The News blog have reported that a ‘Goldilocks’ planet has been found by Kepler, NASA’s planet hunting mission, this week:
Kepler 22-b is not an Earth twin: at 2.4 times Earth’s radius, it could be more like a gassy Neptune than a rocky planet. But it sits in a comfortably warm orbit from its host star at temperatures similar to those experienced by Earth. The team got a third blip on its light curves just before Christmas in 2010—enough to make Kepler 22-b a candidate—and then spent another full year trying to confirm the planet, with follow-up observations from other telescopes in space and on the ground.
The Kepler team was also preparing to unload another instalment of its catalogue, which now includes 2,326 planet candidates. Find out more in their post.
Want to be a polar scientist?
The Frontier Scientists have been divulging the take-home messages from the American Geophysical Union (AGU ) Conference, a meeting designed to encourage effective future leaders in polar research. There was plenty of advice on hand for budding polar scientists:
Janet Warburton, PolarTREC director, pointed to poster sessions as a great venue to meet scientists and ask them questions. “The one-to one introduction to the science might help you decide if this is your future work.
Find out more in their summary and the Frontier Scientists also plan to attend the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting 2011, so stay tuned.
Quotes and the periodic table
Bob O’Hara reveals in his latest post that a few years ago he saw a quote up on the wall on the MRG lab in Helsinki, and he is wondering if anyone knows its provenance:
The Second Law of Thermodynamics, as it applies to life, states that organisms survive by making a bigger mess of their environment.
Answers in his comment thread!
This week’s guest post, The periodic table: matter matters, is by chemist and philosopher of science, Eric Scerri. He explains why the periodic table is perhaps the finest example of a scientific system of classification and why it remains in the limelight:
At the same time, there has been a veritable explosion of interest in the elements and the periodic table especially in the popular imagination. There have been i-Pad applications, YouTube videos, two highly successful popular books, people singing Tom Leher’s element song in various settings as well as artists and advertisers helping themselves to the elegance and beauty of the periodic table. On the scientific side, elements continue to be discovered or more precisely synthesised and there are official deliberations concerning how the recently discovered elements should be named.
Continue reading his post to find out more
The mind
This week Graham Morehead is discussing the mind, asking what are the internal organs of the mind and how can a mental surgeon operate if the human psyche is seen as a single undifferentiated mass? He expresses his views:
I see wisdom in the psychological model proposed by Marshall Rosenberg. His history as a negotiator taught him some very interesting lessons about people. We all have needs. That part is obvious. The non-obvious thing he discovered was how to distinguish between needs and strategies. For something to be a need it must be theoretically fulfillable for everyone in the world. So many of our so called needs are actually strategies to meet some deeper underlying needs.
What do you think? Join in the discussion.
Quad Pill
The Spoonful of Medicine Blog have reported that science may have been inspired by a cartoon:
The 1960s cartoon The Jetsons envisioned a future where single pills provided the same nutrition, taste and satiation as food that required chewing. That time-saving tablet remains a pipe dream, but the drugmaker Gilead is trying to deliver a similarly inspired pill for HIV medicines. On 27 October, the California company submitted an application to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its four-in-one HIV pill, which, if approved, would contain more medicines than any pill currently on the US market. The so-called ‘Quad’ pill promises the same virus-controlling ability as the four drugs separately but should be easier to use for people with the infection.
Learn more about the drugs potential in their report.
Turning Over a New Leaf
Scitable’s blogger Whitney Campbell is discussing how one research team led by Daniel Nocera at MIT, are making foliage they hope will have a long future – artificial leaves:
Instead of a natural leaf’s tissues, chloroplasts, and vascular structures, these artificial leaves are each made from a thin sheet of semiconducting silicon with different materials bound to either side: a nickel-molybdenum-zinc alloy on one surface and a cobalt-based catalyst on the other.2 When submerged in water and exposed to sunlight, the solar cell’s cobalt side releases oxygen from the H2O—a breakthrough first identified by Nocera and his team in 20083—while the alloy side encourages hydrogen molecules to effervesce. Mimicking the water splitting that occurs during natural photosynthesis, these reactions can be elicited with artificial light, as illustrated by the following soundless video from the Nocera lab.
Researchers are hoping they will soon be able to collect, store, and redirect these ionic streams through fuel cells which can recombine the molecules back into water again, resulting in surges of electrical power. Find out more about this research in her post, or watch the video above.
Finally
Viktor Poor warns that when you take a forensics exam, you might find something unusual:
