by Karen Stollznow

You’ve probably seen it on social media before: a paragraph of scrambled text that looks like nonsense at first glance, yet somehow you can read it with surprising ease.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

This effect, often playfully referred to as typoglycemia, is frequently shared online as a quirky insight into how our brains work.

But this viral claim is only part of the story. To understand why it works, we need to look at how the brain actually processes written language.

There is no magical ‘rule’

The claim that usually accompanies this snippet is that as long as the first and last letters of a word are in the right place, the order of the middle letters doesn’t matter.

At first glance, the claim seems plausible.

But while there is a kernel of truth here, the explanation is misleading.

Reading scrambled words has much less to do with a magical “rule” about first and last letters, and much more to do with how our brains use context, pattern recognition and prediction.

We don’t read letter by letter

When we read, we typically don’t painstakingly process each letter in sequence. Instead, skilled readers recognise words rapidly by drawing on multiple cues at once. Psycholinguistic research shows that we process words as patterns rather than as sequences of individual sounds.

These include familiar letter patterns, the overall shape of the word and, crucially, the context of the sentence. Our brains are constantly predicting what is likely to come next, then checking those predictions against the visual input.

This is why we often miss typos in our own writing. We don’t see what’s actually on the page, we see what we expect to be there.

The same principle helps us make sense of jumbled words. Even when letters are out of order, enough of the structure remains for the brain to make an educated guess.

Word shape and structure matter

The viral meme suggests that only the first and last letters matter.

But this oversimplifies what’s really going on. We are sensitive to how letters relate to each other within a word. Common spelling patterns and familiar combinations make words easier to recognise, even when slightly distorted.

This is also why certain visual disruptions make reading harder. Text in alternating caps, such as “AlTeRnAtInG CaPs”, is difficult to process because it disrupts the usual visual contour of words. The same goes for “ransom note” lettering made from mismatched fonts, which interferes with pattern recognition.

In other words, readability depends on preserving enough of a word’s internal structure, not just its outer letters.

Not all scrambled text is readable

If the meme were true, any sentence with intact first and last letters should be easy to read. But that’s not what we find.

Take this example:

Slhal I cmorape tehe to a srmmeus day

It follows the supposed “rules”, yet it is much harder to decipher. In fact, this is the opening of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

So why is the viral paragraph so much easier to read? Because it has been carefully (if unconsciously) engineered to be readable.

The hidden tricks behind the meme

Several factors make the famous example easier to process than it appears.

First, many of the words are short, which limits how many possible combinations the letters could form. Words like “you” and “can” are often left unchanged.

Second, function words such as “the”, “and” and “is” are usually intact. These small, common words provide the grammatical scaffolding of the sentence, making it easier to predict what comes next.

Third, when longer words are scrambled, the changes are often minimal. Adjacent letters are swapped (“wrod” for “word”), which is much easier to process than more extreme rearrangements.

Finally, the passage itself is highly predictable. Once you recognise the topic and rhythm, your brain fills in the gaps automatically, much as it does when listening to speech in a noisy environment.

The key to understanding this phenomenon is context. Words are not processed in isolation. Each word is interpreted in relation to the others around it, and within a broader framework of meaning.

This allows us to compensate for missing or distorted information.

But there are limits. As scrambling becomes more extreme, or as words become less predictable, comprehension quickly breaks down. Reading speed also slows noticeably, even when we can still make sense of the text.

Humans and machines

Interestingly, computers can now unscramble jumbled words with remarkable accuracy. By analysing probabilities and patterns across large datasets, algorithms can determine the most likely original form of a word or sentence.

In this sense, machines and humans rely on similar principles. Not rigid rules about letter position, but flexible systems that weigh patterns and probabilities. This highlights why the “typoglycemia” claim is an oversimplification, rather than a scientific rule.

The idea persists because it captures a genuine insight in a catchy way. It reveals that reading is not a simple, letter-by-letter process, but a dynamic interaction between perception and expectation.

At the same time, it’s a reminder of how easily scientific ideas can be distorted as they spread online.

So yes, we can often read scrambled words. But not because the order of letters doesn’t matter. It’s because our brains are remarkably good at making sense of imperfect information. So good, in fact, that they can turn a mess into meaning.

Karen Stollznow is a Research Fellow of Linguistics, Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research at Griffith University and University of Colorado Boulder.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation and is shared through a Creative Commons License.

Check out out!

All photos are credited to NASA.

