All of Earth's Water and Our Puny Planet Vs. A Solar Flare

Earth Vs. Solar Flare
Seems like there's news all the time right now about the sun.  A few news books and articles have appeared about the sun, our source of energy for life.  When you compare the size of a solar flare to our puny planet, you realize just how powerful a flare is.  A solar flare is like easily a hundred times larger than the earth.  Not too many scifi spaceships or technologies capable of take that kind of damage.

There is a good article here and it has a great graphic.
http://www.universetoday.com/96465/guest-post-our-explosive-sun/
The article's author also just published a book about the sun and an excerpt can be found here.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hottest-stars-extreme-cosmos

All of Earth's Water
For some reason it also reminded me about this other infographic about all of the water on earth shown as a sphere.  Sure doesn't seem like very much water is out there when you see the graphic.  When you see images like these, it does makes you realize how small you are.

Big blue sphere is all the water on Earth!

The image above is courtesy of the USGS and there is a very informative article about the graphic here.
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/2010/gallery/global-water-volume.html

Moon Dust and Solar Flares - Science News

I recently ran across a couple of very interesting news articles.  One from NASA and another from a research group examining the toxicity of lunar dust.

Solar Flare Coronal Mass Ejection / NASA

We've entered a high cycle for solar activity and the photos of solar flares and the movies are amazing to see.  Possible disruption of your electronic devices - maybe.  Nothing like toasted electronics everywhere if a big enough flare pops up.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/News071212-X1.4flare.html

I also never realized how much of a problem lunar dust is.  The particles are just deadly to humans.  These dust particles are razor sharp as they have never been weathered and they are like inhaling asbestos or other really sharp glassy silicates.  They're abrasive to the skin and eyes and bad for the lungs.  Wow.  Talk about needing to clean off the old spacesuit.  Decontamination bath time and major scrubbing and vacuuming.
http://www.universetoday.com/96208/the-moon-is-toxic/