SciByte

Kepler-34 b orbits its two sun-like stars every 289 days, and the stars themselves orbit and eclipse each other every 28 days.

eclipses allow a very precise determination of the stars

Kepler-35 b revolves about a pair of smaller stars (80 and 89 percent of the sun’s mass) every 131 days, and the stars orbit and eclipse one another every 21 days

Kepler-34 at 4,900 light-years from Earth

Kepler-35 at 5,400 light-years

among the most distant planets discovered.

In December 2011, scientists announced

: a planet 2.4 times the size of Earth

Later in the month

team announced the discovery of the first Earth-size planets

suggests that this breed of star could be the place to search for Earth-like rocky planets

85 out of 900 potential planetary systems identified by Kepler have been found in red dwarf systems.

A comparison of KOI-961 and its tiny planets with our own planet Jupiter and its four large moons. Image: NASA/JPL Caltech

KOI-961 also bears striking resemblance to the well-studied nearby red dwarf, Barnard's Star, which is only six light years away

a planet, moons could be carving these rings

it could be newborn planets that are responsible.

unmanned 2014 EFT-1 mission will blast Orion into space aboard a Delta 4-Heavy rocket. The capsule will orbit Earth twice while climbing to an altitude of several thousand miles, then rocket back in a high-speed plunge to validate its heat shield and other systems.

Artist's rendering of the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle on a deep space mission.CREDIT: NASA

Acoustic testing

recent acoustic testing of the Orion crew module/launch abort system structure involved hundreds of sensors planted throughout the hardware.

subjected it to the flight environment

chamber gets up to 150 decibels…like a rifle shot right next to your ear. It's pretty loud. All that sound…it's like a really loud rock concert

Huge heat shield

underside of Orion's crew module is the heat shield

measuring 16.5 feet (5 m) in diameter

Thermal Protection System advances heritage materials from the NASA's space shuttle and Apollo programs to create a next-generation system that can withstand the extreme environments of piloted deep space missions.

huge pieces of space junk could rain down on us at any moment.

Phobos-Grunt spacecraft

re-enter the atmosphere sometime between Saturday and Monday (Jan. 14 to Jan. 16).

the third uncontrolled satellite re-entry in four months

claims are handled on a case-by-case basis, you might be surprised to learn damage from satellite debris, aka space junk, likely would be covered under most insurance policies

Farmers Insurance, aired a commercial during this winter's college football bowl games offering similar assurances to its current and potential customers.

Experts predict that Russia's failed Mars probe Phobos-Grunt will crash back to Earth in mid-January 2012. This artist's concept shows fuel burning from a ruptured fuel tank as the spacecraft re-enters the atmosphere.CREDIT: Michael Carroll

NASA estimates that our planet's orbital debris cloud contains more than 500,000 pieces larger than a marble and more than 20,000 at least as big as a softball

space junk poses little threat to people on the ground. Most pieces of falling satellites burn up the atmosphere

the bits that make it through are likely to land harmlessly in the ocean or on uninhabited land

To date, nobody is known to have been injured by a chunk of falling debris.

poses a real threat to the craft that orbit and observe our planet and provide navigation and telecommunications services

2009, for example, the Iridium 33 communications satellite was destroyed when it slammed into a defunct Russian satellite.

This computer illustration depicts the density of space junk around Earth in low-Earth orbit.CREDIT: ESA

in the first 100 days of the outbreak tracked closely

data reported from hospital and clinics

social media data were available almost instantly

others have shown that Twitter and other online sources can provide meaningful information about outbreaks of diseases such as H1N1 and swine flu

new work establishes that the approach is useful for tracking a disease that emerges in the unsafe living conditions that often follow a disaster, says Polgreen.

188,819 tweets that contained or were tagged with the word cholera during the first 100 days of the cholera outbreak

analysis suggests the social tool provides a good measure of the disease’s spread

The researchers compared the tweets to data from HealthMap, a disease-tracking tool that mines Internet news stories, blogs and discussion groups and lets the public report illness by cell phone. Both the Twitter and HealthMap data corresponded to official data from the Haitian Ministry of Public Health.

Official sources of data are better validated, but on the downside they are going to take time

you can watch all the action, and even take pictures of the events with your iPhone

augmented-reality app that recreates Tranquility Base in your backyard or neighborhood park

download it from iTunes for only $.99.

is for iPhones and iPads only.

A size comparison between the Sun, a low mass star, a brown dwarf, Jupiter, and the Earth. Image credit: NASA

Two of Saturn's shepherd moons keep the planet's F ring in check. Image Credit: NASA/JPL

cases are surging in a number of countries -- not just the three other endemic countries of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria, but in a dozen reinfected countries, many in Africa.

Many countries have been declared polio-free only to be reinfected by virus imported from another country

NASA has billed New Horizons as the fastest spacecraft ever launched from Earth

But the Tombaughs' two children, Annette and Alden, should get to see what New Horizons discovers. They'll be the mission team's guests of honor when the probe makes its closest approach to Pluto in July 2015

new computer simulations blame more exotic causes

stars literally pushing the planets into interstellar space after the suns reach the end of their normal hydrogen-burning lives and begin expanding into red giants

Other scenarios involve gravitational perturbations, either caused by passing stars, a solar system entering and exiting our galaxy's gravitationally dense spiral arms

interactions with dense molecular clouds

most likely reason

extrasolar planets would simply be ejected by the gravitational forces that result when their parent stars get jostled about inside tightly-packed star clusters

babbling babies match up what adults say with how they say

budding talkers can afford to look for communication signals in a speakers’ eyes

tested 179 infants from English-speaking families at age 4, 6, 8 or 12 months

devices tracked where babies looked when shown videos of women speaking English or a foreign language

also report that on average, infants’ pupils increasingly dilated between ages 8 months and 1 year in response to Spanish speakers, a sign of surprise at encountering unfamiliar speech

By 2 years of age, children with autism avoid eye contact and focus on speakers’ mouths

new findings raise the possibility of identifying kids headed for this developmental disorder even earlier

hasn’t yet been demonstrated that children who continue to look at the mouths of native-language speakers after age 1 develop autism or other communication problems more frequently than those who shift to looking at speakers’ eyes