AfterTek

The US has launched a space mission to study potentially disruptive solar storms by taking three-dimensional pictures of the Sun.  The rocket carrying the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or Stereo a pair of solar probes lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Wednesday.

Stereo will take pictures of the solar outbursts so that scientists can, for the first time, pinpoint where the storms are heading.  The eruptions, called coronal mass ejections, can shut down communications and navigational satellites, affect aircraft and disrupt electricity supplies as billions of tonnes of charged particles are sent streaming into space.

A CURIOUS teenager in Argentina has discovered the fossil skull of the biggest bird ever found.  A swift, flightless predator that is three metres tall and that pursued its prey across the plains of Patagonia 15 million years ago.
The skull, tapering to a cruel beak curved like a brush hook, belongs to a previously unknown offshoot of extinct birds known as phorusrhacids “terror birds.”  Weighing perhaps 180 kilograms, the bird most likely preyed on rodents the size of sheep that once grazed on the South American savanna.

Sensors from the University of New Hampshire have been shot into space to study massive eruptions from the surface of the sun.

Carrying 16 instruments each, the satellites are to help scientists predict the billion-ton eruptions of electrified gas and deadly particles known as coronal mass ejections that cause the Northern Lights and can disrupt power grids on Earth.

The sensors are aboard two spacecraft launched Wednesday in Florida to monitor and analyze highly charged particles that streak through the solar system from the sun. One spacecraft will orbit the sun ahead of Earth, and the other will orbit behind, giving scientists their first three-dimensional view of the sun.