.D Candidate in Biological Sciences at Clemson University and coordinator for the demonstration.

"If kids develop more of an appreciation for the predators, for the slimy-and-scaly-skinned ones, and for the misunderstood ones, they are then poised to appreciate all wildlife more," said Michelle Martin, head coordinator for the Camp WaBak weekend activities that included the herps demonstration.

Thilina Surasinghe, Ph.D candidate in Wildlife and Fisheries Biology at Clemson University, described the Myth Busters game as his favorite part of the demonstration because ". . . this is the occasion when we filtered fact from fiction. Misconceptions about nature and wildlife lead to unnecessary conflicts between wildlife and humans. Once such fallacies are eliminated through proper, hands-on education, resolution of such conflicts becomes easier for conservation efforts."

Victoria Robertson (undergraduate in Wildlife and Fisheries Biology) provides the girls with an up-close-and-personal encounter with a live leopard gecko. For some girls, this might have been their first interaction with a gecko or even a herp in general!

Graduate student (Thilina Surasinghe) and undergraduate students (Meaghan Miranda and Victoria Robertson) from the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Biology reveal the truth about parental care in herps, and explain how some herp parents take great care of their offspring.

The girls also learned fun trivia about their state herps. Debbie Jacobs (undergraduate in Biological Sciences) shows two girls some baby specimens of the South Carolina state reptile: the loggerhead sea turtle.

Conservation biology was also touched upon when the Girl Scouts learned the difference between wild versus pet animals, and how we should try to maintain wild populations so that friends and future generations can appreciate them in the wild as well. The Clemson students focused on providing a fun, learning experience to encourage the kids to view science education with a positive attitude. A main theme of the demonstration was to encourage the Girl Scouts to have so much fun that they didn't even realize that they were learning. In addition to using science to dispel popular myths about herps, the Myth Busters game also functioned to foster their critical thinking skills by actively involving them in the demonstration.

Additionally, the Girl Scouts were introduced to the basic principles of ecology and functional morphology through some of these myths. For instance, the Draco lizard (Draco spp.) and the flying gecko (Ptychozoon kuhli) were used to illustrate that some herps can glide and do so by increasing the surface area of their bodies to fall down slowly from trees. A preserved flying gecko was passed around to enable them to see the extra flaps of skin on the body. Then pictures of a Draco lizard and its skeleton were shown so that the girls could see that Draco lizards achieve a Frisbee- shaped body with greater body surface area by stretching out elongated ribs that are covered with skin.

This public outreach event was also a fun and enriching experience for the Clemson students. Katherine Gleason, a master's student in biological sciences, said that her favorite part of the event was "seeing the girls get really excited about herps and the different specimens we had to show them." Science education and public outreach can be some of the most enjoyable aspects of being a scientist, and Gleason described it as important for keeping the general public involved with science.

"Instead of people thinking that scientists are abstract, faceless strangers working in labs, they can see that we're just regular people trying to figure out how and why the world works the way it does," she said.

Martin said that "children are naturally curious about what they see outside, and educating them about what they are seeing helps them to become better stewards of nature. . . It also makes them better observers: as they know more, they notice more, and that leads to all sorts of wonderful discoveries." Thus, such events can illustrate how science can be a pathway to solving nature's mysteries. Kawano said it was events such as this that inspired her to pursue a career in biology and that public outreach events are a chance to "pass on the torch" to the next generation of scientists.

Herpetology was chosen as one of the demonstrations because herps are often under-appreciated yet play important roles in ecosystems and society and are a fascinating group of animals. Surasinghe said that he studies herps because they show a diversity of lifestyles, live in a variety of habitats, and because their "cold-blooded" physiology requires them to rely on the external environment to regulate their body temperature, they are sensitive to disturbances in the environment. Because of these features, herps serve as the "canaries of the coal mine" and can act as indicators of environmental health. Said Martin: "Because it may be some obscure chemical emitted by the skin of a toad that saves us all from cancer one day, developing an attitude of preservation and conservation could be essential to our own survival as a species."

To continue to foster their appreciation and interest in herps, the Girl Scouts were all provided with fun activities and gifts from various donors. Zoo Med generously provided lanyards, stickers and information packets for everyone, and posters that were awarded to kids who answered trivia questions about herps based on what they learned from the demonstration. An activity book was created using material kindly obtained from ReptileChannel.com and the Alligator Farm Zoological Park in St. Augustine, FL. Support was also received from Dr. Alfred Wheeler (Chair for the Department of Biological Sciences at Clemson University), and Stanlee Miller (curator for the Vertebrate Collections at the Clemson University Campbell Natural History Museum).

Rich Archbold: Senior plans next birthday feat

From Contra Costa Times: Rich Archbold: Senior plans next birthday feat
Don't tell Mary Thoits she can't do something.

The next thing you know she will just turn around and do it.

Like when her older brother told her that girls shouldn't drive cars. So Thoits, just 16, said the heck with cars; she instead rode her bike to the airport in Grand Rapids, Mich., took flying lessons and started flying planes.

Or, just a few years later, when she was 85 and had a crazy idea to jump out of a plane over Lake Elsinore to celebrate her birthday. Friends questioned her sanity. But she did it anyway and loved it.

But that's just Thoits, now 88, living life with gusto and inspiring others to do just the same - although maybe not jumping out of planes as an octogenarian.

Her philosophy is that you shouldn't stop learning as you grow older.

"Your mind doesn't age," she said. "You should say, `How old would I be if my mind didn't know how old I was?"'

As director of the popular Senior Studies Program at Long Beach City College for more than 30 years, Thoits has enriched the lives of thousands of older citizens.

She teaches a world affairs class with aplomb and humor. Last week she had seniors pass a ball among themselves like a hot potato while Lucy Daggett, the LBCC tour director and professional singer, sang. When Daggett stopped singing, whoever had the ball had to imagine that she was an Iranian and discuss global issues from an Iranian point of view.

Thoits also likes to dress up in costumes to bring history to life. Some of her favorite characters include Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross; Edith Wilson, wife of President Woodrow Wilson; and the Pope.

"I'm just a ham," she says with an impish grin. "But the students get more out of the class."

Thoits is now embarking on perhaps her most ambitious project in many years at LBCC. She wants to create a program in which seniors and baby boomers can improve the health of their brains to fight memory loss and improve reaction time, such as when driving a car.

"Our society has been concentrating too much on our bodies, on outward appearances," Thoits said. "It's important to be physically fit, but it's just as important, maybe more so, to work on our minds. That's what we are as people. Studies show that we don't fully use the power in our brain. My vision is to develop programs that develop that brain power."

Thoits has been working with consultant Lorraine Wicks, former director of the Senior Education Center in North Orange County, to see what would work best for LBCC. Thoits said one program conducted by Wicks elsewhere produced some remarkable changes in the lives of seniors, including improved reaction time while driving, better information retention, more confidence in using electronic gadgets and a more positive outlook on life.

Like everything else, these programs cost money. Thoits is working with a task force to focus on specific classes with costs to determine the feasibility of moving forward. She hopes to start the program by early fall.

"People are worried about losing their memory. Comedians make fun of older people and their driving. But this is not a joke," Thoits said. "In this age of information overload, I think there are ways to stimulate the brain other than sitting in front of a TV. We need a balance in our lives."

Thoits is a believer in the science of meditation and has given a class in "Four Ways to Stay Out of a Straitjacket: Exercise, Humor, Visualization and Meditation."

"Meditation is a way to quiet the mind and search for answers as to why we're on Earth," she said.

Thoits started her search during World War II when she joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPS), flying military aircraft to the East Coast for transport overseas.

In the early 1940s she went to DePauw University in Indiana and majored in art.

"The professor said I couldn't draw, but I could write, so I switched my major to English literature," she said. "I spent some time then in Durham University in northern England where I had an epiphany. I had been sort of a rebel and wasn't focused on education. At Durham a professor wrote on one of my papers that I should stop just parroting back what I thought he wanted to hear and that I should start thinking for myself. That was a great discovery."

Thoits also spent some time at the Sorbonne before working 13 years in Germany and two in Korea organizing social events for military personnel. Lured by the ocean and education, she earned a master's degree in public administration from Cal State Long Beach.

She was looking for a job and accidentally ran into Beverly O'Neill, then dean of student affairs at LBCC, who asked Thoits to take over the moribund Senior Center that held passive events such as card-playing and bingo.

"There's nothing wrong with cards and bingo," Thoits said. "But I discovered that many of the seniors wanted to do more with their time."

She said the Senior Center aims all of its programs at developing learning by stimulating curiosity through classes, seminars, tours, music and art.

"Curiosity keeps you young," she said.

When she was approaching her 85th birthday, Thoits had another epiphany: "A lot of people start worrying too much as they get older. I wanted to start making memories for myself, but I also wanted to let people know that if I could do these things, they could too and make a difference in their lives."

