Word: sunspots
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...over the world last week astronomers expectantly watched the sun. Close to the solar equator a few small sunspots appeared, lasted a day or so, disappeared -sparse and sickly survivors of a decade-long sunspot cycle whose heyday was five years ago. The telescope men were looking for first signs of a new cycle-vigorous black splotches in the neighborhood of 30° north and south latitude, with magnetic polarities reversed in respect to the spots of the dying cycle. They had been looking for months, might have looked for months more (for sunspot changes cannot be forecast like eclipses...
...mean temperature of the air is about one degree C. cooler than during sunspot minima...
Mice do most damage in "mouse years" when the mouse population exceeds the normal. Naturalists have noticed that the increase generally comes every eleven years, coincides with the sunspot cycle. They have suggested that the mildness of minimum sunspot winters is an important cause. Two famed mouse plagues have occurred in the U. S. One was in Humboldt Valley, Nev., in 1906-07. At the height of the plague there were from 8,000 to 12,000 mice per acre on large ranches. In 1926 an army of house mice marched out of the Buena Vista lake basin maize fields...
...more than a quarter-century after he had begun, he elucidated a sunspot theory, modestly crediting its discovery to the 17th Century heretic Galileo Galilei. Sunspots, Father Ricard declared, exert a definite influence on weather conditions, cause tidal waves, earthquakes, tornadoes, affect even the moods of animals. After observing sunspots, he forecast California's weather for long advance periods...
Worldwide astronomers scoffed. But Father Ricard had compared 4,000 weather maps with 3,000 sunspot observations, was not to be abashed. Blandly he replied to those who called him an ecclesiastical eccentric, by calling such an eminent astronomer as Herbert Hall Turner of Oxford a "wild theorist." In 1914 he was engaged in patient controversy with Astronomer Albert Porta of Turin, Astronomer Edward Lucien Larkin of Lowe's Observatory, Astronomer William Wallace Campbell of the Lick Observatory (now president of the University of California...