Official "Science News" Thread

[xilman]

Originally Posted by Brian-E

This article, and others concerning the discovery, speculate about the possible existence of planets in the "habitable zone" of Alpha Centauri. However I fail to see how a planetary orbit can exist in any habitable zone of this system. The two main component stars are very close together, at a distance comparable to that between the solar system's giant planets and the sun, which means that any planets in stable orbits must either (a) orbit just one of the component stars at too close a distance for life to exist, as is true of the newly discovered planet, or (b) orbit the whole two-star system (ignoring the tiny and distant proxima centauri which won't be gravitationally important) at a distance much too large to support life.

Have I missed something?

Take a look at this.

Originally Posted by http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=25127

A 230-day orbit around Centauri B should put us right in the middle of the habitable zone, the place we’d most like to find a terrestrial world. Fortunately, it’s a region of orbital stability — the effects of Centauri A only become problematic as we move as much as 3 AU out from the star.

[science_man_88]

Major Solar Flare Erupts From the Sun

The flare erupted from the sunspot AR 11598 (short for Active Region 11598), and reached peak brightness at 11:22 p.m. EDT (0322 GMT this morning, Oct. 23), according to scientists working on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a space telescope that constantly monitors the sun with high-definition cameras. It ranked as an X1.8 solar flare, one of the strongest types of solar flares, according to the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) run by NOAA and the National Weather Service.

[kladner]

http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...is_in_software

New memory technology to serve dual roles of mass storage and system memory

Computerworld - There will be a sea change in the non-volatile memory (NVM) market over the next five years, with more dense and reliable technologies challenging dominant NAND flash memory now used in solid-state drives (SSD) and embedded in mobile products.

[Dubslow]

http://www.boeing.com/Features/2012/..._10_29_12.html

It’s incredibly light, yet amazingly strong and rigid.
It’s called microlattice, the lightest metal structure ever created, and it was created by scientists at HRL Laboratories, the same Malibu, California-based company that invented the laser and the semiconductor.

[Batalov]

"The same lab that invented laser". Interesting. Not Townes-Basov-Prokhorov? Or Gould?

EDIT: USA is still (until next year) practicing the first-to-invent (will switch to a first-to-file system on March 16, 2013). The patent was awarded to Bell Labs (not HRL). Gould fought hard, too, and got some partial success 20 years later.

[chappy]

the first, at least according to Townes, but who are you going to believe?

[Batalov]

Originally Posted by chappy

the first, at least according to Townes, but who are you going to believe?

The first implementation of invention?

[jasong]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20217938

People are arguing about the whole twisted light experiment.

Personally, I think they should stfu and just let the guys do their experiments. Either they've discovered something new and it's totally awesome for telecommunications, or they're wasting their time and nothing will come of it. Either way, arguing about it is just stupid. If someone's wrong, why should it be offensive for them to continue to be wrong? It's just stupid.

Not saying they're correct about their theory, but it reminds me of the whole propeller-based sailboat thing a year or so back. Actually, sandboat, not sure of what the proper term is, the original raced across a desert. People were convinced they were out of their freaking gourds. On the forums for that stuff(there's internet forums for freaking everything), about 90% of the posters were telling them they were morons for even trying. But they built their little prototype and everybody was totally amazed. Maybe it'll be the same situation with twisted light.

[Dubslow]

Another super-earth sized habitable-zone planet found (composition unknown, about 7 earth masses)

Perhaps more importantly, this one's only 42 ly away.


_______________________________________________________________

http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2012...s/?fromcat=all

In the video, the speaker explains and demonstrates improvements made to the machine understanding of his English words, which are automatically transcribed as he speaks. He then demonstrates having those words translated directly into Mandarin – if it’s actually Cantonese I’ll punish myself – text.

This is when the fun begins. Microsoft, he says, has taken in oodles of data, and can thus have that translated Mandarin spoken. And the final kicker: he has fed the system an hour’s worth of his voice, and thus the software will speak in Mandarin, using his own tones.

[jasong]

Originally Posted by Dubslow

Another super-earth sized habitable-zone planet found (composition unknown, about 7 earth masses)

It's awesome to find all these "super-earth's," but I have a question, in two parts:

(1) What do you call an earth-like planet that's SMALLER than the earth, and

(2) Have they(the human race) found a smaller "earth" and I just haven't heard about it?

[firejuggler]

(1)Mars-sized, Mercure sized, venus -sized... after all, all we can detect for now are plus sized-earth or jupiter ( Largest telluric planet and gazeous one)
(2) not that I know. As said above, we can't detect them yet.

Image below is a signature of an eclipsing binary.

One star rotate around the other

Around D15, the smaller one get in front of the larger one.
D22.5, the smaller one get behind the larger one.