So was born the parachute jumping three years ago. At 86, Thoits went parasailing over San Diego ("A little too passive," she said, laughing); at 87, she flew a Cessna over Catalina Island and landed it at Long Beach Airport ("I hadn't landed a plane in 50 years. Lord, help us," she said. "The landing was a little hard, but I did it); at 88, she did some crewing on a dragon boat.

She turns 89 on June 3 and hasn't decided what to do yet. "I just want to make it memorable," she said.

Thoits perhaps is looking beyond 89 a little to next year when she turns 90. That should be a doozy of a birthday. If you have any ideas for Thoits on her birthday celebrations or her brain development plans, you can reach her at the LBCC Pacific Coast Campus, 1305 E. Pacific Coast Highway, 562-938-3407, or email mthoits@lbcc.edu.

COD grad uses art to teach about Tuskegee Airmen

The woman in this story is an artist rather than a scientist, but she is someone who is very good at what she does, and people who are very good at what they do are good role models for everybody.

From DHHerald: COD grad uses art to teach about Tuskegee Airmen
Jacqueline Withers was an art student at College of DuPage when a friend asked if she had ever thought of making the Tuskegee Airmen a theme of one of her exhibits. Unfamiliar with the history of America's first black military pilots, Withers rented a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen and went to the library to do more research.

She was stunned at their bravery, the obstacles they overcame to become fighter pilots during World War II, and the racism they still faced when they returned.

“It was a part of black history that was not taught,” Withers said. “I wondered, ‘How many people don't know this about these guys.'”

Withers decided to help change that by starting the Tuskegee Airmen Mural Project. Then living in Westmont, she called schools and asked to work with students to paint the history of the black Americans who graduated from Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama. Two of those murals still hang in Westmont Junior High School and Downers Grove South High School.

Withers made it her personal goal to paint a Tuskegee Airmen mural in every state.

But she didn't stop with painting. Withers, who moved to Colorado in 2006, started the Take Flight Leadership Aviation/Bessie Coleman Fly Girl Chapter in Denver to encourage disadvantaged young people to follow their dreams, pursue careers in aviation and become leaders.

She recently brought five young women to Chicago to observe the 80th anniversary of the Bessie Coleman Flyover, honoring the first African-American woman to earn an international pilot's license. Coleman, who had moved to Chicago from Texas, died in a plane accident in 1926, but had dreamed of establishing an aviation school.

One of the young women who attended the flyover, Coraima Chavez, 16, said she wanted to fly for several years when she joined Take Flight Aviation Leadership last summer. Since then, she has attended ground school, gone up in the air with pilots and worked with others to help build a biplane.

She hopes to earn her pilot's license this summer.

“It has basically helped me think about my dream and how to achieve my dream to become a pilot,” she said. “It helped me become more confident in myself.”

Last fall, Chavez's essay on the Tuskegee Airmen made her one of the three winners in a national contest sponsored by Southwest Airlines. She said being involved in the flight program also has motivated her to get better grades.

“She (Withers) is the one who got me where I am today,” she said. Achieving dreams

Young people in the Take Flight Leadership Aviation/Bessie Coleman Fly Girl Chapter in Denver are required to maintain high grades and receive mentoring. They take training provided by the Experimental Aircraft Association's Young Eagles program and are eligible to test for a pilot's license at age 14.

“You can get your pilot's license before your driver's license,” Withers noted.

Participants as young as 9 may start in the program and pursue dreams other than becoming pilots, she said. She encourages them to become leaders and gives award for accomplishments such as serving as speakers at events. One won an EEA scholarship to attend aviation training in Oshkosh, Wis., this summer and a national Tuskegee Airmen art contest.

Withers estimates she has reached 25,000 young people through painting murals in schools and the Take Flight Aviation Leadership/Bessie Coleman Fly Girl Chapter.

“I've been able to reach the souls of children,” she said.

She received the National Youth Day 2010 Hero of the Year award from the Tuskegee Airmen, Inc. for her work and has met some of the original Tuskegee Airmen,

“My whole life opened up,” Withers said. “You read about history, but (when you meet the airmen) you see history.”

Since graduating from COD, Withers has earned a bachelor's degree from the Art Institute of Colorado, a master's degree in management and is working on a doctorate in organizational leadership. She works as a freelance artist and motivational speaker.

Withers said she realized while attending an event in which she had a prominent role that she was no longer the girl in the background she had been while growing up in a family of 12 children in Chicago.

“I wish my dad were here to see that,” she said. “My dad was my biggest person who inspired me. (He said), ‘You can do anything you want to do if you apply yourself.'”

Teacher and mentor

Withers also has received continuing support from Jennifer Hereth, an art professor at COD who seeks to instill in her students a sense of social consciousness. Withers had done art work, but not painted until Hereth encouraged her to take up the brush.

“If she sees your potential, she helps you bring it out,” Withers said. “I never thought I would be painting walls, murals. I wouldn't have if it hadn't been for her.”

Hereth said she recognized that Withers was a highly motivated artist with a personal vision. She encouraged her to use her art to put out a message from her heart.

“I am in awe of where she has taken that social consciousness,” Hereth said. “She has taken that step many artists dream of.”

Hereth has been able to channel financial support for Withers' work with youth through IArtists, a group of Chicago area artists who encourage art and social change.

Withers said funding is always a challenge. So far, she has painted Tuskegee Airmen murals in six states.

“The problem is getting to every state,” she said.

One challenge Withers has not taken up is learning to fly herself.

“The kids always tease me, ‘Miss Jacqueline, when are you going to learn to fly?'” she said. “I haven't had time.”

Learn more about Jacqueline Withers and her Tuskegee Airmen murals at www.artinstitutes.edu/alumni-success/jacqueline-withers-freelance-artist-and-motivational-speaker-spirit-within-art-work-3119713.aspx and takeflightleadershipavation.blogspot.com/2011/08/eyes-in-sky-murals-by-jacqueline.html

Sunburst Six: 1. The Sun part 3 (Scientific puzzles)

Theoretical problems
For many years the number of solar electron neutrinos detected on Earth was 1⁄3 to 1⁄2 of the number predicted by the standard solar model. This anomalous result was termed the solar neutrino problem. Theories proposed to resolve the problem either tried to reduce the temperature of the Sun's interior to explain the lower neutrino flux, or posited that electron neutrinos could oscillate—that is, change into undetectable tau and muon neutrinos as they traveled between the Sun and the Earth.

Several neutrino observatories were built in the 1980s to measure the solar neutrino flux as accurately as possible, including the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada and the Kamiokande laboratory in Japan. Results from these observatories eventually led to the discovery that neutrinos have a very small rest mass and do indeed oscillate.

Moreover, in 2001 the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory was able to detect all three types of neutrinos directly, and found that the Sun's total neutrino emission rate agreed with the Standard Solar Model, although depending on the neutrino energy as few as one-third of the neutrinos seen at Earth are of the electron type. This proportion agrees with that predicted by the Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein effect (also known as the matter effect), which describes neutrino oscillation in matter, and it is now considered a solved problem.

Coronal heating problem
The optical surface of the Sun (the photosphere) is known to have a temperature of approximately 6,000 K. Above it lies the solar corona, rising to a temperature of 1,000,000–2,000,000 K. The high temperature of the corona shows that it is heated by something other than direct heat conduction from the photosphere.

It is thought that the energy necessary to heat the corona is provided by turbulent motion in the convection zone below the photosphere, and two main mechanisms have been proposed to explain coronal heating. The first is wave heating, in which sound, gravitational or magnetohydrodynamic waves are produced by turbulence in the convection zone.

These waves travel upward and dissipate in the corona, depositing their energy in the ambient gas in the form of heat. The other is magnetic heating, in which magnetic energy is continuously built up by photospheric motion and released through magnetic reconnection in the form of large solar flares and myriad similar but smaller events—nanoflares.

Currently, it is unclear whether waves are an efficient heating mechanism. All waves except Alfvén waves have been found to dissipate or refract before reaching the corona. In addition, Alfvén waves do not easily dissipate in the corona. Current research focus has therefore shifted towards flare heating mechanisms.

Sunburst Six: The Sun Part 2 (Scientific Understanding)

Development of scientific understanding
In the early first millennium BCE, Babylonian astronomers observed that the Sun's motion along the ecliptic was not uniform, though they were unaware of why this was; it is today known that this is due to the Earth moving in an elliptic orbit around the Sun, with the Earth moving faster when it is nearer to the Sun at perihelion and moving slower when it is farther away at aphelion.

One of the first people to offer a scientific or philosophical explanation for the Sun was the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, who reasoned that it was a giant flaming ball of metal (rather than the chariot of Helios, the sun God as was the more common belief), and that the Moon reflected the light of the Sun.

For teaching this heresy, he was imprisoned by the authorities and sentenced to death, though he was later released through the intervention of Pericles (A prominent Athenian statesman).

Eratosthenes estimated the distance between the Earth and the Sun in the 3rd century BCE as "of stadia myriads 400 and 80000", the translation of which is ambiguous, implying either 4,080,000 stadia (755,000 km) or 804,000,000 stadia (148 to 153 million kilometers or 0.99 to 1.02 AU); the latter value is correct to within a few percent. In the 1st century CE, Ptolemy estimated the distance as 1,210 times the Earth radius, approximately 7.71 million kilometers (0.0515 AU).

