enigmatic object detected five years ago in space may be a ringed alien world comparable to Saturn

Mind the gaps

gaps usually are signs that massive bodies are sculpting the ring edges

: 11 January 2012

orbit very close to their star, just 0.6 to 1.5 percent the distance from Earth to the sun

surface temperatures of these planets range from 720 Kelvin (836 degrees F) to 450 Kelvin (350 degrees),"

11 January 2012

The new three planet system hosts planets that are all smaller than Earth. Image: NASA/JPL Caltech.

eight out of ten stars in the Galaxy are red dwarfs

January 11, 2012

Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Finding one as small as Mars is amazing, and hints that there may be a bounty of rocky planets all around us."

Red dwarfs are the most common kind of star in our Milky Way galaxy. The discovery of three rocky planets around one red dwarf suggests that the galaxy could be teeming with similar rocky planets.

Received 15 November 2011 Accepted 05 December 2011 Published online 11 January 2012

Questions remained, however, about the prevalence of circumbinary planets and their range of orbital and physical properties

Using data from NASA’s Kepler Mission

astronomers announced the discovery of two new transiting “circumbinary” planet systems — planets that orbit two stars.

two new planets, named Kepler-34 b and Kepler-35 b, are both gaseous Saturn-size planets

11 January 2012

astronomers announced the discovery of a miniature solar system made up of three tiny planets - all of them smaller than Earth

130 light-years from Earth

11 January 2012

Saturn-like ring system has been discovered 420 light years away

using the ground-based SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) and All Sky Automated Survey (ASAS),

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The Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland has generated a lot of news of late, e.g. the announcement that a team had found what it believes to be a particle that traveled faster than he speed of light, an actual new particle, and of course the seemingly never-ending storyline associated with the hopeful discovery of the elusive Higgs Boson, now a physicist not associated with the project, has built a scale model replica of the ATLAS experiment; a particle detector that will likely serve as ground zero should the so-called “god particle” ever be observed.

a physicist with the Niels Bohr Institute took almost thirty five hours to build and cost two thousand Euros (paid for by the high energy physics group at the university). The point of building the replica, he says, is to incite interest in physics. Plus, no doubt, it was sort of fun.

The real ATLAS project is 44 meters long and 22 meters wide and weighs 7000 tonnes. Mehlhase’s model, at approximately 1:50 scale is approximately 1 meter long by a half meter wide. And while the real deal has millions of parts, the model has 9500 pieces, mostly LEGO blocks.

A custom MIG-welded steel chassisA 450 Watt electric motorTwo 7 Ah 12 Volt batteriesA 5DOF intertial measurement unitThe OSMC H-bridgeAn ATmega328P microcontroller

operates much like a Segway -- you lean forward to accelerate, and lean back to brake

holding in my right hand (in the video at the bottom) is a "kill switch" -- if I let go of it, the unicycle deactivates the motor,

Since the 1980s, scientists have been synthesizing newer allotropes, including carbon nanotubes, graphene, and fullerenes, all of which have had a significant scientific and technological impact.

scientists have been investigating a wide variety of new – and sometimes elusive – carbon allotropes

scientists also noted that T-carbon could have astronomical implications as a potential component of interstellar dust and carbon exoplanets

calculated that another material, lonsdaleite (also called hexagonal diamond, since it’s made of carbon and is similar to diamond), is even stronger than w-BN and 58 percent stronger than diamond

marks the first case where a material exceeds diamond in strength under the same loading conditions

Normal compressive pressures under indenters cause the materials to undergo a structural phase transformation into stronger structures, conserving volume by flipping their atomic bonds

By applying extreme pressure to compress and flatten carbon nanotubes, scientists have discovered that they can create a new carbon polymer that simulations show is hard enough to crack diamond

directly compressing carbon nanotube bundles to design and to synthesize novel metastable carbon allotropes

applying pressure to some of these carbon allotropes can change the bonds, resulting in different forms of carbon with novel electronic and mechanical properties

Humans can quickly detect photo fraud, maintains Karsch. They can do so in spotting lighting inconsistencies in a doctored photograph

In their computer program, a user is asked to select light sources in the picture.

An algorithm recreates the 3-D geometry and lighting of the scene and the artificial object is inserted into its new environment

Hubble Space Telescope has crossed a major milestone, accumulating 10,000 science papers based on its observations

After 21 years

it's actually in the best shape of its life