Planet

A stream of highly charged particles from the sun is headed straight toward Earth, threatening to plunge cities around the world into darkness and bring the global economy screeching to a halt. This isn't the premise of the latest doomsday thriller. Massive solar storms have happened before - and another one is likely to occur soon, according to Mike Hapgood, a space weather scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England. Much of the planet's electronic equipment, as well as orbiting satellites, have been built to withstand these periodic geomagnetic storms.

Had enough of life in the fast lane and looking to take it down a notch or two? You might seek guidance from a colony of deep-sea microbes harvested from the barren depths of the Pacific Ocean that are progressing so slowly, they almost appear to be dead. Just how plodding are these ancient creatures, who are buried about 100 feet deep in the seabed? Some of them haven't received any new food for 86 million years, when dinosaurs still walked the Earth. And they are using up oxygen at rates 10,000 times slower than their counterparts on the surface of the ocean floor.

Leather, tulle and silk may be the stuff of runway dreams, but when it comes to most U.S. apparel, cotton is king. Almost 75% of clothing sold in the U.S. contains at least some of the tufty fiber, according to the 2010 Cotton Inc. Retail Monitor, a survey of mass retailers. Farmers in this country will grow 8.16 billion pounds of cotton during the current growing season. Add China, India and the 100-plus other countries that cultivate cotton, and the yield is 62 billion pounds produced annually worldwide.

Can Lonely Planet fans give up their Bible-sized guidebooks for a teeny-tiny app? Name: Lonely Planet Country Guides Available for: iPhone, iPod Touch What it does: Get thousands of recommendations for places to eat, sleep, sight-see and more. Lonely Planet's guides to Italy, Ireland, Australia, France, Spain and Costa Rica are the first to become apps. Cost: $9.99 What's hot: The entire app is available offline, so there's no sweating data or roaming fees.

The action in the new kids flick "Planet 51" takes place on an alternate-universe version of Earth where Shrek-green humanoids live out SoCal-accented happy days, complete with Googie architecture, white picket fences and Little Richard playing on the radio. The big news among the populace is the premiere of "Humaniacs III," the latest in a popular movie series about human invaders who "eat brains for dinner." So when American astronaut Chuck Baker (voiced by Dwayne Johnson)

"Rise of the Planet of the Apes" does it right. Smart, fun and thoroughly enjoyable, it's a model summer diversion that entertains without insulting your intelligence. Adroitly blending the most modern technology with age-old story elements, it's also an origin story that answers the question that's been hanging in the air since 1968: How did it happen that apes rule? That year's Charlton Heston-starring "Planet of the Apes" (based on a novel by Pierre Boulle) posited a world where simians were in charge and people were in cages.

Look, Pluto had a good run. While 76 years is nothing in astronomical time, in the human span it's a whole lifetime. For all those decades, Pluto was regarded as a planet, the smallest and most distant member of our solar system family. It had an affectionate place in human hearts, and a Disney cartoon character and an element as famous namesakes. And then, Mike Brown killed it. He admits as much; it's the title of his book, "How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming. " In 2005, the Caltech astronomer found, in the same neighborhood as Pluto, an object at least as big as Pluto, which he called Eris.

In reading Mark Davis' deliberately alarming column (Column Left, Sept. 17) on the imminent danger of losing our planet, I conclude that according to Davis we must stop all economic growth. Now! We must all stop development, stop industry, stop everything we are doing to save the planet. Now! I have observed that the true conservationists are the homeless. They don't use unnecessary gas or electricity to heat large homes (or even small ones); they don't drive cars, thus saving on fuel and fuel emission; they don't bathe or use toilets, thus conserving water; they recycle our clothing; they eat our leftovers.

Boxed alcoholic beverages tend to receive a gimlet eye from discerning drinkers. Wines purveyed from cardboard boxes go south quicker than their bottled brethren and often come from vintners with low marks from connoisseurs. But what about boxed beer? Why hasn't the populist sudsy brew, already an everyman's refreshment, entered the boxed beverage realm? Because it's simply more difficult to keep carbonated beer pressurized and oxygen free in large, four-liter containers, according to Thomas Hussey, a recently graduated industrial design student from Australia's University of Technology Sydney.

Re "In case of environmental panic, read this," Nov. 15 Buried amid all the bizarre, speculative and dangerous ideas to cure our planet's fever is the easiest one of all -- use less carbon. It's the only sure way to treat the patient. Of course, it means talking about unpleasant subjects such as conservation. It also means addressing the biggest taboo of all: overpopulation. Already, more than 1 billion people have no clean water. At least 1 billion more want, and may get, cars.

