Sun

Astronomers are using a new technique similar to that being used by geologists studying earthquakes to learn about the interior of the sun, scientists said here Sunday at a meeting of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science. The new technique, called helioseismology, has already provided surprising information about the sun's rotation and new data about the composition and temperature of the interior, said astrophysicist Robert W.

After nine days of delay, the Genesis NASA robotic explorer rocketed away from Cape Canaveral on an unprecedented mission to gather and return tiny particles of the sun. Liftoff was scuttled five times last week by bad weather and technical concerns. Genesis will make a three-month journey to a point 1 million miles from Earth and 92 million miles from the sun. There it will use collector panels to gather a minute amount of atoms from the solar wind over 2 1/2 years.

Scientists have announced "a major breakthrough" in the battle against bugs--an insecticide that turns sunlight into a death ray. The insecticide, developed by researchers at the University of Illinois, employs a simple amino acid that its designers hope will be harmless to man and animals, and be biodegradable as well. Its potential targets range from houseflies and cockroaches to agricultural pests.

New, detailed images of the fiery arches of gas in the sun's outer atmosphere might help solve a decades-old mystery: How can the atmosphere be so much hotter than the sun's surface? The images released Tuesday by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration do not reveal the answer, but experts say they overturn one long-standing idea about where the heating takes place.

After five years of trying, Bill Fountain won the Ernest Hemingway look-alike contest, along with its $100 bar tab and a chance to go mano a mano with the big man's own sparring partner, 79-year-old Kermit Forbes. Fountain out-machoed 97 other contestants and he credits his new cable-knit sweater with helping him win Saturday.

The intense solar activity of the last month may have knocked out a key instrument on the Mars Odyssey orbiter. A radiation monitor used to determine how hazardous Mars would be for astronauts stopped working on Oct. 28. Efforts to restore the instrument have been unsuccessful, said officials at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. It had been collecting data continuously since March 2002.

A period of violent storms on the surface of the sun is expected to build into one of the most active periods of solar activity in hundreds of years and now may peak earlier than had been expected, possibly by the end of next year. Scientists attending the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union here this week said that solar cycles, which peak every 11 years, can disrupt communications and even cause satellites to tend to fall out of the sky during the period of maximum solar activity.

It's that time again, when sun worshipers flock to swimming pools and beaches to soak up rays. But for some people, a "healthy tan" may not be healthy at all. Since 1973, the rate of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, has increased by 4% each year, according to the American Cancer Society. The most recent state figures available show that 802 Californians--including 185 people in Los Angeles County--died of melanoma in 1991.

Scouts and sailors may pride themselves on their abilities to navigate using the sun, but butterflies can do it too, scientists reported Wednesday. Tests on monarch butterflies showed they used the sun as a compass when flying from their fall breeding grounds in the eastern United States south to Mexico. Evolutionary biologist Sandra Perez of the University of Arizona and colleagues threw off the internal body clocks of some butterflies by keeping them in the dark.

The sun, that blazing sphere at the center of our solar system, is covered by mountains of hot gases that stretch as far as 40,000 miles at their bases, according to new images. "The sun has mountains. These bumps are about five times the diameter of Earth," Jeffrey R. Kuhn, a solar physicist from Michigan State University, told a meeting of the American Geological Society in San Francisco. However, the mountains are only about a third of a mile high, he said.