Alien Particles From Beyond The Solar System Responsible For Computer Crashes, Researcher Says

The more we use electronic devices, be they handheld devices like smartphones and tablets or the larger laptops and desktop computers, the more we are frustrated by the inevitable crashes and freezes the devices suffer from time to time. And each time that happens, we curse the device manufacturer (or the office tech support) with doing a shoddy job. But in reality, the actual blame may not lay with the usual suspects at all. In fact, no one on the entire Earth may be at fault. At a Friday presentation in the ongoing annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Bharat Bhuva from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, blamed "these operational failures" on the "impact of electrically charged particles generated by cosmic rays that originate outside the solar system." In the morning presentation, titled "Cloudy with a Chance of Solar Flares: Quantifying the Risk of Space Weather," Bhuva said the millions of invisible, subatomic particles -- such as energetic neutrons, muons, pions and alpha particles -- that originate very far from our planet, and flow through Earth and our bodies (they have no known negative impact on living tissues) can alter bits of data stored in the memories of electronic devices when they interact with the integrated circuits the devices use.