The Sun is experiencing “striking” long-term shifts in its behavior that have gone undiscovered for more than a decade, according to a study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on Wednesday. 

The Sun passes through a cycle of high and low activity that lasts roughly 11 years and is caused by variations in the star’s magnetic activity. This activity peaks at a solar maximum, producing more frequent sunspots and higher radio flux, which are known as surface “proxies” of intense magnetism, as well as dramatic eruptions like solar flares and coronal mass ejections. At solar minimum, when magnetic activity winds down, the Sun enters a quieter phase. Throughout the cycle, sound waves known as p-modes oscillate near the surface of the Sun, providing clues about its internal structure. 

All of the above is well known, but using new tools, astronomers have just discovered a weird mismatch in surface and p-mode signals that emerged more than a decade ago and has become especially pronounced in the current epoch, Cycle 25, which began in 2019.

“Essentially, we can use the p-modes as a proxy and a probe of activity underneath the surface of the Sun, because the frequencies change in response to the changing magnetic field,” said Bill Chaplin, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Birmingham who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. 

“The sunspot number and the radio flux are basically proxies of the total amount of magnetic flux,” he continued. “What we're doing with the p-modes is saying: What is actually happening beneath the visible surface?”  

To answer that question, Chaplin and his colleagues examined four decades of observations from the Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network (BiSON), a collection of six remote solar observatories located around the world that have tracked the Sun’s oscillations since 1976. 

While astronomers have monitored sunspots for centuries, BiSON has enabled researchers to monitor long-term shifts in “helioseismology,” which measures the seismic activity inside the Sun, a dataset that has led to the recent discovery of so-called "glitches" and other previously undetectable solar phenomena. 

“There's a tendency to think that because we've only had data on a few cycles, that all cycles look like that, and that they copy and repeat,” Chaplin said. “I think what's becoming clear is that that isn't the case. No cycle is the same as another.”

The new study revealed that Cycle 25 shows stronger high-frequency p-mode activity just below the surface compared to recent cycles, but that it also appears weaker in terms of surface proxies, meaning it is showing comparatively fewer sunspots and reduced radio flux. This discrepancy hints that magnetic activity has become increasingly confined to a region of several hundred miles under the surface with each successive cycle, though the underlying reason for this change is unclear.

“We saw this really clear signal in the high frequency modes,” said Chaplin. “You can see in the high frequency modes that the current cycle is as strong as Cycles 22 and 23 and that the picture looks very different in the proxies.”

The results suggest that surface proxies, while valuable as rough estimates of magnetic activity, don’t provide the full picture of the roiling dynamics playing out under the solar surface. Chaplin and his colleagues note that several other studies have presented evidence for long-term changes in near-surface solar phenomena, though it will take more research to understand what is driving these trends.

To that end, the team plans to continue observing Cycle 25, which just passed its maximum and is expected to close out with a minimum toward the end of the 2020s. The researchers speculated that the structural changes may be linked either to the longer Hale cycle, which is a period covering two solar cycles—roughly 22 years. Since the Sun’s magnetic poles flip after each solar cycle, the Hale cycle measures the time it takes for the Sun to return to its original magnetic state.

These long-term observations are slowly peeling back the enigmatic inner workings of the Sun, especially the solar dynamo—the process that generates its magnetic field—which remains poorly understood. These efforts could help refine forecasts of hazardous space weather near Earth, while also shedding light on the behavior of other stars.

“Getting more robust space weather predictions is important, but also, from the science point of view, there is [a need] for a better understanding of the dynamo, and how the dynamo changes on long timescales,” Chaplin said.

“Helioseismology is important because it enables you to see inside the Sun, which is something that you can't do by any other means,” he concluded.

Rather than pay a monthly subscription for an app that plenty of people think kinda sucks, a developer has created Cracked Oura, an open source app that lets Oura ring wearers query and analyze their health data without the monthly fee. 

On Thursday, Oura announced the new Ring 5, a lighter and smaller wearable with an allegedly better battery life. That ring will cost at least $399, and some models cost as much as $499. An Oura subscription, which is required to actually get usable insights on your sleep, stress, and exercise, costs nearly $70 a year or $6 a month.

Or, users could try Cracked Oura, which developer Elmo Ahorinta published on GitHub earlier this year. “Pay for the ring, not for the app that is not even that good,” its GitHub page reads.

The page says Cracked Oura keeps the health data local to a user’s device, provides some deeper insights than the official app, and, most importantly, doesn’t require a subscription. The app works by using Oura’s data export function on its website. “​​Anyone can request the data from their website and it comes with a bunch of CSVs that contain the data. My application just takes the CSVs and populates a database,” Ahorinta told me in an email. Rather than having to log in to Oura’s website and manually download their data each time, Cracked Oura does it automatically, Ahorinta said.

It’s not complete, though. “At the moment, my application misses some features that Oura has. For example, women's health, symptom radar, and the front page's short texts about sleep and readiness are features that would need reverse engineering,” Ahorinta said. “Also, features like recording your workout heart rate and adding tags requires the subscription. But other than that, my application can be used to visualize the same data points that Oura does.”

The GitHub page lists Claude as a contributor, indicating Ahorinta used AI to make the app.

Even if not that many people end up using Cracked Oura, its existence highlights that people don’t necessarily want to be locked into a single platform, or a monthly subscription fee, when they’ve already spent a bunch of money to generate data about their own health. “I hope that other people would also contribute to this project and fix my bugs and bad design choices that I have made. I believe that this type of workaround applications could be made for any other wearable devices that have a subscription that gatekeep some parts of the data,” Ahorinta said.

Oura did not respond to a request for comment.

The company recently told cybersecurity journalist Zack Whittaker that it does “receive infrequent requests from the government” for user data. Oura wouldn’t say how many requests it receives, how often it turns over that requested data, or what kinds of data is requested, Whittaker wrote.

It's that time again, another quarter has passed, and summer is about to begin.

BusPatrol, a company that has installed AI-powered cameras in tens of thousands of school buses around the U.S., now plans to turn those cameras into automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), capturing the location of every vehicle the buses drive past, and give that data to law enforcement, 404 Media has learned. The plan will essentially transform school buses into roaming surveillance vehicles, taking a technology that was originally designed to issue tickets to people illegally passing stopped buses and using it for much wider and general law enforcement, likely without a warrant.

BusPatrol has already taken steps to share the collected data with law enforcement contracting giant Axon, according to leaked BusPatrol documents and a source with knowledge of the plans. Internally, BusPatrol has acknowledged how controversial its plan to collect and share this data is, pointing specifically to concerns about ICE using license plate data, but emphasizes the likely success of selling the angle of protecting children.