The theory that the Sun is the center around which the planets move was first proposed by the ancient Greek Aristarchus of Samos in the 3rd century BCE, and later adopted by Seleucus of Seleucia. This largely philosophical view was developed into a fully predictive mathematical model of a heliocentric system in the 16th century by Nicolaus Copernicus.

In the early 17th century, the invention of the telescope permitted detailed observations of sunspots by Thomas Harriot, Galileo Galilei and other astronomers. Galileo made some of the first known telescopic observations of sunspots and posited that they were on the surface of the Sun rather than small objects passing between the Earth and the Sun. (Sunspots were also observed since the Han Dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE) by Chinese astronomers who maintained records of these observations for centuries. Averroes also provided a description of sunspots in the 12th century.)

Arabic astronomical contributions include Albatenius discovering that the direction of the Sun's eccentric is changing, and Ibn Yunus observing more than 10,000 entries for the Sun's position for many years using a large astrolabe.

The transit of Venus [across the sun] was first observed in 1032 by Persian astronomer and polymath Avicenna, who concluded that Venus is closer to the Earth than the Sun, while one of the first observations of the transit of Mercury was conducted by Ibn Bajjah in the 12th century.

In 1672 Giovanni Cassini and Jean Richer determined the distance to Mars and were thereby able to calculate the distance to the Sun. Isaac Newton observed the Sun's light using a prism, and showed that it was made up of light of many colors, while in 1800 William Herschel discovered infrared radiation beyond the red part of the solar spectrum.

The 19th century saw advancement in spectroscopic studies of the Sun; Joseph von Fraunhofer recorded more than 600 absorption lines in the spectrum, the strongest of which are still often referred to as Fraunhofer lines.

In the early years of the modern scientific era, the source of the Sun's energy was a significant puzzle. English scientist William Thomson, Lord Kelvin suggested that the Sun was a gradually cooling liquid body that was radiating an internal store of heat. Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz then proposed a gravitational contraction mechanism to explain the energy output.

Unfortunately the resulting age estimate was only 20 million years, well short of the time span of at least 300 million years suggested by some geological discoveries of that time. In 1890 Joseph Lockyer, who discovered helium in the solar spectrum, proposed a meteoritic hypothesis for the formation and evolution of the Sun.

Not until 1904 was a documented solution offered. Ernest Rutherford suggested that the Sun's output could be maintained by an internal source of heat, and suggested radioactive decay as the source. However, it would be Albert Einstein who would provide the essential clue to the source of the Sun's energy output with his mass-energy equivalence relation E = mc2.

In 1920, Sir Arthur Eddington proposed that the pressures and temperatures at the core of the Sun could produce a nuclear fusion reaction that merged hydrogen (protons) into helium nuclei, resulting in a production of energy from the net change in mass. The preponderance of hydrogen in the Sun was confirmed in 1925 by Cecilia Payne. The theoretical concept of fusion was developed in the 1930s by the astrophysicists Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Hans Bethe. Hans Bethe calculated the details of the two main energy-producing nuclear reactions that power the Sun.

Finally, a seminal paper was published in 1957 by Margaret Burbidge, entitled "Synthesis of the Elements in Stars". The paper demonstrated convincingly that most of the elements in the universe had been synthesized by nuclear reactions inside stars, some like our Sun.

If you can dream it, you *can* do it

But it won't happen if you just putz around and don't put in the work, which is what will turn your dreams into reality.

From Yahoo News: Paralyzed woman makes marathon history LONDON, ENGLAND - MAY 08: Claire Lomas (C) walks the last mile of the London Marathon on May 8, 2012 in London, England. Ms Lomas, who is paralysed from the waist down after a riding accident in 2007, has taken 16 days to complete the 26.2 mile route. Starting out with 36,000 other runners she has averaged 2 miles a day with the help of a bionic ReWalk suit

Science is still a final frontier for women

From SwissInfo.ch: Science is still a final frontier for women
Women continue to face serious obstacles when pursuing a scientific career in Switzerland, with the juggle of family life and research particularly difficult. Research shows women are underrepresented in scientific and technological fields, and the higher up the ladder one climbs, the fewer the women. The crux: having children is a big disadvantage when it comes to building up a scientist’s essential body of research. “Science is like a bottomless pit. You can put endless hours into it. And basically it’s all-consuming,” said Susan Gasser, a leading biologist awarded this year’s European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) Women in Science Award. “A single woman and single man pretty much start the race at the same point but it’s almost inevitable that most women have to take breaks for childbearing and raising. Then it’s all about a balancing act to stay at the forefront.” A woman will have to recognise from the outset that she “probably won’t be the best scientist or mother” she can be, Gasser (a mother of one) told swissinfo.ch. Instead she will have to compromise. Over the past 30 years Gasser has authored more than 200 scientific articles and reviews. She now heads the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel. The EMBO/FEBS award recognised her “exceptional achievements” as a female researcher in molecular biology and as a mentor. “I’ve received a few other awards but this one is special because it recognises something beyond just doing good science. They recognise that you have also been a role model and perhaps mentored other younger women in a field where women are obviously underrepresented.” " In Switzerland there’s still this idea that the mother has to stay with the child. And for a scientific career this is impossible. " Etiennette Verrey, president of the Swiss Federal Commission for Women’s Issues Obstacles A 2009 report for the European Union found that in Switzerland, women were underrepresented in technical sciences (27 per cent) and technology and IT (six per cent), but were overrepresented in social sciences (65 per cent) and health (86 per cent). Gender equality is currently the subject of a major national research programme in Switzerland. The so-called NRP 60 aims to identify the root causes of gender inequalities, review equality policy and come up with recommendations for sustainable policy and practices. A final report will be submitted to the government in 2014. One of the projects is looking at women in one of the most male-dominated professions: engineering. While there is a gender gap in this area globally, Switzerland is also below the European Union average when it comes to women studying engineering at university. The researchers are studying cultures within companies and the impact on women’s career chances. Case studies have been done at ten different Swiss firms, with line managers, human resources and male and female engineers all interviewed. The conclusion so far is that company culture has a “very strong influence” on job progression. “We have found that there are strong obstacles for women in the technical field at every stage of the career ladder,” one of the project leaders, Anja Umbach-Daniel, told swissinfo.ch. “What we see right now from line managers and HR is that they are not aware of the obstacles. They think there are no problems for women and they have equal opportunities, but on the other side we hear from the women themselves that they have problems climbing the career ladder.” The project aims to uncover exactly what these obstacles are. " It wasn’t a question for me, I wanted this. I wanted a scientific career and a family. " Susan Gasser

Support systems

It’s a similar picture in most EU countries. According to 2007 EU figures, only three countries – Latvia, Lithuania and Poland - had equal numbers of male and female scientists and engineers. On average, 32 per cent of scientists and engineers in the EU were women. Switzerland ranked at the bottom, with just 18 per cent of women in this category.

“One of the greatest problems in gender equality lies in the scientific and technical professions,” confirmed Etiennette Verrey, president of the Swiss Federal Commission for Women’s Issues.

She said that from a legal point of view women had equal rights in each field and “we’re on the right track” with the national research programme. But there was still a great need for a change in mentalities and in support systems.

Crèches have long waiting lists and Verrey called on both the state and companies to help with improving childcare facilities.

“In Switzerland there’s still this idea that the mother has to stay with the child. And for a scientific career this is impossible. Because if a woman leaves her professional life for one to two years, she virtually cannot return to it again. The reconciliation of work and family life is a very big problem,” she told swissinfo.ch.

Separating girls

People’s understanding of gender roles had to change too, she said. School programmes encouraging girls to do scientific subjects have had little success so far. One idea being discussed in Switzerland is for girls and boys to be taught separately in certain subjects, to remove the element of competition between the sexes.

“So girls do not have in mind that ‘I am a girl and therefore I’m bad at mathematics’.” In the United States, for example, there are elite women’s universities, Verrey added – something Switzerland does not have.

Having goals is also important, Susan Gasser noted. “Both my grandmother and my mother had careers. It wasn’t a question for me, I wanted this. I wanted a scientific career and a family.”

Learning how to balance family and work life can also have its positive side, she said, as it forces women to become more efficient, which in turn can help them become better scientists. Mentoring is also vital.

“The reason I think mentoring is important for women is that sometimes men don’t understand the pressures on a woman because they don’t know what it means to feel this split between family and career. There’s really strong pressure that can be put on you – are you being a good mother or not?”

Her advice to women embarking on a scientific career? Know what you want, “marry the right man”, be pragmatic and ready to sacrifice.

Sunburst Six: The Sun Part 3 (space missions)

Solar space missions
The first satellites designed to observe the Sun were NASA's Pioneers 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, which were launched between 1959 and 1968. These probes orbited the Sun at a distance similar to that of the Earth, and made the first detailed measurements of the solar wind and the solar magnetic field. Pioneer 9 operated for a particularly long time, transmitting data until May 1983.

