The HARPS spectrograph on the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile is the world's most successful planet finder [1]. The HARPS team, led by Michel Mayor (University of Geneva, Switzerland), have announced the discovery of more than 50 new exoplanets orbiting nearby stars, including sixteen super-Earths [2]. This is the largest number of such planets ever announced at one time [3]. The new findings are being presented at a conference on Extreme Solar Systems where 350 exoplanet experts are meeting in Wyoming, USA.

"The harvest of discoveries from HARPS has exceeded all expectations and includes an exceptionally rich population of super-Earths and Neptune-type planets hosted by stars very similar to our Sun. And even better -- the new results show that the pace of discovery is accelerating," says Mayor.

In the eight years since it started surveying stars like the Sun using the radial velocity technique HARPS has been used to discover more than 150 new planets. About two thirds of all the known exoplanets with masses less than that of Neptune [4] were discovered by HARPS. These exceptional results are the fruit of several hundred nights of HARPS observations [5].

Working with HARPS observations of 376 Sun-like stars, astronomers have now also much improved the estimate of how likely it is that a star like the Sun is host to low-mass planets (as opposed to gaseous giants). They find that about 40% of such stars have at least one planet less massive than Saturn. The majority of exoplanets of Neptune mass or less appear to be in systems with multiple planets.

With upgrades to both hardware and software systems in progress, HARPS is being pushed to the next level of stability and sensitivity to search for rocky planets that could support life. Ten nearby stars similar to the Sun were selected for a new survey. These stars had already been observed by HARPS and are known to be suitable for extremely precise radial velocity measurements. After two years of work, the team of astronomers has discovered five new planets with masses less than five times that of Earth.

Mom and Dad warned that television would rot your brain, and a new study suggests it's true - at least from certain frenetic-style cartoons.

Kids who watched just nine minutes of the fast-paced children's cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants did worse afterward at tasks requiring focus and self-control than did kids who watched a slow-paced cartoon and kids who entertained themselves by coloring.

The study was small, and scientists weren't sure how long the brain-drain effect persists. But the research highlights the importance not just of how much TV a child watches, but of what kind, said Dimitri Christakis of the Seattle Children's Research Institute at the University of Washington. Christakis was not involved in the study, but penned an accompanying editorial appearing today (Sept. 12) in the journal Pediatrics.

"It's not ... all television that creates deficits in attention," Christakis told LiveScience. "It's the pacing of the program, what we call the 'formal features,' that actually matter."

Nautilus foresaw the Arab Spring and the whereabouts of Bin Laden (sort of). What happens next is anyone's guess

Hey, wouldn't it be great if we had a supercomputer that could predict the future? By "we", incidentally, I mean "we" as in "the human race", not "we" as in "myself and you - you specifically". You might be Josef Fritzl for all I know. I don't want to find myself sharing a supercomputer desktop with Fritzl. Every time I went to open a window, he'd nail it shut.

That's a massive digression for an opening paragraph, so let's pretend it didn't happen and start again, after I click my fingers. Since you won't be able to hear me click my fingers, I'll substitute a pound sign for the noise itself. Ready? 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... £!

Lightning discharges in the atmosphere are familiar, but what about the ones underground?

The electrical phenomenon we call lightning is not well understood. The most common interpretation involves the circulation of water vapor up and down through clouds in a process called convection. Water is heated by the Sun until it evaporates, rising into the air where it collects into clouds. The water vapor continues to rise higher and higher, finally cooling enough to condense back into liquid. Earth's gravity then pulls it back to the surface where the cycle repeats.

According to consensus opinions, water droplets tend to collide during convection, knocking electrons off one another, creating a charge separation. Electrons accumulate in the lower portion of the cloud, where it acquires a negative charge. As the droplets that have lost an electron continue to rise, they carry a positive charge into the top of the cloud.

A chemical essential for life may have been brought to Earth from outer space by meteorites, scientists claim.

Astrobiologist Dr Terry Kee, from the University of Leeds, has found meteorite fragments contain a precursor to a key chemical that allows biological cells to capture energy from their surroundings.

He believes debris from meteorites that hit the Earth billions of years ago may have combined with slightly acidic water on the planet to produce early forms of the compound.

This would then have allowed the first forms of cellular life to form and to use energy from their surroundings.

"There is strong scientific evidence that chemicals essential to life have been found in interstellar material such as meteorites," Dr Kee said.

"Meteorites are fragments of some of the oldest materials in our solar system, and their composition can hold clues as to the appearance and environment of our own planet and what lived on it billions of years ago."

