Online - E-Media Tidbits. Companies - Google and Nasa back new school for futurists. Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts Workshop Report. The adverse effects of extreme space weather on modern technology--power grid outages, high-frequency communication blackouts, spacecraft anomalies--are well known and well documented, and the physical processes underlying space weather are also generally well understood.
Less well documented and understood, however, are the potential economic and societal impacts of the disruption of critical technological systems by severe space weather. As a first step toward determining the socioeconomic impacts of extreme space weather events and addressing the questions of space weather risk assessment and management, a public workshop was held in May 2008. NASA warns of 'space Katrina' radiation storm. High performance access to file storage A study funded by NASA has flagged up yet another terrible hazard for those no longer able to get excited about nuclear war, global pandemics, terrorism, climate change, economic meltdown and asteroid strike.
Top space brainboxes say that even if the human race survives all those, there is a serious risk of civilisation being brought crashing to its knees by a sudden high-intensity solar radiation storm. Beware the space equivalent of Hurricane Katrina. Virtual telescope of Microsoft. Twirling galaxies, exotic nebulae and exploding stars are now just a mouse click away for amateur astronomers.
Microsoft has launched WorldWide Telescope, a free tool that stitches together images from some of the best ground- and space-based telescopes. Collections include pictures from the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes, as well as the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The web-based tool also allows users to pan and zoom around the planets, and trace their locations in the night sky. "Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago," explained Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.