In the 1970s, two Helios spacecraft and the Skylab Apollo Telescope Mount provided scientists with significant new data on solar wind and the solar corona. The Helios 1 and 2 probes were U.S.–German collaborations that studied the solar wind from an orbit carrying the spacecraft inside Mercury's orbit at perihelion. The Skylab space station, launched by NASA in 1973, included a solar observatory module called the Apollo Telescope Mount that was operated by astronauts resident on the station.

Skylab made the first time-resolved observations of the solar transition region and of ultraviolet emissions from the solar corona. Discoveries included the first observations of coronal mass ejections, then called "coronal transients", and of coronal holes, now known to be intimately associated with the solar wind.

In 1980, the Solar Maximum Mission was launched by NASA. This spacecraft was designed to observe gamma rays, X-rays and UV radiation from solar flares during a time of high solar activity and solar luminosity. Just a few months after launch, however, an electronics failure caused the probe to go into standby mode, and it spent the next three years in this inactive state.

In 1984 Space Shuttle Challenger mission STS-41C retrieved the satellite and repaired its electronics before re-releasing it into orbit. The Solar Maximum Mission subsequently acquired thousands of images of the solar corona before re-entering the Earth's atmosphere in June 1989.

Launched in 1991, Japan's Yohkoh (Sunbeam) satellite observed solar flares at X-ray wavelengths. Mission data allowed scientists to identify several different types of flares, and demonstrated that the corona away from regions of peak activity was much more dynamic and active than had previously been supposed. Yohkoh observed an entire solar cycle but went into standby mode when an annular eclipse in 2001 caused it to lose its lock on the Sun. It was destroyed by atmospheric re-entry in 2005.

One of the most important solar missions to date has been the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, jointly built by the European Space Agency and NASA and launched on 2 December 1995. Originally intended to serve a two-year mission, a mission extension through 2012 was approved in October 2009.

It has proven so useful that a follow-on mission, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, was launched in February 2010. Situated at the Lagrangian point between the Earth and the Sun (at which the gravitational pull from both is equal), SOHO has provided a constant view of the Sun at many wavelengths since its launch. Besides its direct solar observation, SOHO has enabled the discovery of a large number of comets, mostly tiny sungrazing comets which incinerate as they pass the Sun.

All these satellites have observed the Sun from the plane of the ecliptic, and so have only observed its equatorial regions in detail. The Ulysses probe was launched in 1990 to study the Sun's polar regions. It first travelled to Jupiter, to "slingshot" past the planet into an orbit which would take it far above the plane of the ecliptic. Serendipitously, it was well-placed to observe the collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994.

Once Ulysses was in its scheduled orbit, it began observing the solar wind and magnetic field strength at high solar latitudes, finding that the solar wind from high latitudes was moving at about 750 km/s which was slower than expected, and that there were large magnetic waves emerging from high latitudes which scattered galactic cosmic rays.

Elemental abundances in the photosphere are well known from spectroscopic studies, but the composition of the interior of the Sun is more poorly understood. A solar wind sample return mission, Genesis, was designed to allow astronomers to directly measure the composition of solar material. Genesis returned to Earth in 2004 but was damaged by a crash landing after its parachute failed to deploy on re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. Despite severe damage, some usable samples have been recovered from the spacecraft's sample return module and are undergoing analysis.

The Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) mission was launched in October 2006. Two identical spacecraft were launched into orbits that cause them to (respectively) pull further ahead of and fall gradually behind the Earth. This enables stereoscopic imaging of the Sun and solar phenomena, such as coronal mass ejections.

The Indian Space Research Organisation has scheduled launch of a 100 kg satellite named Aditya. The satellite will be launched in 2012, and will study the dynamic Solar corona.

How Girls Can Become Better Scientists

From FrogMom: How Girls Can Become Better Scientists
“I used to have a lot of overdue fines at the library,” said Dr Kim Ennico, NASA scientist and astrophysicist who now plays with lots of cool space toys. “I was asking lots of questions and no one would answer so I retreated to books and read about everything. I wanted to learn how things worked and loved reading detective mystery stories.” I interviewed Kim Ennico in 2009 for an article on space museums and today, her words resonate even more then they did back then. Our whole discussion on how girls have to learn a healthy curiosity and skepticism to move forward as scientists was a revelation. As my girls grew from toddlers to preschoolers and preschoolers to school kids, I recycled many of her ideas and today I’ve come to appreciate their full meaning. Here’s my take on how you can encourage little girls to be better scientists and challenge the gender stereotypes.

Sources To get girls interested in science, Dr Ennico gave me advice based on her educational work with the Santa Clara school district. She used to teach science to girl scouts using girl-friendly examples such as an infrared beauty salon or a spectometer as a rainbow catcher. Some of her ideas were re-inforced when I heard educator and psychologist JoAnn Deak talk about her book “Your Fantastic Elastic Brain: Stretch It, Shape It” in 2011. She talked about how girl brains and boy brains differ and discussed methods to help strengthen and improve areas of kids brains. I left with two copies of her book, have given it many times since, and apply her methods dutifully. I also use advice I heard at conferences on children’s books when people talked about math books for kids. last but not least, I’ve discussed this topic at length with friends and my dad who is a soil scientist. Do’s and Don’ts to Raise Better Scientists – Especially If You Have Daughters I would now like to share what I’ve learned because these tips really changed the way I interact with my girls on a daily basis. Note that this is not the Holy Gospel but a set of guidelines, often common sense, that works for my family. 1. Don’t Give The Answer Away Right Now To promote self-learning, parents should encourage their kids to try and figure out the answer to any question rather than give the answer right away. In JoAnn Deak’s words, “when a student raises his or her hand in class, all the other kids stop thinking.” It’s true, we’ve all experienced that. When I was a kid, even if the kid who replied was wrong, I had stopped using my brain the second I saw a hand up in the air. By prolonging the thinking process, kids can stretch and strengthen their brains like body muscles. As a mom eager to educate my girls, sometimes it’s hard to resist giving out the answer. Kids don’t think the way we do, sometimes they don’t get the answer right or they get distracted. Chill out, relax. As much as I can, I encourage them to think and figure out their own answer. Since we have a long commute to school, here’s an example taken from our car conversations. When they ask me from the back seat, “Mom, does a piggie like to eat rice with bananas?” or “Mom, why do volcanoes have to erupt?”, I respond them “What do you think?”. If they need hints to steer in the right direction, I ask them questions that I know they can answer. “Where do pigs live?” “What other kinds of animals live with pigs and what do you think they eat?” “What’s at the center of the earth?” “What comes out of volcanoes?” “What happens if I leave milk on the stove?” and so forth so they can move forward. I only want to be a tool in their reasoning process. 2. Do Teach Girls to Question Everything I know I’m going to get in trouble for writing this. Yes, I am but that’s OK. Girls should never ever ever accept an “Because I say so” to any question, however complex or embarrassing. There are age-appropriate ways to talk about everything from the our digestive system to death, reproduction or the big bang theory. Kids have brains, they can process much more than we give them credit for. “Because I told you so” is not scientific. It’s not backed by any hard evidence. It’s just highly subjective and therefore potentially faulty. Kim Ennico called that “healthy skepticism” and I completely agree. Whenever your daughter asks “Mom, Dad, why is ….?”, you just can’t answer “Because God made it” or “Because that’s the way it is.” That’s not helping, it’s a dead end.

If you don’t know the answer, be honest and offer to look up the answer later at home or at the library. Hey, nobody needs to know the answer to everything. I don’t know the first thing about submarines but I’m willing to take my girls on a tour of the USS Pompanito and get The First Book of Submarines at the library. That’s a start.

One last item, girl-specific. According to Kim Ennico “in mixed gender classes, it’s boys who ask more questions. Girls have to learn there’s nothing wrong about being curious.” What matters is that girls learn to not take everything for face value. If they do, it’s the end of her critical thinking and critical thinking is the key to learning.

3. Do Foster Persistence and Patience

Being obsessive pays off. In Kim Ennico’s words, “I kept my notes in order and I was stubborn.” As a little girl she was very shy yet she observed a caterpillar, wondered about it and went to the library to learn about it. Her approach was organized and she was never bored. I know that patience is a hard skill to learn for kids, especially nowadays when instant gratification is available at the tip of Amazon Prime or any Google research. My girls don’t like to wait but I teach them patience by giving them simple deadlines. “This weekend we are going on a long hike. After the hike you will be able to watch Superman.” I could tell them to watch the movie now if I wanted to, we have the DVD and they’ve done their homework. However I prefer to delay the reward so they learn that patience pays off.

As for being organized, we’re still working on that but my girls now prepare their clothes for the next school day on the night before and they recently fell in love with check lists of things to do.

