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At 1015 Universal Time, an X-class solar flare was emitted from the sunspot region 9393, sending a coronal mass ejection toward earth. This follows a coronal mass ejection emitted two days ago. Energy from the first CME is expected to arrive on Friday, and from the second on Saturday.

With an X-class flare, which is the most powerful measured, there is always the potential for strong geomagnetic storm on earth and potential danger to satellites. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station will retire to radiation shielded areas if radiation levels on the station should exceed established safety tolerances.
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The family of a Colorado woman who died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the human form of Mad Cow Disease, believes her death was caused by a herbal dietary supplement containing bovine protein. The woman, who died November 23, 1999, had been taking the supplement to help her lose weight.

Her husband could not remember an occasion when his wife might have eaten a meat product that he hadn?t and can?t think of any other way she could have gotten the condition except through the supplement. Her daughter said, ?She went from a walker to a wheelchair in one week,? before she died.
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An unusually high number of sunspots are now crossing the solar disk as it rotates. One of these, Sunspot 9393, is a very large formation, and could result in an X-class flare, the most powerful measured.

A sunspot this large has not been observed in many years, and it presents a very dramatic image on the face of the sun. The spot is large enough to comfortably enclose a planet the size of earth many times over.
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Two fertility scientists have announced plans to create the first human clone within two years, despite new evidence that cloning can produce monstrous results.

Scientists say that creating healthy copies through cloning is harder than they had expected. Clones often have severe problems, such as developmental delays, heart defects and malfunctioning immune systems. In one example that sounds like science fiction, some cloned mice that had seemed normal suddenly grew grotesquely fat as young adults.

It?s not that one particular thing goes wrong, researchers say. Rather, the cloning process seems to create random errors that can produce a number of unpredictable problems, at any time in life. Fewer than 3% of cloning efforts succeed.
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