Aug 19
A monster truck rally rocked the Montgomery County Fairgrounds Thursday, Aug. 16.
Aug 19
Between June 2011 and June 2012 the nation added more than 1.7 million jobs. At the same time, the number of government jobs fell by more 200,000. While the national economy has improved since the Great Recession, a number of state economies continue to struggle. In response to a stalled recovery and shifting political pressure, many states are doing the unthinkable: cutting government jobs.
Aug 19
If you’re living for the weekend largely because it’s pay day, you’re not alone: While fewer people are dependent on their next paycheck to make ends meet this year, more people in their 40s and 50s are living paycheck to paycheck compared to younger adults, according to a new survey.
CareerBuilder, the nation’s largest online job site, found that 43 percent of people between the ages of 45 and 54 reported they were living paycheck to paycheck to make ends meet in a recent survey of more than 3,800 full-time employees, the highest share of any age group. About one-third of people over age 55 reported living paycheck to paycheck. On the bright side: the share of total workers who “usually or always live paycheck to paycheck” — 40 percent — has fallen 46 percent in 2008, CareerBuilder found.
So why would the 45-to-54 cohort be the hardest pressed when it comes to making ends meet? There’s the squeeze of supporting children and family (one survey found that 90 percent of boomers shoulder this load) and the fact that a quarter of Americans age 50 and up used up all of their savings during the recession years of 2007 through 2009. Health also affects one’s ability to make ends meet. Injury and illness are the biggest causes of personal debt for 40- to 59-year-olds, according to an AOL Jobs article.
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More on Unemployment
Aug 19
CHICAGO — With no physical evidence tying Drew Peterson to the death of his third wife and so much of the case hinging on what she said before she died and what his next wife said before she vanished, it was a certainty that his trial would be unlike anything ever seen in Illinois and perhaps in the country.
But nobody expected what unfolded in the first three weeks of the trial: prosecutors made a series of blunders that prompted the judge to consider at least three defense motions for a mistrial and has some legal experts wondering just how much trust is left.
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More on Drew Peterson
Aug 19
By: Charles Q. Choi
Published: 08/16/2012 02:54 PM EDT on SPACE.com
In a strange twist of solar physics, the shape of our sun is rounder than previously thought, yet at the same time, it is also flatter — or squashed — more often, making the star wider at the middle than at its poles, scientists say.
The findings, announced Aug. 16, raise new mysteries about activity in the interior ofthe sun, researchers added.
The sun goes through rhythmic changes in activity. During these approximately 11-year-long solar cycles, the number of sunspots on the surface of the sun can rise and fall dramatically.
What shape, our star?
Until now, astronomers had presumed the shape of the sun changed along with this cycle. The flow of matter in the sun’s interior and atmosphere is thought to shift over time due to the tumultuous magnetic activity accompanying the solar cycle, which in turn would transform the sun’s shape.
"So far, just about anything we measure with sufficient accuracy about the sun ends up varying with the 11-year sunspot rhythm," study lead author Jeffrey Kuhn, a physicist and solar researcher at the University of Hawaii in Pukalani, told SPACE.com. [Photos: Views of the Sun from Space]
Still, for more than 50 years, researchers have found it quite challenging to measure the sun’s shape.
"There are literally tens of measurements, and most of them don’t agree," Kuhn said. "Most of the differences are attributable to how hard it is to see small shape changes through the atmosphere."
Now, using data from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, researchers measured the solar shape over a two-year period from 2010 to 2012, during which the sun evolved from a minimum of sunspot activity to a maximum. This observatory is in space, which helps it avoid the distorting influence that Earth’s atmosphere can have on measurements of the sun’s shape.
"Now that we have the necessary accuracy to measure the shape, it turns out it doesn’t vary," Kuhn said.
Our flatter sun
Against their expectations, Kuhn and his colleagues found that the sun’s slightly flattened shape — with a wide equator and a shorter distance between its poles — is remarkably stable and nearly completely unaffected by the solar cycle. This suggests the shape of the sun "really is controlled by fundamental properties of the star, and not so much by the sun’s perhaps superficial magnetism, which is highly variable," Kuhn said.
