2.2 Billion Dollar Miniture Sun Project to Make Fusion Reaction Energy Needs a Reality

""Engineers and scientists are constructing a huge mini-star, which will produce the same reactions that happen in the sun to provide energy for the future.

The project, known as Iter, is based in Cadarache, near Aix-en-Provence in southern France. It will weigh three times as much as the Eiffel Tower and be as big as 60 football pitches.

Inside the new building will be a nuclear reactor that scientists hope can provide power through nuclear fusion. In doing so it could generate clean, safe energy and reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

Earlier this year, the team behind the project appointed a new leader, Bernard Bigot.

"We are now entering into manufacturing and preparations for assembly," he said as he joined in March. Bigot said that he had joined as part of a new management team that was set up to deliver “both a research and an industrial facility”.

Inside that facility there will be a smaller and controlled version of the same reactions that happen in our sun, nuclear fusion. That happens when two atomic nuclei collide with each other, releasing energy in the form of photons. The scientists hope to harness that energy and re-use it, to replace the dirty and limited forms of energy that we use today.

The project was launched in an early stage in 1987. It is now being pushed forward by a group of seven entities — including the EU, as well as the US, Russia and China.""

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/fusion-power-scientists-building-ministar-to-provide-electricity-of-the-future-10250948.html

Cosmic Call of a Blood Moon Lunar Eclipse Shaping Energies of Humanity

""On Saturday this week, April 4, 2015, there will be a Total Eclipse of the Moon, starting at 6 am (Note that for the eastern part of North America, the Moon will set before eclipse achieves totality). If we look at this eclipse through the cultural history of humanity, we can find that there are different things that go on when this first Full Moon of Spring is eclipsed. This is because, in many cultural traditions, Spring is regarded as the beginning of the spiritual new year. Looking into the celestial world to find the relationship between Sun and Moon and Earth every Spring was the way to find the 'cosmic call to destiny' for the coming year.

 Now in the Jewish tradition, the Spring Full Moon marks the observance and celebration of the festival of the Passover. Traditions connected with this festival have included the observance of a curfew, so that people were in the practice of not going out at night, or specifically, of not going out into the light of the Moon. When we get to the Christian tradition, we find in the New Testament description of the Last Supper, which is a Passover meal, that Judas Isacriot goes out into the night after this meal.

More specifically, he goes into the influence of the Moon,or into an eclipsing Moon, which is quite a bit different than any of the other Spring Moons. Because of this, there is a tradition of not going out into the light of the Spring Moon when it is being eclipsed, and instead to spend time in prayer and fasting. If we look into the region of the stars where we find the Sun at this time, We find that the planet Uranus is in the same field of stars. Uranus was the first planet in the history of humanity that was discovered with the use of a telescope, which means it brought something new to human experience. Because of this, Uranus has always been regarded as a herald of change. With a Total Eclipse of the Spring Moon, and the planet Uranus in the same region of the zodiac as the Sun, there certainly seems to be change on our horizon""

http://interlochenpublicradio.org/post/lunar-eclipse-cosmic-call-destiny

First Massive Solar Storm of 2015 Delivers Spectacular Auroras from Bursting Plasma Shoots of Sun

""A severe solar storm reached the Earth on Tuesday, contributing to a display of the aurora with the potential to stretch as far south as Oregon in the US, as well as being visible across unexpected reaches of the southern hemisphere.

Two blasts of magnetic plasma left the sun on Sunday, eventually combining and arriving on Earth on Tuesday about 15 hours earlier and much stronger than expected, said Thomas Berger, director of the Space Weather Prediction Centre in Boulder, Colorado. 

Authorities warned of possible disruption to power grids, GPS tracking and communication systems, but Berger said that in this case there were none of the bursts of radiation that can affect satellite operations.

The storm ranked a 4, called severe, on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s scale of 1-5 scale for geomagnetic effects. It is the strongest solar storm to reach Earth since the fall of 2013. It’s been nearly a decade since a level 5 storm, termed extreme, has hit Earth."" 

""Striking images came from Estonia and Alaska, while forecasters said there was the possibility of a sky show in much of Russia and northern Europe, as far south as central Germany and Poland.

In the southern hemisphere, displays were reported from Dunedin, New Zealand, and mainland Australian locations including Perth and Goulburn.""

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/mar/18/solar-storm-delivers-spectacular-aurora-displays-and-pictures

Measuring Billions of Elusive Neutrinos Flowing Through the Earth, UMass Amherst Physicists Learn More about the Sun

 ""AMHERST, Mass. - Using one of the most sensitive neutrino detectors on the planet, an international team including physicists Laura Cadonati and Andrea Pocar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst are now measuring the flow of solar neutrinos reaching earth more precisely than ever before. The detector probes matter at the most fundamental level and provides a powerful tool for directly observing the sun’s composition.

Pocar, Cadonati and colleagues report in the current issue of Physical Review Letters that the Borexino instrument has now measured with high precision the flux of the beryllium seven (7Be) solar neutrino, abundant, low-energy particles once below the observable threshold. With this advance, they can now precisely study the behavior of solar neutrinos with kinetic energy below 1 megaelectron volt (MeV). Borexino scientists also recently reported the first observation of neutrinos produced in a little-studied solar nuclear process known as proton-electron-proton, or pep, and set of stringent limit on reactions involving carbon, nitrogen and oxygen (the CNO cycle) in the sun.

Cadonati says, "Borexino is the only detector capable of observing the entire spectrum of solar neutrinos at once. Our results, the culmination of 20 years of research, greatly narrow the observation precision. The data confirm the neutrino oscillations, flavor changes and flow predicted by models of the sun and particle physics."""

http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/newsreleases/articles/138249.php