Astronomers Closer To Exoplanet "Holy Grail"

From Wired News:

In the astronomical equivalent of meeting someone who reminds you of yourself, scientists have discovered a planet outside the solar system that weighs just twice as much as Earth.

The relatively small size of the new planet, dubbed Gliese 581e, prompted Grenoble Observatory astronomer Xavier Bonfils to call it "the least massive exoplanet ever detected" in a press release.

That seems an odd reason for celebration until one considers the behemoth sizes of other exoplanets.

The largest, named TrES-4 and found — quite appropriately — orbiting a star in the Hercules constellation, is roughly twice the diameter of Jupiter, which itself could house 1,000 planet Earths. Corot-7b, the previous smallest-exoplanet designee, is twice the size of Earth and about five times as heavy.

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Earth-Sized Planet Discovered In Galaxy Outside Our Solar System

Exoplanet: An artist's impression shows Gliese 581 e with its star in the distance

From The Daily Mail:

Scientists have discovered a planet close in size to Earth in a galaxy outside our solar system.

As many as 300 so-called exoplanets - or planets outside our solar system - have been discovered, but most are much larger than Earth.

Gliese 581 e is about twice the mass of our planet and orbits a star 20.5 light years away in the constellation Libra.

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Where's The Remotest Place On Earth?

(Click the Above Image to Enlarge)
In our hyperconnected world, getting away from it all is easier said than done.
Click the link in the main text to see more of the connectivity maps

From The New Scientist:

SO YOU'VE hitch-hiked through Central America, stalked rare beasts in Madagascar and trekked your way through northern Chile. You're pretty well travelled, even if you do say so yourself. Before you get ideas about being an intrepid explorer, however, consider this. For all their wide open spaces and seeming wildernesses, none of these places can be described as remote in 2009.

In fact, very little of the world's land can now be thought of as inaccessible, according to a new map of connectedness created by researchers at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, and the World Bank.

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Solar Systems Around Dead Suns?

Asteroid 'Bites the Dust' Around Dead Star. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope set its infrared eyes upon the dusty remains of shredded asteroids around several dead stars. This artist's concept illustrates one such dead star, or "white dwarf," surrounded by the bits and pieces of a disintegrating asteroid. These observations help astronomers better understand what rocky planets are made of around other stars. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 20, 2009) — Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers have found that at least 1 in 100 white dwarf stars show evidence of orbiting asteroids and rocky planets, suggesting these objects once hosted solar systems similar to our own.

Team member Dr Jay Farihi of the University of Leicester will present this discovery on April 20th at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science conference at the University of Hertfordshire.

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Is Picking A Mate Just Genetics?

Is finding true love a matter of romance and judgment or just cold genetics?
(ABCNews Photo Illustration/ABC News)

From ABC News:

Scientists Say Genes May Dictate Mate Selection, at Least for Fruit Flies

So after looking for years you finally found your perfect mate. Was it good judgment on your part, helped along by a lot of romance, or was it just a case of cold genetics?

It may well be that your genes, not your superior taste when it comes to the opposite sex, made the choice for you. But even your genes can get it wrong. At least if you are a fruit fly.

A team of scientists at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., and the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, have been trying for a number of years to figure out the role genes play in mate selection.

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Lack Of Water Threatens "Garden of Eden"

Iraq’s marshes in 2003. Today, the marshes are drying up due to a drought and competition over limited water supplies. Hassan Janali, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

From Earth Magazine:

Since the downfall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Iraqis and scientists from around the world have been working hard to restore Iraq’s once-lush marshes. But after several years of measurable improvement, drought and competition over limited water supplies threaten to reverse this progress. Those working on the marshes are confident that the marshes can come back — but whether the people who rely on these wetlands for their livelihood will be as resilient remains to be seen.

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Manhattan Depicted Before Human Impact

Modern Manhattan on right; virtual recreation of 1609 Mannahatta on left. Image © Markley Boyer / Mannahatta Project / Wildlife Conservation Society

From Live Science:

New York City seems about as far removed from its natural state as any spot on the planet. Now a new study reveals what Manhattan looked like before it became a concrete jungle.

Once known as Mannahatta — the land of many hills — in the Lenape Native American dialect, New York was a lush island paradise 400 years ago. Times Square used to be an old-growth forest, Harlem was a ranging meadow, and downtown was wetlands. Streams teemed with fish. Wolves, mountain lion, elk and deer roamed the rolling hills.

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Medical Micro-Robots Made As Small As Bacteria

Artificial bacterial flagella are about half as long as the thickness of a human hair. They can swim at a speed of up to one body length per second. This means that they already resemble their natural role models very closely. (Credit: Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems/ETH Zurich)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 19, 2009) — For the first time, ETH Zurich researchers have built micro-robots as small as bacteria. Their purpose is to help cure human beings.