However, while the sun is slightly flattened, its shape is still rounder than theory had predicted, researchers added.
"The peculiar fact that the sun is slightly too round to agree with our understanding of its rotation is also an important clue in a longstanding mystery," Kuhn said. "The fact that it is too round means that there are other forces at work making this round shape. We’ve probably misunderstood how the gas turbulence in the sun works, or how the sun organizes the magnetism that we can only see at the surface. Finding problems in our theories is always more exciting than not, since this is the only way we learn more."
Future research to measure the sun’s shape more accurately can also help analyze how oscillations from deep in the sun’s interior are manifested at its surface. "This will be a new and powerful tool for understanding why the sun changes, and how it will affect the Earth in the future," Kuhn said.
The scientists detailed their research online in the Aug. 16 edition of the journal Science.
Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We’re also on Facebook and Google+.
- Solar Showdown: How Well Do You Know Our Sun?
- The Sun’s Wrath: Worst Solar Storms in History
- Sun Spouts a Half Million Mile Filament | Video
Copyright 2012 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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More on Video
Aug 19
FLATLANDS — The 23-year-old passenger of a livery cab was in critical condition early Saturday after a struggle between a potential robber and the cab’s driver led to bloodshed, police said.
Aug 19
Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) on Sunday chided Vice President Joe Biden for his remark that Republican repeal of Wall Street reform would put voters “back in chains.”
“I think it was an indelicate play on the Republican words of shackling the economy with regulations and shackling small businesses,” O’Malley said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It was certainly an indelicate choice of words.”
O’Malley, the current chair of the Democratic Governors Association, was one of several guests on the Sunday show circuit to discuss Biden’s comments.
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More on Barack Obama
Aug 19
CLAYTON, N.J. — A 15-year-old New Jersey girl has been arrested on charges of arson and attempted murder, accused of setting her family’s house on fire and trying to kill them, authorities say.
The girl faces two counts of aggravated arson and six counts of attempted murder in the 2 a.m. Saturday fire at the family’s Clayton home in southwest New Jersey, the Gloucester County Prosecutor’s Office said in a news release.
Aug 19
Inhabitat’s week in green: solar powered toilet, pollution-fighting mural and the world’s largest rooftop wind farm
Posted in: Today's Chili Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green.
Hear those school bells in the distance? It’s hard to believe, but the start of the school year is just a few weeks away — and all week we’ve been rounding up some of our favorite eco-friendly back-to-school essentials. From green school supplies to sustainable backpacks, we’ve got all your back-to-school needs covered. And to top it off, we’re giving away a laptop-charging Voltaic solar-powered backpack (worth $389) stuffed with green school supplies for a total prize package worth over $500. If we could go back to school and live in any dorm, we’d probably choose Copenhagen’s Tietgenkollegiet dorm, a circular building with community kitchens, cafes, music rooms and a central courtyard. And if we could choose any gadget to take with us, it would have to be the P&P Office Waste Processor, which can transform a basket full of waste paper into fully-formed pencils.
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Inhabitat’s week in green: solar powered toilet, pollution-fighting mural and the world’s largest rooftop wind farm originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 19 Aug 2012 10:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Aug 19
LONDON, Aug 19 (Reuters) – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange used the balcony of Ecuador’s London embassy on Sunday to berate the United States for threatening freedom of expression and called on U.S. President Barack Obama to end what he called a witch-hunt against WikiLeaks.
Speaking from the balcony of the embassy, where he is staying to avoid arrest by British police who want to extradite him to Sweden, Assange said the United States risked shunting the world into an era of journalistic oppression.
“As WikiLeaks stands under threat, so does the freedom of expression and the health of all of our societies,” Assange said, dressed in a maroon tie and blue shirt. “I ask President Obama to do the right thing: the United States must renounce its witch-hunt against WikiLeaks,” he said in a 10-minute speech which he ended with two thumbs up to the world’s media.
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