4. Teach That Failure Can Lead to Good Results

Kids, it’s OK to fail. It’s actually frequent and normal. If you never fail, it means you never tried. The history of science is full of examples of accidental discoveries. Play-Doh was accidentally invented in 1955 by Joseph and Noah McVicker while trying to make a wallpaper cleaner. Saccharin, the sweetener in the pink packet, was discovered because chemist Constantin Fahlberg didn’t wash his hands after a day at the office. Radioactivity was discovered by accident in 1896 when Becquerel, a scientist fascinated by natural fluorescence and the X-ray, left his equipment wrapped up together in a drawer and realized that the uranium rock he had left in the drawer had imprinted itself on a photographic plate without being exposed to sunlight first.

When my girls discover – by accident – that they can mix baking soda and vinegar to make volcanoes in the kitchen, I’ll probably curse this theory and teach them the magic of the floor mop:)

In dusty library, a link to heroic past

From NewsTelegram.com: In dusty library, a link to heroic past
PROVIDENCE — Day after day, a tall, shy woman weaves her way unnoticed through the earnest and learned campus swirl of Brown University. She enters the hush of a library, then promptly vanishes from sight.

Down goes Marie Malchodi, 48, who attended but never graduated from Brown, down to the library's subterranean warrens, where she works as a "book conservation technician." She sweeps her long dark hair into a bun, pierces it with a paint brush, and starts her day, caring for ancient books and ephemera that are sensitive to the touch.

A few weeks ago, Malchodi opened yet another leather-bound book, one of more than 300,000 rare volumes in the hold of the John Hay Library. With surgical precision, she turned the pages of a medical text once owned by Solomon Drowne, class of '73 (1773, that is.). And there, in the back, she found a piece of paper depicting the baptism of Jesus. It was signed:

"P. Revere Sculpt."

Ye gods! Had Marie Malchodi, of Cranston, R.I., book conservation technician, just made contact with Paul Revere, of Boston, silversmith? Revere, who knew of the fiery need to share vital information, would have appreciated Malchodi's galloping reaction, which was:

''I have to show this to somebody."

Malchodi is more spiritually attuned to books than her Orwellian job title might suggest. She came to Brown as an undergraduate in the early 1980s, but life wound up demanding her study. Soon she was working in a College Hill bookstore rather than reading in a college library, and making cabinets rather than writing papers about her beloved Romantics.

One day she saw an advertisement for a bookbinding and conservation job at the university. She has been here ever since - though mostly underground - inspecting old books, submitting to their long-ago stories and vanishing to where now is then and then is now.

In the ensuing 20 years, gray has come to her hair and a husband and twin girls have come to her life, yet wasn't it all just yesterday? When Wordsworth thrilled her heart? When Wordsworth lived?

A year ago, Malchodi was assigned to check the condition of thousands of rare books about to be shipped to an off-campus annex. In a basement room made smaller and louder by the air ducts looming from the ceiling, she tended to her task, sitting on a stool set beside a collection of dusty, rolled-up maps, all needing to be vacuumed, and all with titles like "Madeira and Mamore Railway Plan of the Rio Madeira at San Antonio."

The job sometimes took longer than necessary, because of that tendency of hers to get lost in things: illustrations in children's books, brittle newspaper clippings, and, especially, handwritten notes from the long dead. She feels the rush of intimacy as the distance in time collapses.

Now here, on a small cart, were another 177 books, all from the collection of Drowne, a physician and polymath who distinguished himself during the American Revolution. "Watts's Logick." ''Kalm's Travels." ''Plague and Yellow Fever."

Next up: an 1811 edition of "The Modern Practice of Physic," by Dr. Robert Thomas, a champion of purgatives as a cure for disease. Malchodi examined the red leather cover, the gold tooling on the spine. Then she pulled out that piece of paper.

The engraving, titled "Buried With Him By Baptism," shows John the Baptist raising Jesus from the River Jordan under a blazing sun, while people in vaguely Colonial attire watch from shore. And in the lower right corner appears the name of an American Revolution icon.

Who knows how long this papery wisp lay hidden in the musty stacks at the century-old Hay Library? In the section reserved for the history of science. Near a microscope and a skull. Across from a copy of Darwin's monograph on the "sub-class Cirripedia" (Barnacles, that is.).

What Malchodi knew was that she had to sound the alarm. With some hesitancy - "because I don't want to bother her" - she approached the raised desk of Rachel Lapkin, a library materials conservator who was immersed in stabilizing the leather of an 18th century Chinese dictionary.

Lapkin, who actually enjoys her colleague's enthusiasm, studied the print and found it fascinating, even bizarre. "I think we should look into that," she said.

The basement brain trust decided that the print must be shown to Richard Noble, the rare books cataloger, whose office takes some doing to reach. So, with the discovery safely inside Thomas' celebration of purgatives, Malchodi began her journey through an underground labyrinth, carrying the volume as a deacon might carry the Bible.

Out of her basement work space and past some lockers. Past discarded wooden catalog cabinets. Down some steps to the subbasement. Past some metal book shelves and a "Do Not Remove" sign. Down more steps and through the tunnel that crosses beneath College Street. Up to Noble's office, in Cataloging and Acquisitions. Carefully carrying that Revere - if it was a Revere.

And Noble had stepped away for lunch.

An hour or so later, Malchodi returned. "She said, 'I found this,' and presented it to me with a big smile," Noble recalled. "She let me discover what was inside. She let me have that much fun."

Noble's first reaction was to say that the engraving was just crude enough to be a Revere. Then he held the engraving up to the light as a test. It had the faintly ribbed look of paper produced from the slurry pulp made of rags, signaling that it was mostly likely handmade paper from the 18th century.

Yes. A Revere.

This could very well mean that the patriot - who had nurtured t he seeds of rebellion with his engraving of the Boston Massacre of 1770 - had cut the scene into a flat copper plate; filled the grooves with ink, perhaps by pressing it in with the palm of his hand; wiped away the excess with circular sweeps of a small cloth; and used a hand-operated press to produce the engraving.

''That was a nice moment," Noble said.

It turned out that Malchodi had uncovered only the fifth known copy of this particular engraving, which is "a bit of a curiosity in Revere's work," according to Lauren Hewes, the curator of graphic arts at the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester, Mass. She said that while Revere carefully documented his prosperous and prolific career as an artisan, he made no mention of this piece, and so the exact date of the engraving is unclear.

''It sits outside of what we think of when we think of Paul Revere," she said. "It wasn't all patriotic topics - he did a lot more than that."

How the engraving came to be in the possession of Solomon Drowne is still being researched; his descendants have some theories. And its monetary worth is probably only a few thousand dollars, but that is hardly what matters.

''It's really a great moment," Hewes said. "That moment of discovery."

Malchodi made her discovery on a Thursday. On that Friday, she was back at work beneath the verdant Brown campus. Inspecting old books, vacuuming old maps, opening herself to time's collapse.

Sunburst Six: 1. The Sun part 2 (Info on the sun)

From Wikipedia
The Sun is the star at the center of our Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields. It has a diameter of about 1,392,000 km, about 109 times that of Earth, and its mass (about 2×1030 kilograms, 330,000 times that of Earth) accounts for about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System.

Chemically, about three quarters of the Sun's mass consists of hydrogen, while the rest is mostly helium. The remainder (1.69%, which nonetheless equals 5,628 times the mass of Earth) consists of heavier elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon and iron, among others.

The Sun's stellar classification, based on spectral class, is G2V, and is informally designated as a yellow dwarf, because its visible radiation is most intense in the yellow-green portion of the spectrum and although its color is white, from the surface of the Earth it may appear yellow because of atmospheric scattering of blue light.

In the spectral class label, G2 indicates its surface temperature of approximately 5778 K (5505 °C), and V indicates that the Sun, like most stars, is a main-sequence star, and thus generates its energy by nuclear fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium. In its core, the Sun fuses 620 million metric tons of hydrogen each second.

Once regarded by astronomers as a small and relatively insignificant star, the Sun is now thought to be brighter than about 85% of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy, most of which are red dwarfs.

The absolute magnitude of the Sun is +4.83; however, as the star closest to Earth, the Sun is the brightest object in the sky with an apparent magnitude of −26.74. The Sun's hot corona continuously expands in space creating the solar wind, a stream of charged particles that extends to the heliopause at roughly 100 astronomical units. The bubble in the interstellar medium formed by the solar wind, the heliosphere, is the largest continuous structure in the Solar System.

The Sun is currently traveling through the Local Interstellar Cloud in the Local Bubble zone, within the inner rim of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Of the 50 nearest stellar systems within 17 light-years from Earth (the closest being a red dwarf named Proxima Centauri at approximately 4.2 light years away), the Sun ranks fourth in mass.

The Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way at a distance of approximately 24,000–26,000 light years from the galactic center, completing one clockwise orbit, as viewed from the galactic north pole, in about 225–250 million years. Since our galaxy is moving with respect to the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) in the direction of the constellation Hydra with a speed of 550 km/s, the Sun's resultant velocity with respect to the CMB is about 370 km/s in the direction of the constellation of Crater or Leo.

