A kind reader, knowing how I jones for Apocalyptica, sent along this link to a New Scientist story about how the sun is acting all freaky, and scientists don’t know why. Excerpt:

But for the past two years, the sunspots have mostly been missing. Their absence, the most prolonged for nearly a hundred years, has taken even seasoned sun watchers by surprise. “This is solar behaviour we haven’t seen in living memory,” says David Hathaway, a physicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
The sun is under scrutiny as never before thanks to an armada of space telescopes. The results they beam back are portraying our nearest star, and its influence on Earth, in a new light. Sunspots and other clues indicate that the sun’s magnetic activity is diminishing, and that the sun may even be shrinking. Together the results hint that something profound is happening inside the sun. The big question is what?

This is important because sunspot activity is suspected of having some significant effect on terrestrial climate. That, and the fact that the Sun could be shrinking, and will turn our planet into a rock as cold and hard and lifeless as Simon Cowell’s heart.