Many will feature little-known animals that inhabit our planet today, with the occasional extinct or prehistoric species thrown in for good measure. It's a good way to not only share the wonder of our planet's beautiy, but also a reminder that we're not the only ones who exist on it.

Reed, who studies the speech variations of the Appalachian region, uses the concept "rootedness." It's the local attachment people place onto pronunciations and certain words, he said.

"[With] a pronunciation like 'warsh,' it's always the stories about someone's aunt or their grandfather or their grandmother, their mama or their papa," Reed said.

"These pronunciations and these words stick around because they are meaningful," he continued. They're indicative of home.

In a park in southeast Baltimore, near where filmmaker John Waters shot his 1980s classic Hairspray, which features the classic Baltimore accent, locals and transplants alike offered their perspectives on the accent.

Cary Griffin, 70, lives in Washington, D.C., but visits her 8-month-old grandson in Baltimore. She remembers her grandmother, from Richmond, Va., going to do the "warsh."

Adam Cook, 29, is originally from California and moved to Baltimore four years ago. He immediately noticed the receptionist's strong accent at his dentist's office. Ed Morman, 79, who has lived in Baltimore for 39 years, said he actually heard the accent more when he lived in Philadelphia and Seattle. He does not say "warsh" because of his own New York accent, he said.

Others felt strongly about the matter: "I do say warsh!" said Lisa Molina, a 53-year-old Baltimore native, sitting on her stoop on a sunny day. Her mother says it — so naturally, that's how Molina says it.

Richard Spindler, 54, who lives in the same building as Molina, agreed that's the only right way to say wash.

Read the entire article here.

Do you know someone who says "warsh"? Can you think of any other unusual pronunciations you've heard from someone?

https://science.nasa.gov/specials/your-name-in-landsat/?fbclid=IwY2xjawReosFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA80MDk5NjI2MjMwODU2MDkAAR4aF9luj_hgkkffMDsBU-YTpIW-7z3ATlTkUkwaMPBiTJTewgS9zod_OVeDTA_aem_380DrPfiPRiNXq2wzQvP0Q

Dogs have been man’s best friend for a long, long time.

The beloved animals were living alongside humans in western Eurasia around 14,000 to 16,000 years ago—before humans developed agriculture—according to two studies published in the journal Nature on March 25. The findings push back the earliest genetic evidence of a domesticated canine by about 5,000 years and provide new insights about how dogs spread.

Today’s barking furry friends descended from ancient wolves, but researchers aren’t sure exactly when domestication began. An analysis published in 2015 that involved computer simulations of the canine family tree suggests that the split occurred around 27,000 to 40,000 years ago. But the previous oldest genetic evidence of a domesticated dog, based on remains found in northwestern Russia, was dated to nearly 11,000 years ago.

In one of the new studies, researchers examined DNA in bones from more than 200 canines recovered from several archaeological sites in Europe and southwestern Asia, including Turkey, Switzerland and Scotland. Analyses revealed some of the animals were dogs and that the oldest was a Swiss animal dated to 14,200 years ago, which lived with a hunter-gatherer group. It shared ancestry with later dogs that resided elsewhere, hinting that the creatures descended from one population and distinct human societies were acquiring dogs from one another.

The other study found even older genetic evidence of a dog. Remains from a site in Turkey yielded a 15,800-year-old domesticated animal. DNA analyses revealed ancient dogs at other sites in western Eurasia, including a 14,300-year-old individual in England. Despite being separated by nearly 2,000 miles, the Turkish and English dogs were also closely genetically related, suggesting that the creatures were widespread in the region by that time.

Read the rest here.

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — A remarkably well-preserved Roman sarcophagus has been unearthed in Hungary’s capital, offering a rare window into the life of the young woman inside and the world she inhabited around 1,700 years ago.

Archaeologists with the Budapest History Museum discovered the limestone coffin during a large-scale excavation in Óbuda, a northern district of the city that once formed part of Aquincum, a bustling Roman settlement on the Danube frontier.

Untouched by looters and sealed for centuries, the sarcophagus was found with its stone lid still fixed in place, secured by metal clamps and molten lead. When researchers carefully lifted the lid, they uncovered a complete skeleton surrounded by dozens of artifacts.

“The peculiarity of the finding is that it was a hermetically sealed sarcophagus. It was not disturbed previously, so it was intact,” said Gabriella Fényes, the excavation’s lead archaeologist.

The coffin lay among the ruins of abandoned houses in a quarter of Aquincum vacated in the 3rd century and later repurposed as a burial ground. Nearby, researchers uncovered a Roman aqueduct and eight simpler graves, but none approaching the richness or pristine condition of the sealed tomb.

Read more about it here.

ALBANY, NY — Scientists from the New York State Museum, in collaboration with researchers from Princeton University and the Northeast Ecological Recovery Society, have confirmed the first documented case of a wild gray wolf south of the St. Lawrence River in decades. The confirmation is based on extensive analysis of a canid shot by a hunter in Cherry Valley, Otsego County in December 2021.

Gray wolves were eliminated from the northeastern United States by the late 19th century. The findings, detailed in a peer-reviewed study led by Dr. Jeremy Kirchman, NYSM Curator of Birds and Mammals, present evidence of occasional long-distance movement of wolves from eastern Canada into New York State.

Dr. Kirchman said, “The Cherry Valley wolf specimen is an exceptionally important piece of physical evidence of occasional dispersals by wild wolves into the northeastern U.S. from core breeding areas in eastern Canada. The specimen will remain preserved in the Museum’s mammalogy collection in perpetuity, where it will be available for future study.”

The discovery prompted the New York State Department of Conservation (NYSDEC) to increase educational efforts aimed at helping hunters distinguish between coyotes, which are legal to hunt in New York, and wolves, which are protected under state and federal law. However, identification remains challenging due to the complex history of hybridization between wolves and coyotes in eastern North America.

To definitively identify the Cherry Valley wolf, the Museum’s research team conducted extensive morphological, genetic, and stable-isotope analyses. DNA comparisons across the genomes of 435 sampled wolves, coyotes, and dogs firmly grouped the specimen with Gray Wolves, showing an exceptionally high probability of Great Lakes Gray Wolf ancestry. Skull measurements and body mass placed the individual well above the size range observed in eastern coyotes, even those with high levels of wolf ancestry.

When DNA results confirmed the animal was a wolf and not a coyote, the NYSDEC confiscated the taxidermy mount and skull and transferred them to the NYSM. The hunter cooperated fully with officials and was not fined.

"I'm happy to have published this comprehensive examination of the wolf's diet, morphology, and genetics with a team that includes my long-time NYSM colleague Dr. Robert Feranec, wolf advocate and citizen scientist Joe Butera, and Dr. Bridgett vonHoldt, a leading expert on canine genetics at Princeton University," Dr. Kirchman added.

The Cherry Valley wolf is currently on display as part of the NYSM's Canine Contrasts exhibit, where visitors can learn about the complex relationship between wolves, coyotes, and their hybrid descendants in eastern North America.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/faberge-winter-egg-russian-royalty-auction/

by Carl Lipo

Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, is often portrayed in popular culture as an enigma. The rationale is clear: The tiny, remote island in the Pacific features nearly 1,000 enormous statues – the moai. The magnitude and number of these monuments defy easy explanation.

Since European ships first encountered these stone giants in the 18th century, outsiders have branded the island as fundamentally mysterious, possibly beyond archaeologists’ ability to explain. This characteristic is part of what makes the island famous. Tour operators market the inexplicable. Documentaries promise unsolved puzzles. Popular books ask how “primitive people” could possibly move 70-ton megaliths.

Archaeological researchers have put forward various explanations for the statues, which were made between 1200 and 1700, but there remains no consensus. For decades, experts offered plausible scenarios: powerful chiefs commanding workers, elite-controlled statue quarries, wooden sleds drawn by hundreds of islanders, roller systems, wooden rails and ceremonial pathway markers. Based on authoritative assertions and compelling narratives, these accounts are rarely connected to archaeological evidence.

I’m an archaeologist who has been studying Rapa Nui for more than two decades. In newly published research, my colleagues and I believe we’ve solved the mystery in three essential ways.

First, using 11,686 photographs taken by drone, we created a comprehensive, three-dimensional model of Rano Raraku, the volcanic crater where 95% of Rapa Nui’s moai were carved. It was a systematic documentation – every slope, every carved surface, every production feature captured at a resolution down to the centimeter. The model generated predictions that we and other researchers could test: If production had been centralized, workshops would have been clustered; if they’d been hierarchical, we’d find differences in resources used at each level; if it had been dictated by elites, techniques would be standardized.

Our data revealed the opposite: Drone imagery shows 30 independent workshops working simultaneously. Instead of top-down organization, small, clan-level groups seem to have used innovative human engineering.

A close-up of a 3D model of the volcanic crater where nearly all of Rapa Nui’s giant statues were carved, with unfinished carvings outlined. Lipo et al., 2025, PLOS One, CC BY

Previous attempts to understand Rano Raraku failed not because the quarry held impenetrable secrets but due to the lack of published documentation and the limitations of traditional mapping methods. Two-dimensional maps couldn’t capture three-dimensional relationships. Statues emerge from cliff faces at various angles. Production areas overlap vertically. Carving sequences intersect across time. Traditional archaeological methods provided impressions but missed details and couldn’t capture the system as a whole.

Our 3D model changes that. We identified 426 moai in various stages of production, 341 extraction trenches, 133 voids where completed statues were removed, and previously unmapped quarrying areas on the exterior slopes. Each workshop was self-contained, demonstrating decentralization. Three distinct carving techniques emerge, showing that different groups employed different approaches while producing standardized forms.

Unfinished moai remain partially carved in a volcanic crater. Lipo et al., 2025, PLOS One, CC BY

The walking moai

Second, we generated data to resolve the age-old question about moai transport: How did Rapanui people move these megalithic giants? Despite many decades of attempts, previous transport theories all shared a fatal flaw: They made no predictions that were testable, meaning that scientists could prove or disprove.

Our walking hypothesis – based on oral traditions, ideas by our colleague Sergio Rapu Haoa and tested by Czech engineer Pavel Pavel – made specific, testable predictions. We found that “road moai,” those statues that were abandoned along constructed roads used for transport, differ morphologically from those that reached their final destinations, large platforms called ahu.

We measured 62 moai abandoned along ancient roads. The road moai proved distinct, characterized by wider bases, D-shaped cross sections and a forward lean of 5-15 degrees. These features wouldn’t be necessary if the moai were transported in a horizontal position. They make vertical transport – “walking” the statues – possible.

In 2013, we built a 4.35-ton concrete replica scaled from road moai. It wasn’t an artistic interpretation but a precise reproduction of measurable features from a statue found along the road and abandoned during transport. With 18 people and three ropes, the statue walked 100 meters in 40 minutes.

In previous work, the author and colleagues built a replica moai to demonstrate the walking transport.

In recently published work, we documented that physics confirmed what walking the replica demonstrated about the road moai shape. The forward lean creates an inverted pendulum that converts lateral oscillation into forward progress.

Those moai that reached ahu must have been altered in order for them to stand upright stably, while those along the roads would retain the features that enabled them to be “walked.”

The distribution data for moai across the landscape provided another test: The locations of road moai leading from the quarry follow an exponential decay curve, meaning that probability of a moai falling in transport is highest near the quarry and decreases with distance since those that fall over never get any farther. Fracture patterns on those road moai with breaks align with vertical impact stresses, meaning the broken moai were damaged by falling from a standing position.

Our testable predictions held.

Deforestation without collapse

The third “mystery” is how an advanced society could destroy its own environment. The island was deforested by the end of the 17th century. This mystery also yielded to systematic analysis. We analyzed data from previous archaeological excavations. Rather than finding increased rat consumption by people, indicating dietary stress from a lack of other food sources, remains of rats eaten by people decreased over time while seafood dominated throughout.

Ecological modeling revealed what we think really happened. Polynesian rats, introduced with the arrival of the first Polynesian colonists around 1200, could grow into a population of millions within just a few years. By eating 95% of the island’s tree seeds, rats prevented forest regeneration. Humans cleared land for cultivation, but rats made the recovery of the palm forests impossible. The synergistic interaction seems to have accelerated deforestation within five centuries.

This wasn’t “ecocide” – intentional self-destruction – but rather unintended ecological transformation caused by an introduced species. Our research also demonstrated that the Rapanui adapted through the use of rock mulch agriculture, which improved soil productivity. They continued to eat seafood and produce monuments for 500 years after deforestation began.

To tackle Rapa Nui’s mysteries, we used systematic documentation. We specified testable predictions, gathered data that could prove us wrong and accepted what the evidence showed. Rapa Nui shows that even entrenched mysteries yield to methodical investigation.

Carl Lipo is Professor of Anthropology and Associate Dean for Research, Binghamton University, State University of New York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons License.

The Last Penny Minted in the US

While that was heartening for scientists, there was one problem: The specimen was dead. Then, another dead night parrot was identified 16 years later. It wasn’t until 2013 that a naturalist found a small, living population in southwestern Queensland. Since then, the species’s known population has been in the tens of birds, and the night parrot remains one of the most elusive—and most endangered—birds on Earth.

Now, however, a team of Indigenous rangers and scientists has discovered as many as 50 night parrots on land managed by the Ngururrpa people in Western Australia’s Great Sandy Desert. The new results from their project, which is supported by the Indigenous Desert Alliance with funding from the Australian National Environmental Science Program’s Resilient Landscapes Hub, were published in the journal Wildlife Research on Monday.

Read the rest of the article here.

The black, red, gray, and pink tartan is rich with symbolism: the black and gray represent the dark times and ashes of those burned, the red represents the victims' blood, and the pink symbolizes the legal tape used to bind documents both then and now. Even the thread count carries meaning -- the large black squares contain 173 threads representing the years the law was in effect, while thinner lines have either 15 or 17 threads, representing the sum of digits in the years 1563 (when the act was implemented) and 1736 (when it was repealed). The red and pink stripes are repeated three times to symbolize the three goals of the Witches of Scotland campaign: a pardon, an apology, and a national memorial.

The Witchcraft Act was enacted in 1563, three years after Scotland declared Protestantism its official religion, and provided few details about what actually constituted witchcraft. Accused individuals were often tortured or sleep-deprived to extract confessions, and most convicted witches were strangled to death before being burned, with a small number burned alive. An estimated 2,500 Scots were killed under the act, with 85 percent of them women, according to the University of Edinburgh's Survey of Scottish Witchcraft.

While Scotland's former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon issued a formal apology in 2022, and the Church of Scotland also apologized for its historic role in the witch hunts, Mitchell and Venditozzi are continuing their campaign to seek an official pardon for all those who suffered under this brutal law. The tartan stands as a permanent living memorial, ensuring these victims are remembered with every thread.

-----

The Witches of Scotland campaign creators, Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi are the authors of a powerful new book "How to Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy's Guide to Silencing Women" which examines the inner workings of a patriarchal system, codified by the Witchcraft Act, designed to weaponize fear and oppress women. It's a captivating, infuriating, and often darkly humorous reminder of the dangers of superstition, bias, and ignorance, and a warning to never forget the past: https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781464241222 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/3XfkiIJ (Amazon)

To learn more about the Witches of Scotland campaign, visit https://www.witchesofscotland.com/ -- and you can pre-order clothing with the new tartan design at https://witchesofscotland.myshopify.com/

https://www.facebook.com/100064430450013/posts/pfbid0Gzdxf8UWPY2vfiJCQewHzKN8LeAEqnKrD8TgZYm5ZByS9zBe4YQ6SAij2Q5Cwe7rl/?app=fbl

Read the rest here.

by Dagomar Degroot

In May 2024, part of the Sun exploded.

The Sun is an immense ball of superheated gas called plasma. Because the plasma is conductive, magnetic fields loop out of the solar surface. Since different parts of the surface rotate at different speeds, the fields get tangled. Eventually, like rubber bands pulled too tight, they can snap – and that is what they did last year.

These titanic plasma explosions, also known as solar flares, each unleashed the energy of a million hydrogen bombs. Parts of the Sun’s magnetic field also broke free as magnetic bubbles loaded with billions of tons of plasma.

These bubbles, called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, crashed through space at around 6,000 times the speed of a commercial jetliner. After a few days, they smashed one after another into the magnetic field that envelops Earth. The plasma in each CME surged toward us, creating brilliant auroras and powerful electrical currents that rippled through Earth’s crust.

A coronal mass ejection erupting from the Sun.

You might not have noticed. Just like the opposite poles of fridge magnets have to align for them to snap together, the poles of the magnetic field of Earth and the incoming CMEs have to line up just right for the plasma in the CMEs to reach Earth. This time they didn’t, so most of the plasma sailed off into deep space.

Humans have not always been so lucky. I’m an environmental historian and author of the new book “Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar System.”

While writing the book, I learned that a series of technological breakthroughs – from telegraphs to satellites – have left modern societies increasingly vulnerableto the influence of solar storms, meaning flares and CMEs.

Since the 19th century, these storms have repeatedly upended life on Earth. Today, there are hints that they threaten the very survival of civilization as we know it.

The telegraph: A first warning

On the morning of Sept. 1, 1859, two young astronomers, Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson, became the first humans to see a solar flare. To their astonishment, it was so powerful that, for two minutes, it far outshone the rest of the Sun.

About 18 hours later, brilliant, blood-red auroras flickered across the night sky as far south as the equator, while newly built telegraph lines shorted out across Europe and the Americas.

