A recent report says that our sun is not kicking out sunspots like it used to. The paper, by solar astronomers Matthew Penn and William Livingstone, says that the magnetic field strength of the sunspots appears to be waning.
If the trend continues, sunspots could vanish completely by 2016. The last time this happened there was a prolonged cooling spell on Earth, known as the Little Ice Age.
It will be interesting to see what, if anything, comes of this.