The Kepler is a one-ton satellite set to be blasted into orbit around the Sun, far away from all the distracting background noise of Earth - in any aspect of the search for intelligent life, it's important to be as far from American Idol as possible. The probe will make over six billion stellar measurements in order to detect any Earth-alikes hiding in the stars.
At the moment our main method of planet-detection is the "wobble method", which sounds awfully unscientific for an interplanetary investigation. It's based on observing how much the planet pulls its host star - the problem being that stars are very big, while planets are pretty small, so we've only found unusually huge and close-in planets this way. Planets which couldn't possibly support life as we know it.
Science & Technology
© Owen Gilbert/Rice University
As One - A field of genetically identical amoebas in Texas raises the possibility that cells might organize on much larger scales than once thought.
As One - A field of genetically identical amoebas in Texas raises the possibility that cells might organize on much larger scales than once thought.
Scientists found the vast and sticky empire stretching 40 feet across, consisting of billions of genetically identical single-celled individuals, oozing along in the muck of a cow pasture outside Houston.
"It was very unexpected," said Owen M. Gilbert, a graduate student at Rice University and lead author of the report in the March issue of Molecular Ecology. "It was like nothing we'd ever seen before."
Scientists say the discovery is much more than a mere curiosity, because the colony consists of what are known as social amoebas. Only an apparent oxymoron, social amoebas are able to gather in organized groups and behave cooperatively, some even committing suicide to help fellow amoebas reproduce. The discovery of such a huge colony of genetically identical amoebas provides insight into how such cooperation and sociality might have evolved and may help to explain why microbes are being found to show social behaviors more often than was expected.
Madison, Wisc. - Eric Szatkowski is a Wisconsin Justice Department special agent, but on that Sunday afternoon he entered an online chat room as a 14-year-old boy.
He claimed he was into weightlifting, AC/DC and muscle magazines. Then he waited.
Within hours, screen name Paul2u sent a message: "Hi. u realy 14?"
Over the past decade, agents and computer experts have gone after hundreds of people like Paul2u who solicit sex from kids or trade child pornography online. Police efforts around the country were all the rage with the media in the early 2000s, reaching a crescendo with Dateline NBC's "To Catch A Predator" series.
He claimed he was into weightlifting, AC/DC and muscle magazines. Then he waited.
Within hours, screen name Paul2u sent a message: "Hi. u realy 14?"
Over the past decade, agents and computer experts have gone after hundreds of people like Paul2u who solicit sex from kids or trade child pornography online. Police efforts around the country were all the rage with the media in the early 2000s, reaching a crescendo with Dateline NBC's "To Catch A Predator" series.
An overdose of the spooky connection can break down quantum computing systems, researchers find.
Physicists have long thought that quantum entanglement, a mysterious link between separated particles that Einstein called "spooky action at a distance," would allow quantum computers to solve certain hard math problems much faster than ordinary computers. But now it seems that entanglement can also be a nuisance.
Instead of speeding up the process, too much entanglement can break down the entire system, researchers report in a paper to appear in Physical Review Letters.
Physicists have long thought that quantum entanglement, a mysterious link between separated particles that Einstein called "spooky action at a distance," would allow quantum computers to solve certain hard math problems much faster than ordinary computers. But now it seems that entanglement can also be a nuisance.
Instead of speeding up the process, too much entanglement can break down the entire system, researchers report in a paper to appear in Physical Review Letters.
© BBC
A number of Roman burials were uncovered during the dig
A number of Roman burials were uncovered during the dig
The house dates from the Iron Age (400-100 BC) and was constructed from wooden posts with a thatched roof and had a diameter of 17m (56ft)
© AP
In this handout photo provided by the Greek Ministry of Culture on Monday, March 23, 2009, the torso and raised right arm of a 2,200-year-old statue are seen after it was raised in a fisherman's nets. The ministry said the find, dating to the late 2nd century B.C. was part of an equestrian statue of an armed man wearing a breastplate and carrying a sheathed sword. It was accidentally found last week in the eastern Aegean Sea between the islands of Kos and Kalymnos.
