Official "Science News" Thread

[Dubslow]

That giant fusion laser in CA has missed yet another target, and its scrapping is being discussed.

As a minor aside:

If the main goal is to achieve a power source that could replace fossil fuels, we suspect the money would be better spent on renewable sources of energy that are likely to be cheaper and quicker to put into wide use.

Practical fusion would completely and permanently change the way energy is used. It would no longer be scarce, unlike any other alternative we know of. (Admittedly, fusion fuel sources are rather scarce, but on the whole it would still be revolutionary.)

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New empathetic CAPTCHA will defeat bots/spammers AND trolls/assholes

[ewmayer]

Nobel Awarded for Stem Cell, Early Cloning Work: NEW YORK (AP) — Two scientists from different generations won the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for the groundbreaking discovery that cells in the body can be reprogrammed into completely different kinds, work that reflects the mechanism behind cloning and offers an alternative to using embryonic stem cells.

The work of British researcher John Gurdon and Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka — who was born the year Gurdon made his discovery — holds hope for treating diseases like Parkinson's and diabetes by growing customized tissue for transplant.

And it has spurred a new generation of laboratory studies into other illnesses, including schizophrenia, which may lead to new treatments.

Basically, Gurdon, 79, and Yamanaka, 50, showed how to make the equivalent of embryonic stem cells without the ethical questions those very versatile cells pose, a promise scientists are now scrambling to fulfill.

[Dubslow]

NASA finally confirms yearlong ISS mission with Russians is on
Experimental endurance flight set to go up in 2015 with one astronaut and one cosmonaut

While no astronaut has yet stayed aboard the International Space Station for 12 continuous months, such a long stay in orbit is not unprecedented. Cosmonaut Valery Polyakov lived aboard Russia's Mir space station from January 1994 until March 1995, spending 438 consecutive days off the planet.

[Dubslow]

MIT creates carbon nanotube pencil, doodles some electronic circuits

[Dubslow]

Planet that's 1/3 diamond

[science_man_88]

Amateur Team Finds 'Tatooine' Planet with 2 Suns in 4-Star System

Amateur astronomers have helped discover an alien planet with two suns and a twinkling twist: The entire twin-sun setup, a real-life version of Tatooine from "Star Wars," is orbited by two more stars — a solar system that is the first of its kind known.

[Dubslow]

Since its initial discovery via Planet Hunters, the existence of PH1 has been confirmed by a team of professional astronomers, who will present their work today at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Reno, Nev.

With a radius about 6.2 times that of Earth's, PH1 is a smidge bigger than Neptune. The gassy planet spends 138 days completing a single orbit around its two parent stars, which have masses about 1.5 and 0.41 times that of the sun. The stars circle each other once every 20 days.

The two other stars orbiting the PH1's twin suns are about 1,000 astronomical units (AU) from the parent stars.

How much work has been done on the four body problem?

[science_man_88]

Originally Posted by Dubslow

How much work has been done on the four body problem?

isn't it 5 bodies (4 stars and a planet) ?

[Dubslow]

Originally Posted by science_man_88

isn't it 5 bodies (4 stars and a planet) ?

size of neptune << size of stars. The 4 body problem is ostensibly much easier to analyze, and should be fairly accurate to the full 5 body problem.

[Dubslow]

5 planets packed into tiniest alien solar system ever found
Super-compact grouping around star KOI-500 only 1 billion years old, 1,100 light-years away

KOI-500 is a super-compact planetary system, the most tightly packed one seen yet, hosting at least five planets ranging from 1.3 to 2.6 times the size of Earth.

"All five planets zip around their star within a region 150 times smaller in area than the Earth's orbit, despite containing more material than several Earths," study lead author Darin Ragozzine, a planetary scientist at the University of Florida at Gainesville, said in a statement. "At this rate, you could easily pack in 10 more planets, and they would still all fit comfortably inside the Earth's orbit."

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by Dubslow

5 planets packed into tiniest alien solar system ever found

From the same article:

As scientists have discovered more and more exoplanets, they have found that most observed worlds orbit much closer to their stars than any planet in our solar system orbits the sun, including so-called hot Jupiters, which are giant planets orbiting closer to their stars than Mercury does the sun. Scientists still don't understand why most observed alien planetary systems look so unlike ours.

"This difference probably has to do with the different ways planets interacted with the disk of gas and dust they came from," Ragozzine said. "There's still a lot of work that needs to (be done to) understand these processes better."


"As the most compact system of a new compact population of planets, KOI-500 will become a touchstone for future theories that will attempt to describe how compact planetary systems form," Ragozzine said. "Learning about these systems will inspire a new generation of theories to explain why our solar system turned out so differently."

Rubbish.

It's perfectly well-understood why "most observed worlds orbit much closer to their stars than any planet in our solar system orbits the sun" -- it's just a simple selection effect: Our current methods of detecting exoplanets work best for compact systems such as these. Exosystems with more far-flung planets, such as in our own system, are simply more difficult to detect with our current methods! No mystery. No new generation of theories needed.

If, however, this preponderance of compact systems among those discovered does continue long after new detection methods should be capable of discovering systems more like our own, then new theories will be needed.