They look like spirals with tiny heads, and screw through the liquid like miniature corkscrews. When moving, they resemble rather ungainly bacteria with long whip-like tails. They can only be observed under a microscope because, at a total length of 25 to 60 µm, they are almost as small as natural flagellated bacteria. Most are between 5 and 15 µm long, a few are more than 20 µm.

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Are Wind Farms A Lot Of Hot Air... And What Would We Do When It's Not Windy?

Romantic hope: Wind farms cannot be the sole solution to our energy crisis

From The Daily Mail:

They're fine for making the odd cup of tea. But, says the Mail's Science Editor; if we wanted to go totally green, we'd have to carpet the country with more windmills than exist in the whole world.

There can be few more dramatic ways to create energy to boil a kettle. A few feet above my head, a giant blade scythes through the air. It is razorsharp, travels at about 90mph, is 130ft long and weighs some nine tons. Moments later, a second blade does the same thing, followed by a third.

The three rotors are attached to a 210ft-tall white tower which looms to the same height as St Paul's Cathedral - although many would consider it considerably less beautiful - and can be seen from miles around.

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Why Antarctic Ice Is Growing Despite Global Warming

Photo: Sea ice has grown in the Ross Sea off Antarctica, despite global warming: what's going on? (Image: Daisy Gilardini / The Image Bank / Getty)

From The New Scientist:

It's the southern ozone hole whatdunit. That's why Antarctic sea ice is growing while at the other pole, Arctic ice is shrinking at record rates. It seems CFCs and other ozone-depleting chemicals have given the South Pole respite from global warming.

But only temporarily. According to John Turner of the British Antarctic Survey, the effect will last roughly another decade before Antarctic sea ice starts to decline as well.

Arctic sea ice is decreasing dramatically and reached a record low in 2007. But satellite images studied by Turner and his colleagues show that Antarctic sea ice is increasing in every month of the year expect January. "By the end of the century we expect one third of Antarctic sea ice to disappear," says Turner. "So we're trying to understand why it's increasing now, at a time of global warming."

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Physicist Stephen Hawking Very Ill And In Hospital

Photo: Stephen Hawking (Wikimedia Commons)

From Yahoo News/Reuters:

LONDON (Reuters) – Physicist Stephen Hawking, the author of "A Brief History of Time" who is almost completely paralyzed by motor neurone disease, has been urgently admitted to hospital, Cambridge University said on Monday.

Hawking, 67, was taken by ambulance to a local hospital in Cambridge, where he teaches as a professor of applied mathematics and theoretical physics.

"Professor Hawking is very ill and has been taken by ambulance to Addenbrooke's Hospital," the university said.

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More News On Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking hospitalized, reported very ill -- AP
Scientist Hawking ill in hospital -- BBC
Physicist Hawking hospitalized -- UPI
Physicist Stephen Hawking hospitalized, "very ill" -- Scientific American
Stephen Hawking rushed to hospital -- CBC
Scientist Stephen Hawking 'very ill': university -- AFP
FACTBOX - Physicist Stephen Hawking -- Reuters

Egypt's Top Archaeologist Claims Antony And Cleopatra Tomb Found

Zahi Hawass (left) displays finds from the Toposiris Magna temple, where he believes Antony and Cleopatra's remains are located Photo: EPA

From The Telegraph:

Egypt's top archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, has shown off treasures from the site of a tomb which he claims contains the remains of Mark Antony and Cleopatra.

Ahead of the start of excavations on Tuesday, Mr Hawass exhibited 22 coins, 10 mummies, an alabaster head and a fragment of a mask with a cleft chin as evidence that the site, a 2,000-year-old temple to the god Osiris, is likely to hold further treasures.

He believes that the Toposiris Magna temple, 30 miles from Egypt's ancient seaside capital of Alexandria, contains the tomb of the doomed lovers that has been shrouded in mystery for so long.

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Learning Disabilities In Males: Nine New X Chromosome Genes Linked To Learning Disabilities

Image: Family with missense variants in the CASK gene, one of the genes discovered in this study. Individuals with the missense variant are denoted by a *. Females are denoted with circles and males with squares. Black shading denotes individuals with learning disabilities. (Credit: Image courtesy of Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 20, 2009) — A collaboration between more than 70 researchers across the globe has uncovered nine new genes on the X chromosome that, when knocked-out, lead to learning disabilities. The international team studied almost all X chromosome genes in 208 families with learning disabilities - the largest screen of this type ever reported.

