As expected, a CME hit Earth’s magnetic field on Jan. 24th at approximately 1500 UT (10 am EST). The impact produced a G1-class geomagnetic storm and bright auroras around the Arctic Circle. As the storm crested, Göran Strand of Östersund, Sweden, took a panoramic photo and wrapped it 360-degrees to create this composition, which he calls Planet Aurora (above).

Even veteran aurora watchers were impressed. “This was one of the best Northern Lights displays that I’ve ever seen, and I mean ever in over 5000 hours on the ice,” says Andy Keen of Inari, Finland. “It was, in short, truly spectacular and something that will live with me for a lifetime.” In the Abisko National Park of Sweden, aurora tour guide Chad Blakely contributed a similar report: “Eight tourists and I were treated to one of the most wonderful displays I have ever seen. The auroras began as we were eating dinner and continued into the very early hours of the morning. Words can not describe the excitement we shared.”

The storm subsided as it crossed the Atlantic and petered out almost completely by the time it reached North America. Only observers in Scandinavia, Iceland and Greenland witnessed the full display.

@ SPACEWEATHER

U.S. President Barack Obama used his last State of the Union speech before the November election to paint himself as the champion of the middle class, by demanding higher taxes for millionaires and tight reins on Wall Street.

Taking advantage of the huge national platform of his annual speech to Congress, Obama defiantly defended his record after three years in office and laid blame for many of the country’s woes at the feet of banks and an out-of-touch Congress.

He proposed sweeping changes in the tax code and new remedies for the U.S. housing crisis as he made the case for reducing income inequality in America.

While the biggest proposals in Obama’s election-year speech are considered unlikely to gain traction in a divided Congress, the White House believes the president can tap into voters’ resentment over the financial industry’s abuses and Washington’s dysfunction.

But even as he called for a “return to American values of fair play and shared responsibility,” Obama seemed to take no blame on himself for a fragile economy and high unemployment that could trip up his re-election bid.

Instead he launched a highly partisan attack over taxes, the most divisive issue at the heart of this year’s presidential campaign, and said: “I will not go back to the days when Wall Street was allowed to play by its own set of rules.”

“Washington should stop subsiding millionaires,” Obama declared as he proposed a minimum 30 percent effective tax rate on those who earn a million dollars or more.

@ REUTERS

After I first learned about prime numbers as a kidlet, I became quite fond of them — a fondness that continues to this day, although I cannot explain why they are so appealing. But even amongst those special numbers that are prime, there is another, much smaller, group of numbers; the Mersenne prime numbers.

Named for Marin Mersenne, the French monk who began to study these numbers in the early 17th century, a Mersenne number (M) is defined as a positive prime integer (p) that is one less than a power of two:

for example;

M2 = 22 = 4 – 1 = 3

which is the smallest of the Mersenne primes. The next Mersenne prime is M3 = 7 and the third smallest Mersenne prime is M5 = 31.

Currently, only 47 Mersenne primes have been identified, and in fact, the largest known prime number, 2243,112,609 – 1, is a Mersenne prime. You’ll forgive me if I don’t write this number out for you, because this prime number is the first discovered to have more than 10 million base-10 digits.

@ THE GUARDIAN

The New Year is always an important holiday in Japan and other East Asian nations. Christmas is celebrated in Japan in much the same way it is in the West, but “New Years” is by far the more significant holiday. Before the Meiji Restoration, the New Year was celebrated according to the Chinese lunar calendar (January 23 for the year 2012). These days, though the calendar still has great influence on festivals and celebrations, the Gregorian calendar change is celebrated by most people as the “official” New Year.

In Japan, people busily prepare for the New Year by cleaning house and buying/cooking food (osechi) to welcome the “god of new life”. At this time, the Post Office is flooded by New Years’ cards which each person sends to friends, relatives, and associates. Rail and air terminals are jammed with people trying to get back to their home towns to spend the New Year’s “night” and “daybreak” with their relatives.

Japanese express wishes for the New Year by saying “Akemashite Omedetou Gozaimasu!” (pronounced ah-keh-mah-shteh oh-meh-deh-toe go-zah-ee-mahss). Only one Kanji (Chinese character) is found in this phrase (within the first word). This Kanji is a combination of the characters for sun and moon, and among other ancient meanings, it has to do with the sun and the moon getting together and becoming “bright”. It entails “changing” and “opening”… “dawning”…

Year of the Dragon

Long before the Occupy movement swept the country—over two years ago—a political revolt began in one of the reddest states in America. Farmers and ranchers in Nebraska, many of whom are long-time conservatives, got angry about the amount of corporate influence in a single political issue that has since captivated the entire state and upset federal politics: the Keystone XL pipeline.

Today, the Obama administration announced that it is rejecting the project—which would have carried tar-sands petroleum from Alberta across Nebraska and five other states to the Gulf of Mexico, where it would have been refined and likely shipped overseas. The rejection is a major victory for the environmental movement, which staged a series of protests against the pipeline last fall. The decision comes after months of political ping-pong. The State Department announced this past November that the administration would delay the decision until after the 2012 election. Then in December, Congressional Republicans attached a mandate to the payroll tax cut extension that forced Obama to make his decision about the pipeline by February of this year. Currently, some members of Congress are crafting legislation that would override Obama’s ruling on Keystone XL, though no bill has yet been introduced. But within Nebraska, the pipeline has been about more than partisan squabbling: public sentiment stirred by the pipeline has the potential to remake state politics.

Like the Occupy movement, Nebraska’s pipeline revolt has raised the level of conversation about clean government and the role of corporate money—almost to a fever pitch. For the last several months, the pipeline has transcended the culture war and become an issue big enough to motivate Republicans at the grassroots to make friends with liberals and “treehuggers.” In Nebraska, the Keystone XL fight has opened a new sense of possibility that a few citizens with little money could wield collective political influence.

@ THE NATION

H1N1

In a letter published in the journals Nature and Science on Friday, 39 scientists defended the research as crucial to public health efforts, including surveillance programs to detect when the H5N1 influenza virus might mutate and spark a pandemic.

But they are bowing to fear that has become widespread since media reports discussed the studies in December that the engineered viruses “may escape from the laboratories” — not unlike the frightful scenario in the 1971 science fiction movie “The Andromeda Strain” — or possibly be used to create a bioterror weapon.

Among the scientists who signed the letter were leaders of the two teams that have spearheaded the research, at Erasmus Medical College in the Netherlands and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, as well as influenza experts at institutions ranging from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the University of Hong Kong.

@ REUTERS

Chris Dodd’s emphatic 2010 pledge not to lobby once he finally left the Senate was prompted by widespread speculation that he spent the last two years in office blatantly shilling for corporate interests in order to ensure a prosperous post-Congress career. Particularly during the 2010 financial reform debate — when it became increasingly apparent that allegations of improper benefits from Countrywide Financial would make his re-election close to impossible — Dodd served on multiple occasions as chief spokesman for, and defender of, the interests of Wall Street and corporate America. Though sleazy and grotesque, it was therefore entirely unsurprising when it was announced last March that Dodd would “be Hollywood’s leading man in Washington, taking the most prestigious job on K Street”: Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), “whose perks include a $1.2 million-a-year salary and getting to attend the Academy Awards ceremony.”

It is in that capacity that Dodd has become the leading public spokesman and private lobbyist for the truly dangerous PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, bills craved by the industry that pays him. These bills, which vest the power in large corporations and the government to seize and shutdown websites with little or no due process in the name of stopping piracy, pose the greatest dangers to Internet freedom of any bill in the last decade, at least. So serious are these threats that they have prompted a rare — and inspiring — protest movement from numerous large Internet companies and blogs in the form of an Internet “blackout” today.

In his SOPA advocacy, Dodd has resorted to holding up Chinese censorship as the desired model, mouthing the slogans of despots, and even outright lying. Like virtually all extremist, oppressive bills backed by large industry, SOPA and PIPA have full bipartisan support; among its co-sponsors are Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy and GOP Rep. Lamar Smith, with many Senators from both parties in support and Harry Reid pushing it forward (to its credit, the White House expressed opposition to several of the worst provisions, though has not yet issued a veto threat).

Glenn Greenwald @ SALON

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

It’s been more than 18 years since John Gilmore offered up his famous explanation of why the Internet is the most powerful tool for free speech ever invented. That’s long enough for an entire generation of Wikipedia-using, Etsy-shopping, Reddit-browsing and Facebook-sharing Internet users to be born, raised and apply to college. But as some members of that generation may discover on Wednesday, when they log on to their favorite website and discover it dark and silent, Gilmore’s insight has rarely been more relevant than it is today.

Some very well known and highly popular websites, including Wikipedia and Reddit, effectively turned themselves off today, acting in protest of proposed congressional legislation that they believe poses a stark, existential threat to the core architecture of the free and open Internet.

In other words, the operators of these websites have decided that two bills currently under consideration in the U.S. Congress — SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, in the House; and, in the Senate, PIPA, the Protect Intellectual Property Act — represent “damage.” And so they’re routing around it, by any means necessary, including, ironically, purposely damaging themselves, albeit temporarily.

@ SALON