s for an
S-Region to pass across the face of the Sun, since the synodic rotation
is twenty-seven point three days.

LATHAM. I should think it would be nearer thirteen or fourteen days.

NIEMAND. Apparently an S-Region is not particularly effective when it is
just coming on or just going off the disk of the Sun.

LATHAM. Are the S-Regions associated with sunspots?

NIEMAND. They are connected in this way: that sunspot activity and
S-Region activity certainly go together. The more sunspots the more
violent and intense is the S-Region activity. But there is not a
one-to-one correspondence between sunspots and S-Regions. That is, you
cannot connect a particular sunspot group with a particular S-Region.
The same thing is true of sunspots and magnetic storms.

LATHAM. How do you account for this?

NIEMAND. We don't account for it.

* * * * *

LATHAM. What other properties of the S-Regions have you discovered?

NIEMAND. Middletown says that the radio waves emanating from them are
strongly circularly polarized. Moreover, the sense of rotation remains
constant while one is passing across the Sun. If the magnetic field
associated with an S-Region extends into the high solar corona through
which the rays pass, then the sense of rotation corresponds to the
ordinary ray of the magneto-ionic theory.

LATHAM. Does this mean that the mental disturbances arise from some form
of electromagnetic radiation?

NIEMAND. We doubt it. As I said before, the charts show a lag of about
forty-eight hours between the development of an S-Region and the onset
of mental disturbance. This indicates that the malignant energy
emanating from an S-Region consists of some highly penetrating form of
corpuscular radiation, as yet unidentified.[A]

[Footnote A: Middletown believes that the Intense radiation recently
discovered from information derived from Explorer I and III has no
connection with the corpuscular S-radiation.]

LATHAM. A question that puzzles me is why some people are affected by
the S-Regions while others are not.

NIEMAND. Our latest results indicate that probably _no one_ is
completely immune. All are affected in _some_ degree. Just why some
should be affected so much more than others is still a matter of
speculation.

LATHAM. How long does an S-Region last?

NIEMAND. An S-Region may have a lifetime of from three to perhaps a
dozen solar rotations. Then it dies out and for a time we are free