THE mysterious sunspot cycle has a subtle influence on crop success, a study of wheat prices in the US suggests.
The study backs the idea that the cycle somehow affects Earth’s climate. Astrophysicist Lev Pustilnik of Tel Aviv University and Gregory Yom Din, an agricultural economist at Haifa University in Israel, analysed US wheat prices during the 20th century. The team did not expect to see a sunspot connection because of factors such as modern technologies, which make crops more robust in bad weather.
But they found a link between numbers of sunspots and prices of US durum wheat (www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0411165…