The mean distance of the Sun from the Earth is approximately 149.6 million kilometers (1 AU), though the distance varies as the Earth moves from perihelion in January to aphelion in July. At this average distance, light travels from the Sun to Earth in about 8 minutes and 19 seconds. The energy of this sunlight supports almost all life on Earth by photosynthesis, and drives Earth's climate and weather. The enormous effect of the Sun on the Earth has been recognized since prehistoric times, and the Sun has been regarded by some cultures as a deity.

An accurate scientific understanding of the Sun developed slowly, and as recently as the 19th century prominent scientists had little knowledge of the Sun's physical composition and source of energy. This understanding is still developing; there are a number of present-day anomalies in the Sun's behavior that remain unexplained.

Name and etymology
The English proper noun sun developed from Old English sunne (around 725, attested in Beowulf [a narrative poem]), and may be related to "south". Cognates to English "sun" appear in other Germanic languages, including Old Frisian sunne, sonne ("sun"), Old Saxon sunna, Middle Dutch sonne, modern Dutch zon, Old High German sunna, modern German Sonne, Old Norse sunna, and Gothic sunnō. All Germanic terms for the Sun stem from Proto-Germanic *sunnōn.

In relation, the Sun is personified as a goddess in Germanic paganism; Sól/Sunna. Scholars theorize that the Sun, as Germanic goddess, may represent an extension of an earlier Proto-Indo-European sun deity due to Indo-European linguistic connections between Old Norse Sól, Sanskrit Surya, Gaulish Sulis, Lithuanian Saulė, and Slavic Solnitse.

The English weekday name Sunday is attested in Old English (Sunnandæg; "Sun's day", from before 700) and is ultimately a result of a Germanic interpretation of Latin dies solis, itself a translation of the Greek heméra helíou.

The Latin name for the star, Sol, is widely known but is not common in general English language use; the adjectival form is the related word solar. The term sol is also used by planetary astronomers to refer to the duration of a solar day on another planet, such as Mars (and by science fiction authors writing of characters in outer space who refer to Sol as their "home" sun).

A mean Earth solar day is approximately 24 hours, while a mean Martian 'sol' is 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35.244 seconds.

Characteristics
An illustration of the structure of the Sun:
1. Core
2. Radiative zone
3. Convective zone
4. Photosphere
5. Chromosphere
6. Corona
7. Sunspot
8. Granules
9. Prominence

The Sun is a G-type main-sequence star comprising about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System. It is a near-perfect sphere, with an oblateness estimated at about 9 millionths, which means that its polar diameter differs from its equatorial diameter by only 10 km. As the Sun consists of a plasma and is not solid, it rotates faster at its equator than at its poles. This behavior is known as differential rotation, and is caused by convection in the Sun and the movement of mass, due to steep temperature gradients from the core outwards.

This mass carries a portion of the Sun’s counter-clockwise angular momentum, as viewed from the ecliptic north pole, thus redistributing the angular velocity. The period of this actual rotation is approximately 25.6 days at the equator and 33.5 days at the poles. However, due to our constantly changing vantage point from the Earth as it orbits the Sun, the apparent rotation of the star at its equator is about 28 days.

The centrifugal effect of this slow rotation is 18 million times weaker than the surface gravity at the Sun's equator. The tidal effect of the planets is even weaker, and does not significantly affect the shape of the Sun.

The Sun is a Population I, or heavy element-rich, star. The formation of the Sun may have been triggered by shockwaves from one or more nearby supernovae. This is suggested by a high abundance of heavy elements in the Solar System, such as gold and uranium, relative to the abundances of these elements in so-called Population II (heavy element-poor) stars. These elements could most plausibly have been produced by endergonic nuclear reactions during a supernova, or by transmutation through neutron absorption inside a massive second-generation star.

The Sun does not have a definite boundary as rocky planets do, and in its outer parts the density of its gases drops exponentially with increasing distance from its center. Nevertheless, it has a well-defined interior structure, described below. The Sun's radius is measured from its center to the edge of the photosphere. This is simply the layer above which the gases are too cool or too thin to radiate a significant amount of light, and is therefore the surface most readily visible to the naked eye.

The solar interior is not directly observable, and the Sun itself is opaque to electromagnetic radiation. However, just as seismology uses waves generated by earthquakes to reveal the interior structure of the Earth, the discipline of helioseismology makes use of pressure waves (infrasound) traversing the Sun's interior to measure and visualize the star's inner structure.

Computer modeling of the Sun is also used as a theoretical tool to investigate its deeper layers.

Core
The core of the Sun is considered to extend from the center to about 20–25% of the solar radius. It has a density of up to 150 g/cm3 (about 150 times the density of water) and a temperature of close to 15.7 million kelvin (K). By contrast, the Sun's surface temperature is approximately 5,800 K. Recent analysis of SOHO mission data favors a faster rotation rate in the core than in the rest of the radiative zone.

Through most of the Sun's life, energy is produced by nuclear fusion through a series of steps called the p–p (proton–proton) chain; this process converts hydrogen into helium. Only 0.8% of the energy generated in the Sun comes from the CNO cycle.

The core is the only region in the Sun that produces an appreciable amount of thermal energy through fusion; inside 24% of the Sun's radius, 99% of the power has been generated, and by 30% of the radius, fusion has stopped nearly entirely. The rest of the star is heated by energy that is transferred outward from the core and the layers just outside. The energy produced by fusion in the core must then travel through many successive layers to the solar photosphere before it escapes into space as sunlight or kinetic energy of particles.

The proton–proton chain occurs around 9.2×1037 times each second in the core of the Sun. Since this reaction uses four free protons (hydrogen nuclei), it converts about 3.7×1038 protons to alpha particles (helium nuclei) every second (out of a total of ~8.9×1056 free protons in the Sun), or about 6.2×1011 kg per second.

Since fusing hydrogen into helium releases around 0.7% of the fused mass as energy, the Sun releases energy at the mass-energy conversion rate of 4.26 million metric tons per second, 384.6 yotta watts (3.846×1026 W), or 9.192×1010 megatons of TNT per second. This mass is not destroyed to create the energy, rather, the mass is carried away in the radiated energy, as described by the concept of mass-energy equivalence.

The power production by fusion in the core varies with distance from the solar center. At the center of the Sun, theoretical models estimate it to be approximately 276.5 watts/m3, a power production density that more nearly approximates reptile metabolism than a thermonuclear bomb.

Peak power production in the Sun has been compared to the volumetric heats generated in an active compost heap. The tremendous power output of the Sun is not due to its high power per volume, but instead due to its large size.

The fusion rate in the core is in a self-correcting equilibrium: a slightly higher rate of fusion would cause the core to heat up more and expand slightly against the weight of the outer layers, reducing the fusion rate and correcting the perturbation; and a slightly lower rate would cause the core to cool and shrink slightly, increasing the fusion rate and again reverting it to its present level.

The gamma rays (high-energy photons) released in fusion reactions are absorbed in only a few millimeters of solar plasma and then re-emitted again in random direction and at slightly lower energy. Therefore it takes a long time for radiation to reach the Sun's surface. Estimates of the photon travel time range between 10,000 and 170,000 years. In contrast, it takes only 2.3 seconds for the neutrinos, which account for about 2% of the total energy production of the Sun, to reach the surface.

Since energy transport in the Sun is a process which involves photons in thermodynamic equilibrium with matter, the time scale of energy transport in the Sun is longer, on the order of 30,000,000 years. This is the time it would take the Sun to return to a stable state if the rate of energy generation in its core were suddenly to be changed.

After a final trip through the convective outer layer to the transparent surface of the photosphere, the photons escape as visible light. Each gamma ray in the Sun's core is converted into several million photons of visible light before escaping into space. Neutrinos are also released by the fusion reactions in the core, but unlike photons they rarely interact with matter, so almost all are able to escape the Sun immediately.

For many years measurements of the number of neutrinos produced in the Sun were lower than theories predicted by a factor of 3. This discrepancy was resolved in 2001 through the discovery of the effects of neutrino oscillation: the Sun emits the number of neutrinos predicted by the theory, but neutrino detectors were missing 2⁄3 of them because the neutrinos had changed flavor by the time they were detected.

Radiative zone
From about 0.25 to about 0.7 solar radii, solar material is hot and dense enough that thermal radiation is sufficient to transfer the intense heat of the core outward. This zone is free of thermal convection; while the material gets cooler from 7 to about 2 million kelvin with increasing altitude, this temperature gradient is less than the value of the adiabatic lapse rate and hence cannot drive convection.

Energy is transferred by radiation—ions of hydrogen and helium emit photons, which travel only a brief distance before being reabsorbed by other ions. The density drops a hundredfold (from 20 g/cm3 to only 0.2 g/cm3) from the bottom to the top of the radiative zone.

The radiative zone and the convection form a transition layer, the tachocline. This is a region where the sharp regime change between the uniform rotation of the radiative zone and the differential rotation of the convection zone results in a large shear—a condition where successive horizontal layers slide past one another.

The fluid motions found in the convection zone above, slowly disappear from the top of this layer to its bottom, matching the calm characteristics of the radiative zone on the bottom. Presently, it is hypothesized that a magnetic dynamo within this layer generates the Sun's magnetic field.