The rewards outweigh the risks -- when you're in a group, anyway. A new USC study explains why people take stupid chances when all of their friends are watching that they would never take by themselves. According to the study, the human brain places more value on winning in a social setting than it does on winning when you're alone.

Georgio Coricelli of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences led a multinational team of researchers that measured activity in the regions of the brain associated with rewards and with social reasoning while participants in the study entered in lotteries.

Their study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers found that the striatum, a part of the brain associated with rewards, showed higher activity when a participant beat a peer in the lottery, as opposed to when the participant won while alone. The medial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain associated with social reasoning, was more activated as well. Those participants who won in a social setting also tended to engage in more risky and competitive behavior in subsequent lotteries.

"These findings suggest that the brain is equipped with the ability to detect and encode social signals, make social signals salient, and then, use these signals to optimize future behavior," Coricelli said.

Feeling lazy? It may be in your genes, say McMaster University researchers.

A study with lab mice at the Hamilton, Ont., university suggests rodents who lack key muscle genes could not run as far as normal mice, who typically love to run.

"While the normal mice could run for miles, those without the genes in their muscle could only run the same distance as down the hall and back," Gregory Steinberg, associate professor of medicine in Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine and Canada Research Chair in Metabolism and Obesity, said in a statement.

Google Details, and Defends, Its Use of Electricity

Google disclosed Thursday that it continuously uses enough electricity to power 200,000 homes, but it says that in doing so, it also makes the planet greener.

Every time a person runs a Google search, watches a YouTube video or sends a message through Gmail, the company's data centers full of computers use electricity. Those data centers around the world continuously draw almost 260 million watts - about a quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant.

Up to now, the company has kept statistics about its energy use secret. Industry analysts speculate it was because the information was embarrassing and would also give competitors a clue to how Google runs its operations.

While the electricity figures may seem large, the company asserts that the world is a greener place because people use less energy as a result of the billions of operations carried out in Google data centers. Google says people should consider things like the amount of gasoline saved when someone conducts a Google search rather than, say, drives to the library. "They look big in the small context," Urs Hoelzle, Google's senior vice president for technical infrastructure, said in an interview.

Researchers have created an application that enables cell phones and other portable devices to translate foreign-language food menus for English speakers and could be used for people who must follow restricted diets for medical reasons.

"You type in the menu listing and the application translates it automatically without talking to a server," said Mireille "Mimi" Boutin, an associate professor in Purdue University's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "It only takes a fraction of a second, you don't need connection to the Internet and it won't empty your battery."

Before entering a foreign country, the user would download a region- and language-specific configuration and database. From then on, the system can operate without a network connection.

"The problem with menus is that even if you know the language you may still have to ask questions to clarify what a dish contains," Boutin said. "For example, in German, "Schinken" means ham, but it can be raw ham or cooked ham. If you are going to eat the ham, you might want to know which."

The user types the desired dish into a prompt field in the graphical user interface. The text is translated, and the best possible translations are then listed, along with other information, including pictures and ingredients. The user can then browse the multimedia database to obtain more information about the dish or the ingredients. When appropriate, information and questions for the waiter are suggested.

"With Albert Parra Pozo, a graduate student who is fluent in Spanish, we were able to develop and implement this system on the iPod Touch for English speakers traveling in Spain," said Boutin, who specializes in signal and image processing. "Our tests indicate that our system yields a correct translation more often than general-purpose translation engines. Moreover, it does so almost instantaneously. The memory requirements of the application, including the database of pictures, are also well within the limits of the device."

Researchers are homing in on the exact time during an infant's development when it begins to tell the difference between basic touch and pain. A new British study indicates most babies can start sensing pain a few weeks before they are born.

These findings may help to improve clinical care for preterm babies.

"Babies can distinguish painful stimuli as different from general touch from around 35 to 37 weeks gestation, just before an infant would normally be born," study researcher Lorenzo Fabrizi of University College London said in a statement.

The researchers studied 46 babies at University College Hospital's Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Wing in Bloomsbury, London. Because 21 of the babies were born prematurely, scientists were able to monitor the different stages of human brain activity from just 28 weeks of development to those born full term at 37 weeks. (Babies' due dates are based on 40 weeks of pregnancy, but babies born even at the 37-week mark are considered full term.)

To determine whether the babies were able to feel pain, researchers relied on recordings of brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG). The scientists noted the babies' electrical brain activity as they underwent a routine heel lance, which is a standard, essential procedure of pricking the baby's foot to collect blood samples for clinical use. A change from general brain activity to a localized brain reaction suggested the baby was experiencing pain.