In this handout photo provided by the Greek Ministry of Culture on Monday, March 23, 2009, the torso and raised right arm of a 2,200-year-old statue are seen after it was raised in a fisherman's nets. The ministry said the find, dating to the late 2nd century B.C. was part of an equestrian statue of an armed man wearing a breastplate and carrying a sheathed sword. It was accidentally found last week in the eastern Aegean Sea between the islands of Kos and Kalymnos.
Instead, Greek authorities say his haul was a section of a 2,200-year-old bronze statue of a horseman.
However hard you stare, you would still miss it. Researchers have found a way to generate the shortest-ever flash of light - 80 attoseconds (billionths of a billionth of a second) long.
Such flashes have already been used to capture an image of a laser pulse too short to be "photographed" before.
The light pulses are produced by firing longer, but still very short laser pulses into a cloud of neon gas. The laser gives a kick of energy to the neon atoms, which then release this energy in the form of brief pulses of extreme ultraviolet light.
The trigger pulses fired at the neon cloud are themselves only 2.5 femtoseconds, billionths of a millionth of a second, long, says team member Eleftherios Goulielmakis at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany.
Such flashes have already been used to capture an image of a laser pulse too short to be "photographed" before.
The light pulses are produced by firing longer, but still very short laser pulses into a cloud of neon gas. The laser gives a kick of energy to the neon atoms, which then release this energy in the form of brief pulses of extreme ultraviolet light.
The trigger pulses fired at the neon cloud are themselves only 2.5 femtoseconds, billionths of a millionth of a second, long, says team member Eleftherios Goulielmakis at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany.
© A Gal-Yam/Weizmann Institute of Science/D Leonard/San Diego State University
Archival images suggest that a 2005 supernova was caused by the explosion of a luminous blue variable, a bright young star that is not expected to explode
Archival images suggest that a 2005 supernova was caused by the explosion of a luminous blue variable, a bright young star that is not expected to explode
A massive young star seems to have exploded before its time, new Hubble Space Telescope images reveal. The star, the heftiest to have been linked to a supernova explosion, could challenge models of when stellar furnaces end their lives. Stars heavier than about eight times the mass of the Sun end their lives in dramatic explosions when the nuclear furnaces at their cores run out of fuel and collapse into neutron stars or black holes.
Hundreds of supernovae are seen each year, but astronomers have only identified a handful of the stars responsible for the dramatic blasts. To do so, they must dig through archived images to identify the doomed stars before the explosions, checking again years after the blasts to confirm their disappearance. Now a team led by Avishay Gal-Yam of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel has found one of these supernova 'progenitors' that seems to be a true outlier. The star, which once sat in the galaxy NGC 266, some 200 million light years away, briefly brightened the sky in a 2005 explosion before disappearing entirely.
A piece of space junk is approaching their orbit, so the shuttle powers the space station out of the way. Ten days ago, another piece of junk menaced the station.
Orlando, Florida -- With his ship still docked at the International Space Station, shuttle commander Lee Archambault fired up Discovery's steering jets Sunday to move the linked craft into a new position that will reduce their chances of colliding with a piece of space junk.
Orlando, Florida -- With his ship still docked at the International Space Station, shuttle commander Lee Archambault fired up Discovery's steering jets Sunday to move the linked craft into a new position that will reduce their chances of colliding with a piece of space junk.
© Ali Abbas for NPR
Ancient buildings have emerged from the river bed in Iraq's western Anbar province as the Euphrates River dries up. For the first time, archaeologists are able to access sites that had been flooded by Saddam Hussein in the mid-1980s
Ancient buildings have emerged from the river bed in Iraq's western Anbar province as the Euphrates River dries up. For the first time, archaeologists are able to access sites that had been flooded by Saddam Hussein in the mid-1980s
The receding waters of the Euphrates River have revealed ancient archaeological sites, some of which were unknown until now.
For Ratib Ali al-Kubaisi, the director of Anbar province's Antiquities Department, the drought has opened up a whole new land of opportunity.