The very title of the subversive documentary "Surviving Progress" sounds counterintuitive. Isn't progress a good thing, the sure cure for civilization's ills? What's to survive? Plenty, according to this expect-the-unexpected Canadian film based on Ronald Wright's bestselling "A Short History of Progress. " Both brainy and light on its feet, bristling with provocative insights and probing questions, this film feels like it's expanding your mind while you're watching it. The premise of "Surviving Progress," much more dystopian in its quiet way than "The Hunger Games," is that we delude ourselves if we think the seeming improvements that growth and development bring will result in quality-of-life advances or even survival of the planet.

Frank Javorsek Bluegrass player co-owned music store Frank Javorsek, 70, a bluegrass musician who co-owned the now-closed Blue Ridge Pickin' Parlor music shop in the San Fernando Valley and hosted a bluegrass radio show on KCSN-FM, died March 22 of a heart attack while giving a mandolin lesson in Encino, said his wife, Tammy. Javorsek, a Palmdale resident who played banjo, fiddle, mandolin and guitar, was a well-known bluegrass instructor in the Los Angeles area and had been teaching for some time at the California Traditional Music Society's Center for Folk Music in Encino.

Looking for a new planet to colonize? A team of European astronomers says you've got options -- billions of them. Using results from the High Accuracy Radical Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) at the European Southern Observatory, the scientists say there are likely tens of billions of planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone that may be able to sustain life. They estimate that one hundred of those planets are in the sun's immediate neighborhood -- which in space-speak is 30 light years away.

There's a world out there where a finger of ice can destroy everything in its path. Where strobes of green light dance across the sunless sky. Where unicorn-like creatures roam the sea. And it's not the stuff of CGI-loaded blockbuster fantasy film. It's "Frozen Planet, "a seven-part Discovery Channel and BBC mega-series exploring the Earth's arcane polar regions. (It premiered last week, but its first installment will repeat Sunday just before the second episode.) Made by the documentary team behind 2006's groundbreaking "Planet Earth" and narrated by Alec Baldwin, "Frozen Planet" is epic in scope and cinematic in execution, demonstrating how far nature documentary series have come.

The smallest planet in the solar system keeps serving up big surprises. Scientists working on the Messenger mission to Mercury have found that the planet has unexpected inner layers and craters with tilted bottoms, and it may have been geologically active far later into its life than previously imagined. In the first of two studies released Wednesday by the journal Science, a team led by MIT geophysicist Maria Zuber scanned the surface of Mercury's northern hemisphere and found the planet's surface to be unusually flat when compared with the terrain of the moon or Mars.

The first thing to say about "Frozen Planet," a documentary about life at the poles that begins its multipart run Sunday on Discovery Channel, is that it is gorgeous to behold: lump-in-throat, tear-in-eye beautiful. It is the very point of such documentaries to be beautiful, of course, and not merely to honor, record and convey the awesome majesty of the natural world but also to look good on that big, expensive television set you bought yourself for Christmas. Like "Planet Earth" (2006)

Did everyone marvel at those stunning photos of clear-cut forests in "Portrait of a Planet" (Nov. 11)? I would be very surprised if the ongoing devastation in Northern California has nothing to do with the decrease in rainfall in Southern California since World War II. For what it's worth, I'm planting trees in my own yard, and I'll give them all the water they need, Bradley's 10%-water-reduction decree be damned. If Central Valley farmers can throw away their cheap water running sprinklers in the noonday sun on surplus crops like cotton and alfalfa, I can take all the 15-minute showers I please.

When Walt Disney Co.'s "John Carter" opens in theaters this weekend, the science-fiction adventure may encounter obstacles as formidable as its hero faces on Mars. The film brings to the big screen a century-old fantasy tale, from Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, that has inspired generations of filmmakers and science fiction writers including James Cameron, George Lucas, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury. Its sweeping scope and $250-million budget suggest director Andrew Stanton's ambition to create a cinematic adventure on a par with movies such as "Avatar" and "Star Wars" — works that were informed by Burroughs' original pulp fiction.

Sun and Earth have a chat. "Well, Happy New Year, Little blue Earth! You've made one more lap 'Round my blazing hot girth. "Through my merciless winds, For yet one more year You've kept a firm hold On your atmosphere. " "Dear Sun, you're most generous With all of your praise. You know it's a feat To defend from your blaze. "For you hurl out harsh rays And electrical dust That could fry life on Earth.