The Carrington Event, as it was later called, revealed that the Sun’s environment could violently change. It also suggested that emerging technologies, such as the electrical telegraph, were beginning to link modern life to the extraordinary violence of the Sun’s most explosive changes.

For more than a century, these connections amounted to little more than inconveniences, like occasional telegraph outages, partly because no solar storm rivaled the power of the Carrington Event. But another part of the reason was that the world’s economies and militaries were only gradually coming to rely more and more on technologies that turned out to be profoundly vulnerable to the Sun’s changes.

A brush with Armageddon

Then came May 1967.

Soviet and American warships collided in the Sea of Japan, American troops crossed into North Vietnam and the Middle East teetered on the brink of the Six-Day War.

It was only a frightening combination of new technologies that kept the United States and Soviet Union from all-out war; nuclear missiles could now destroy a country within minutes, but radar could detect their approach in time for retaliation. A direct attack on either superpower would be suicidal.

An aurora – an event created by a solar storm – over Pituffik Space Base, formerly Thule Air Base, in Greenland in 2017. In 1967, nuclear-armed bombers prepared to take off from this base. Air Force Space Command

Suddenly, on May 23, a series of violent solar flares blasted the Earth with powerful radio waves, knocking out American radar stations in Alaska, Greenland and England.

Forecasters had warned officers at the North American Air Defense Command, or NORAD, to expect a solar storm. But the scale of the radar blackout convinced Air Force officers that the Soviets were responsible. It was exactly the sort of thing the USSR would do before launching a nuclear attack.

American bombers, loaded with nuclear weapons, prepared to retaliate. The solar storm had so scrambled their wireless communications that it might have been impossible to call them back once they took off. In the nick of time, forecasters used observations of the Sun to convince NORAD officers that a solar storm had jammed their radar. We may be alive today because they succeeded.

Blackouts, transformers and collapse

With that brush with nuclear war, solar storms had become a source of existential risk, meaning a potential threat to humanity’s existence. Yet the magnitude of that risk only came into focus in March 1989, when 11 powerful flares preceded the arrival of back-to-back coronal mass ejections.

For more than two decades, North American utility companies had constructed a sprawling transmission system that relayed electricity from power plants to consumers. In 1989, this system turned out to be vulnerable to the currents that coronal mass ejections channeled through Earth’s crust.

In Quebec, crystalline bedrock under the city does not easily conduct electricity. Rather than flow through the rock, currents instead surged into the world’s biggest hydroelectric transmission system. It collapsed, leaving millions without power in subzero weather.

Repairs revealed something disturbing: The currents had damaged multiple transformers, which are enormous customized devices that transfer electricity between circuits.

Transformers can take many months to replace. Had the 1989 storm been as powerful as the Carrington Event, hundreds of transformers might have been destroyed. It could have taken years to restore electricity across North America.

Solar storms: An existential risk

But was the Carrington Event really the worst storm that the Sun can unleash?

Scientists assumed that it was until, in 2012, a team of Japanese scientists found evidence of an extraordinary burst of high-energy particles in the growth rings of trees dated to the eighth century CE. The leading explanation for them: huge solar storms dwarfing the Carrington Event. Scientists now estimate that these “Miyake Events” happen once every few centuries.

Astronomers have also discovered that, every century, Sun-like stars can explode in super flares up to 10,000 times more powerful than the strongest solar flares ever observed. Because the Sun is older and rotates more slowly than many of these stars, its super flares may be much rarer, occurring perhaps once every 3,000 years.

Nevertheless, the implications are alarming. Powerful solar storms once influenced humanity only by creating brilliant auroras. Today, civilization depends on electrical networks that allow commodities, information and people to move across our world, from sewer systems to satellite constellations.

What would happen if these systems suddenly collapsed on a continental scale for months, even years? Would millions die? And could a single solar storm bring that about?

Researchers are working on answering these questions. For now, one thing is certain: to protect these networks, scientists must monitor the Sun in real time. That way, operators can reduce or reroute the electricity flowing through grids when a CME approaches. A little preparation may prevent a collapse.

Fortunately, satellites and telescopes on Earth today keep the Sun under constant observation. Yet in the United States, recent efforts to reduce NASA’s science budget have cast doubt on plans to replace aging Sun-monitoring satellites. Even the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, the world’s premier solar observatory, may soon shut down.

These potential cuts are a reminder of our tendency to discount existential risks – until it’s too late.

Dagomar Degroot is Associate Professor of Environmental History at Georgetown University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons License.

Posting this not so much to sell or help someone buy a cuckoo clock, but there's an interesting part that shows how they work.