Convective zone
In the Sun's outer layer, from its surface down to approximately 200,000 km (or 70% of the solar radius), the solar plasma is not dense enough or hot enough to transfer the thermal energy of the interior outward through radiation; in other words it is opaque enough. As a result, thermal convection occurs as thermal columns carry hot material to the surface (photosphere) of the Sun. Once the material cools off at the surface, it plunges downward to the base of the convection zone, to receive more heat from the top of the radiative zone. At the visible surface of the Sun, the temperature has dropped to 5,700 K and the density to only 0.2 g/m3 (about 1/6,000th the density of air at sea level).

The thermal columns in the convection zone form an imprint on the surface of the Sun as the solar granulation and supergranulation. The turbulent convection of this outer part of the solar interior causes a "small-scale" dynamo that produces magnetic north and south poles all over the surface of the Sun. The Sun's thermal columns are Bénard cells and therefore tend to be hexagonal prisms.

Photosphere
The effective temperature, or black body temperature, of the Sun (5777 K) is the temperature a black body of the same size must have to yield the same total emissive power.

The visible surface of the Sun, the photosphere, is the layer below which the Sun becomes opaque to visible light. Above the photosphere visible sunlight is free to propagate into space, and its energy escapes the Sun entirely. The change in opacity is due to the decreasing amount of H− ions, which absorb visible light easily. Conversely, the visible light we see is produced as electrons react with hydrogen atoms to produce H− ions.

The photosphere is tens to hundreds of kilometers thick, being slightly less opaque than air on Earth. Because the upper part of the photosphere is cooler than the lower part, an image of the Sun appears brighter in the center than on the edge or limb of the solar disk, in a phenomenon known as limb darkening. Sunlight has approximately a black-body spectrum that indicates its temperature is about 6,000 K, interspersed with atomic absorption lines from the tenuous layers above the photosphere. The photosphere has a particle density of ~1023 m−3 (this is about 0.37% of the particle number per volume of Earth's atmosphere at sea level; however, photosphere particles are electrons and protons, so the average particle in air is 58 times as heavy).

During early studies of the optical spectrum of the photosphere, some absorption lines were found that did not correspond to any chemical elements then known on Earth. In 1868, Norman Lockyer hypothesized that these absorption lines were because of a new element which he dubbed helium, after the Greek Sun god Helios. It was not until 25 years later that helium was isolated on Earth.

Atmosphere
During a total solar eclipse, the solar corona can be seen with the naked eye, during the brief period of totality.

The parts of the Sun above the photosphere are referred to collectively as the solar atmosphere. They can be viewed with telescopes operating across the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio through visible light to gamma rays, and comprise five principal zones: the temperature minimum, the chromosphere, the transition region, the corona, and the heliosphere.

The heliosphere, which may be considered the tenuous outer atmosphere of the Sun, extends outward past the orbit of Pluto to the heliopause, where it forms a sharp shock front boundary with the interstellar medium. The chromosphere, transition region, and corona are much hotter than the surface of the Sun. The reason has not been conclusively proven; evidence suggests that Alfvén waves may have enough energy to heat the corona.

The coolest layer of the Sun is a temperature minimum region about 500 km above the photosphere, with a temperature of about 4,100 K. This part of the Sun is cool enough to support simple molecules such as carbon monoxide and water, which can be detected by their absorption spectra.

Above the temperature minimum layer is a layer about 2,000 km thick, dominated by a spectrum of emission and absorption lines. It is called the chromosphere from the Greek root chroma, meaning color, because the chromosphere is visible as a colored flash at the beginning and end of total eclipses of the Sun.

The temperature in the chromosphere increases gradually with altitude, ranging up to around 20,000 K near the top.

In the upper part of chromosphere helium becomes partially ionized.

Above the chromosphere, in a thin (about 200 km) transition region, the temperature rises rapidly from around 20,000 K in the upper chromosphere to coronal temperatures closer to 1,000,000 K. The temperature increase is facilitated by the full ionization of helium in the transition region, which significantly reduces radiative cooling of the plasma.

The transition region does not occur at a well-defined altitude. Rather, it forms a kind of nimbus around chromospheric features such as spicules and filaments, and is in constant, chaotic motion. The transition region is not easily visible from Earth's surface, but is readily observable from space by instruments sensitive to the extreme ultraviolet portion of the spectrum.

The corona is the extended outer atmosphere of the Sun, which is much larger in volume than the Sun itself. The corona continuously expands into space forming the solar wind, which fills all the Solar System. The low corona, near the surface of the Sun, has a particle density around 1015–1016 m−3. The average temperature of the corona and solar wind is about 1,000,000–2,000,000 K; however, in the hottest regions it is 8,000,000–20,000,000 K. While no complete theory yet exists to account for the temperature of the corona, at least some of its heat is known to be from magnetic reconnection.

The heliosphere, which is the cavity around the Sun filled with the solar wind plasma, extends from approximately 20 solar radii (0.1 AU) to the outer fringes of the Solar System. Its inner boundary is defined as the layer in which the flow of the solar wind becomes superalfvénic—that is, where the flow becomes faster than the speed of Alfvén waves.Turbulence and dynamic forces outside this boundary cannot affect the shape of the solar corona within, because the information can only travel at the speed of Alfvén waves.

The solar wind travels outward continuously through the heliosphere, forming the solar magnetic field into a spiral shape, until it impacts the heliopause more than 50 AU from the Sun. In December 2004, the Voyager 1 probe passed through a shock front that is thought to be part of the heliopause. Both of the Voyager probes have recorded higher levels of energetic particles as they approach the boundary.

Magnetic field
The heliospheric current sheet extends to the outer reaches of the Solar System, and results from the influence of the Sun's rotating magnetic field on the plasma in the interplanetary medium.

The Sun is a magnetically active star. It supports a strong, changing magnetic field that varies year-to-year and reverses direction about every eleven years around solar maximum. The Sun's magnetic field leads to many effects that are collectively called solar activity, including sunspots on the surface of the Sun, solar flares, and variations in solar wind that carry material through the Solar System.

Effects of solar activity on Earth include auroras at moderate to high latitudes, and the disruption of radio communications and electric power. Solar activity is thought to have played a large role in the formation and evolution of the Solar System. Solar activity changes the structure of Earth's outer atmosphere.

All matter in the Sun is in the form of gas and plasma because of its high temperatures. This makes it possible for the Sun to rotate faster at its equator (about 25 days) than it does at higher latitudes (about 35 days near its poles). The differential rotation of the Sun's latitudes causes its magnetic field lines to become twisted together over time, causing magnetic field loops to erupt from the Sun's surface and trigger the formation of the Sun's dramatic sunspots and solar prominences (see magnetic reconnection). This twisting action creates the solar dynamo and an 11-year solar cycle of magnetic activity as the Sun's magnetic field reverses itself about every 11 years.

The solar magnetic field extends well beyond the Sun itself. The magnetized solar wind plasma carries Sun's magnetic field into the space forming what is called the interplanetary magnetic field.

Since the plasma can only move along the magnetic field lines, the interplanetary magnetic field is initially stretched radially away from the Sun. Because the fields above and below the solar equator have different polarities pointing towards and away from the Sun, there exists a thin current layer in the solar equatorial plane, which is called the heliospheric current sheet. At the large distances the rotation of the Sun twists the magnetic field and the current sheet into the Archimedean spiral like structure called the Parker spiral.

The interplanetary magnetic field is much stronger than the dipole component of the solar magnetic field. The Sun's 50–400 μT (in the photosphere) magnetic dipole field reduces with the cube of the distance to about 0.1 nT at the distance of the Earth. However, according to spacecraft observations the interplanetary field at the Earth's location is about 100 times greater at around 5 nT.

Chemical composition
The Sun is composed primarily of the chemical elements hydrogen and helium; they account for 74.9% and 23.8% of the mass of the Sun in the photosphere, respectively. All heavier elements, called metals in astronomy, account for less than 2% of the mass. The most abundant metals are oxygen (roughly 1% of the Sun's mass), carbon (0.3%), neon (0.2%), and iron (0.2%).

The Sun inherited its chemical composition from the interstellar medium out of which it formed: the hydrogen and helium in the Sun were produced by Big Bang nucleosynthesis. The metals were produced by stellar nucleosynthesis in generations of stars which completed their stellar evolution and returned their material to the interstellar medium before the formation of the Sun.

The chemical composition of the photosphere is normally considered representative of the composition of the primordial Solar System. However, since the Sun formed, the helium and heavy elements have settled out of the photosphere. Therefore, the photosphere now contains slightly less helium and only 84% of the heavy elements than the protostellar Sun did; the protostellar Sun was 71.1% hydrogen, 27.4% helium, and 1.5% metals.

In the inner portions of the Sun, nuclear fusion has modified the composition by converting hydrogen into helium, so the innermost portion of the Sun is now roughly 60% helium, with the metal abundance unchanged. Because the interior of the Sun is radiative, not convective, none of the fusion products from the core have risen to the photosphere.