Remarkably, the team also found that approximately 1-2% of X chromosome genes, when knocked-out, have no apparent effect on an individual's ability to function in the ordinary world. The publication in Nature Genetics - a culmination of five years of scientific collaboration - emphasises the power of sequencing approaches to identify novel genes of clinical importance, but also highlights the challenges researchers face when carrying out this kind of study.

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Laughter Is Indeed Good Medicine

From Live Science:

Nobody can say if laughter is the best medicine, but it certainly seems to help. So suggests a new but very small study of diabetes patients who were given a good dose of humor for a year.

Researchers split 20 high-risk diabetic patients —all with hypertension and hyperlipidemia (a risk factor for cardiovascular disease)— into two groups. Both groups were given standard diabetes medication. Group L viewed 30 minutes of humor of their choosing, while Group C, the control group, did not. This went on for a year of treatments.

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Discover Interview The Man Who Found Quarks And Made Sense Of The Universe

From Discover Magazine:

Murray Gell-Mann had a smash success with particles, notorious dustups with Feynman, and a missed opportunity with Einstein.

It is no accident that the quark—the building block of protons and neutrons and, by extension, of you and everything around you—has such a strange and charming name. The physicist who discovered it, Murray Gell-Mann, loves words as much as he loves physics. He is known to correct a stranger’s pronunciation of his or her own last name (which doesn’t always go over well) and is more than happy to give names to objects or ideas that do not have one yet. Thus came the word quark for his most famous discovery. It sounds like “kwork” and got its spelling from a whimsical poem in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. This highly scientific term is clever and jokey and gruff all at once, much like the man who coined it.

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Shuttle Dodges Space Junk Risk

Photo from National Geographic

From Wired Science:

Despite the recent rash of space-debris problems, the risk that the space shuttle mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope will have a catastrophic collision with space junk and micrometeoroids won't exceed NASA guidelines.

NASA said Thursday the new orbital debris risk for STS-125 had fallen to 1 in 221. A couple of precautionary maneuvers -- in particular coming into a lower, less crowded orbit on the 10th day of the mission and using Hubble as a shield -- reduced the spaceship's chance of getting hit with a stray paint chip or metal bolt.

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New Bird Flu Cses Suggest The Danger Of Pandemic Is Rising

Chickens for sale in Cairo: Most bird-flu victims in Egypt this year are children. Reuters

From The Independent:

Infections in Egypt raise scientists' fears that virus will be spread by humans.

First the good news: bird flu is becoming less deadly. Now the bad: scientists fear that this is the very thing that could make the virus more able to cause a pandemic that would kill hundreds of millions of people.

This paradox – emerging from Egypt, the most recent epicentre of the disease – threatens to increase the disease's ability to spread from person to person by helping it achieve the crucial mutation in the virus which could turn it into the greatest plague to hit Britain since the Black Death. Last year the Government identified the bird-flu virus, codenamed H5N1, as the biggest threat facing the country – with the potential to kill up to 750,000 Britons.

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Scientists Compete To Build Best Living Machine

American scientist and entrepreneur Craig Venter Photo: REUTERS

From The Telegraph:

Scientists from around the world are to compete in a competition to build the best machine using only parts from living organisms.

More than 100 genetic engineering laboratories will compete using the microscopic components found inside biological cells.

The organisers of the competition, which is now in its sixth year, hope that useful technology will be created from these basic building blocks of life.

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Ocean Dead Zones Likely To Expand: Increasing Carbon Dioxide And Decreasing Oxygen Make It Harder For Deep-sea Animals To Breath

Photo: A new study by marine chemists at MBARI suggests that deep-ocean animals such as this owlfish (Bathylagus milleri) may suffer as carbon dioxide increases and oxygen concentrations decline in the deep sea. (Credit: Copyright 2001 MBARI)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 18, 2009) — New calculations made by marine chemists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) suggest that low-oxygen "dead zones" in the ocean could expand significantly over the next century. These predictions are based on the fact that, as more and more carbon dioxide dissolves from the atmosphere into the ocean, marine animals will need more oxygen to survive.

Concentrations of carbon dioxide are increasing rapidly in the Earth's atmosphere, primarily because of human activities. About one third of the carbon dioxide that humans produce by burning fossil fuels is being absorbed by the world's oceans, gradually causing seawater to become more acidic.

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Jet Lag Caused By Out-Of-Synch Brain

From Live Science:

The droopy-eyed jet lag that comes after a cross-country plane trip could be caused by two groups of cells at the base of the brain falling out of synch, a new study suggests.

The body has a built-in time-keeping system, known as a circadian rhythm, that helps us keep track of when it's time to eat, sleep, wake up and perform other body functions. This system is partly governed by the cycle of day and night.

Changing time zones or working the late shift can throw off the body's sense of timing because it changes the timing of our exposure to light.

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