It's classic crackpo- [MAYBE NOT] (Score 1)

In college physics, they had a common name for ion-transporting twistey filaments in the lab- Birkeland Currents. [I think he was an early Nobel Prize winner.] Not sure why they didn't use the term in this article... Maybe they are still trying to get their minds around the sheer immensity of the ones they photographed between the sun and earth.