The solar heavy-element abundances described above are typically measured both using spectroscopy of the Sun's photosphere and by measuring abundances in meteorites that have never been heated to melting temperatures. These meteorites are thought to retain the composition of the protostellar Sun and thus not affected by settling of heavy elements. The two methods generally agree well.

Singly ionized iron group elements
In the 1970s, much research focused on the abundances of iron group elements in the Sun. Although significant research was done, the abundance determination of some iron group elements (e.g., cobalt and manganese) was still difficult at least as far as 1978 because of their hyperfine structures.

The first largely complete set of oscillator strengths of singly ionized iron group elements were made available first in the 1960s, and improved oscillator strengths were computed in 1976. In 1978 the abundances of singly ionized elements of the iron group were derived.

Solar and planetary mass fractionation relationship
Various authors have considered the existence of a mass fractionation relationship between the isotopic compositions of solar and planetary noble gases, for example correlations between isotopic compositions of planetary and solar neon and xenon.

Nevertheless, the belief that the whole Sun has the same composition as the solar atmosphere was still widespread, at least until 1983.

In 1983, it was claimed that it was the fractionation in the Sun itself that caused the fractionation relationship between the isotopic compositions of planetary and solar wind implanted noble gases.

Solar cycles
When observing the Sun with appropriate filtration, the most immediately visible features are usually its sunspots, which are well-defined surface areas that appear darker than their surroundings because of lower temperatures. Sunspots are regions of intense magnetic activity where convection is inhibited by strong magnetic fields, reducing energy transport from the hot interior to the surface. The magnetic field causes strong heating in the corona, forming active regions that are the source of intense solar flares and coronal mass ejections.

The largest sunspots can be tens of thousands of kilometers across. The number of sunspots visible on the Sun is not constant, but varies over an 11-year cycle known as the solar cycle. At a typical solar minimum, few sunspots are visible, and occasionally none at all can be seen. Those that do appear are at high solar latitudes.

As the sunspot cycle progresses, the number of sunspots increases and they move closer to the equator of the Sun, a phenomenon described by Spörer's law. Sunspots usually exist as pairs with opposite magnetic polarity. The magnetic polarity of the leading sunspot alternates every solar cycle, so that it will be a north magnetic pole in one solar cycle and a south magnetic pole in the next.
History of the number of observed sunspots during the last 250 years, which shows the ~11-year solar cycle

The solar cycle has a great influence on space weather, and is a significant influence on the Earth's climate since luminosity has a direct relationship with magnetic activity. Solar activity minima tend to be correlated with colder temperatures, and longer than average solar cycles tend to be correlated with hotter temperatures. In the 17th century, the solar cycle appeared to have stopped entirely for several decades; few sunspots were observed during this period. During this era, known as the Maunder minimum or Little Ice Age, Europe experienced unusually cold temperatures.

Earlier extended minima have been discovered through analysis of tree rings and appear to have coincided with lower-than-average global temperatures.

Possible long-term cycle
A recent theory claims that there are magnetic instabilities in the core of the Sun that cause fluctuations with periods of either 41,000 or 100,000 years. These could provide a better explanation of the ice ages than the Milankovitch cycles.

Life cycle
The Sun was formed about 4.57 billion years ago from the collapse of part of a giant molecular cloud that consisted mostly of hydrogen and helium and which probably gave birth to many other stars. This age is estimated using computer models of stellar evolution and through nucleocosmochronology (nucleo-cosmo-chronology).

The result is consistent with the radiometric date of the oldest Solar System material, at 4.567 billion years ago. Studies of ancient meteorites reveal traces of stable daughter nuclei of short-lived isotopes, such as iron-60, that only form in exploding, short-lived stars. This indicates that one or more supernovae must have occurred near the location where the Sun formed. A shock wave from a nearby supernova would have triggered the formation of the Sun by compressing the gases within the molecular cloud, and causing certain regions to collapse under their own gravity.

As one fragment of the cloud collapsed it also began to rotate due to conservation of angular momentum and heat up with the increasing pressure. Much of the mass became concentrated in the center, while the rest flattened out into a disk which would become the planets and other solar system bodies. Gravity and pressure within the core of the cloud generated a lot of heat as it accreted more gas from the surrounding disk, eventually triggering nuclear fusion. Thus, our Sun was born.

The Sun is about halfway through its main-sequence evolution, during which nuclear fusion reactions in its core fuse hydrogen into helium. Each second, more than four million tonnes of matter are converted into energy within the Sun's core, producing neutrinos and solar radiation. At this rate, the Sun has so far converted around 100 Earth-masses of matter into energy. The Sun will spend a total of approximately 10 billion years as a main-sequence star.

The Sun does not have enough mass to explode as a supernova. Instead, in about 5 billion years, it will enter a red giant phase. Its outer layers will expand as the hydrogen fuel at the core is consumed and the core will contract and heat up. Hydrogen fusion will continue along a shell surrounding a helium core, which will steadily expand as more helium is produced. Once the core temperature reaches around 100 million kelvins, helium fusion at the core will begin producing carbon, and the Sun will enter the asymptotic giant branch phase.

Following the red giant phase, intense thermal pulsations will cause the Sun to throw off its outer layers, forming a planetary nebula. The only object that will remain after the outer layers are ejected is the extremely hot stellar core, which will slowly cool and fade as a white dwarf over many billions of years. This stellar evolution scenario is typical of low- to medium-mass stars.

Earth's fate
Earth's ultimate fate is precarious. As a red giant, the Sun will have a maximum radius beyond the Earth's current orbit, 1 AU (1.5×1011 m), 250 times the present radius of the Sun.

However, by the time it is an asymptotic giant branch star, the Sun will have lost roughly 30% of its present mass due to a stellar wind, so the orbits of the planets will move outward. If it were only for this, Earth would probably be spared, but new research suggests that Earth will be swallowed by the Sun owing to tidal interactions.

Even if Earth should escape incineration in the Sun, still all its water will be boiled away and most of its atmosphere will escape into space. Even during its current life in the main sequence, the Sun is gradually becoming more luminous (about 10% every 1 billion years), and its surface temperature is slowly rising. The Sun used to be fainter in the past, which is possibly the reason life on Earth has only existed for about 1 billion years on land. The increase in solar temperatures is such that in about another billion years the surface of the Earth will likely become too hot for liquid water to exist, ending all terrestrial life.

Sunlight
Sunlight is Earth's primary source of energy. The solar constant is the amount of power that the Sun deposits per unit area that is directly exposed to sunlight. The solar constant is equal to approximately 1,368 W/m2 (watts per square meter) at a distance of one astronomical unit (AU) from the Sun (that is, on or near Earth).

Sunlight on the surface of Earth is attenuated by the Earth's atmosphere so that less power arrives at the surface—closer to 1,000 W/m2 in clear conditions when the Sun is near the zenith.

Solar energy can be harnessed by a variety of natural and synthetic processes—photosynthesis by plants captures the energy of sunlight and converts it to chemical form (oxygen and reduced carbon compounds), while direct heating or electrical conversion by solar cells are used by solar power equipment to generate electricity or to do other useful work, sometimes employing concentrating solar power (that it is measured in suns). The energy stored in petroleum and other fossil fuels was originally converted from sunlight by photosynthesis in the distant past.

Motion and location within the galaxy
The Sun lies close to the inner rim of the Milky Way Galaxy's Orion Arm, in the Local Fluff or the Gould Belt, at a hypothesized distance of 7.5–8.5 kpc (25,000–28,000 lightyears) from the Galactic Center, contained within the Local Bubble, a space of rarefied hot gas, possibly produced by the supernova remnant, Geminga. The distance between the local arm and the next arm out, the Perseus Arm, is about 6,500 light-years. The Sun, and thus the Solar System, is found in what scientists call the galactic habitable zone.

The Apex of the Sun's Way, or the solar apex, is the direction that the Sun travels through space in the Milky Way, relative to other nearby stars. The general direction of the Sun's galactic motion is towards the star Vega in the constellation of Lyra at an angle of roughly 60 sky degrees to the direction of the Galactic Center.

The Sun's orbit around the Galaxy is expected to be roughly elliptical with the addition of perturbations due to the galactic spiral arms and non-uniform mass distributions. In addition the Sun oscillates up and down relative to the galactic plane approximately 2.7 times per orbit. It has been argued that the Sun's passage through the higher density spiral arms often coincides with mass extinctions on Earth, perhaps due to increased impact events.

It takes the Solar System about 225–250 million years to complete one orbit of the galaxy (a galactic year), so it is thought to have completed 20–25 orbits during the lifetime of the Sun. The orbital speed of the Solar System about the center of the Galaxy is approximately 251 km/s. At this speed, it takes around 1,190 years for the Solar System to travel a distance of 1 light-year, or 7 days to travel 1 AU.

The Sun's motion about the centre of mass of the Solar System is complicated by perturbations from the planets. Every few hundred years this motion switches between prograde and retrograde.