Category Archives: Science

NASA’s Kepler Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s Kepler mission has confirmed its first planet in the “habitable zone,” the region around a star where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Kepler also has discovered more than 1,000 new planet candidates, nearly doubling its previously known count. Ten of these candidates are near-Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of their host star. Candidates require follow-up observations to verify they are actual planets.

The newly confirmed planet, Kepler-22b, is the smallest yet found to orbit in the middle of the habitable zone of a star similar to our sun. The planet is about 2.4 times the radius of Earth. Scientists don’t yet know if Kepler-22b has a predominantly rocky, gaseous or liquid composition, but its discovery is a step closer to finding Earth-like planets. (more…)

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Pair of Black Holes ‘Weigh In’ At 10 Billion Suns, The Most Massive Yet

AUSTIN, Texas — A team of astronomers including Karl Gebhardt and graduate student Jeremy Murphy of The University of Texas at Austin have discovered the most massive black holes to date — two monsters weighing as much as 10 billion suns and threatening to consume anything, even light, within a region five times the size of our solar system. (more…)

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In The Dragonfish’s Mouth: The Next Generation of Superstars to Stir Up Our Galaxy

TORONTO, ON – Three astronomers at the University of Toronto have found the most numerous batch of young, supermassive stars yet observed in our galaxy: hundreds of thousands of stars, including several hundreds of the most massive kind –blue stars dozens of times heavier than our Sun. The light these newborn stars emit is so intense it has pushed out and heated the gas that gave them birth, carving out a glowing hollow shell about a hundred light-years across.

These findings will be published in the December 20 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. For the researchers, the next step is already clear: “By studying these supermassive stars and the shell surrounding them, we hope to learn more about how energy is transmitted in such extreme environments,” says Mubdi Rahman, a PhD candidate in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, who led the work with his supervisors, Professors Dae-Sik Moon and Christopher Matzner. (more…)

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New Study to Test Unusual Hypothesis on Beta Brainwaves

Beta oscillations are tightly linked to Parkinson’s disease and the ability to process sensory information, such as touch. Two neuroscientists have brought their collaboration to Brown University and won funding from the National Science Foundation to see if they can finally provide a definitive, if unorthodox, explanation for beta brainwaves.

Before she could seek to convince the world that her computer model of a key brain circuit explains a fundamental, 80-year-old mystery of neuroscience with potential relevance to Parkinson’s disease, Stephanie Jones sought to convince Christopher Moore. The new Brown neuroscience professors are now close collaborators, but when they first started talking about the beta oscillations of the cortex, Moore thought Jones was plain wrong, if not a bit nuts. (more…)

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Study Debunks Stereotype That Men Think About Sex All Day Long

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Men may think about sex more often than women do, but a new study suggests that men also think about other biological needs, such as eating and sleep, more frequently than women do, as well.

And the research discredits the persistent stereotype that men think about sex every seven seconds, which would amount to more than 8,000 thoughts about sex in 16 waking hours. In the study, the median number of young men’s thought about sex stood at almost 19 times per day. Young women in the study reported a median of nearly 10 thoughts about sex per day. (more…)

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Powerful Mathematical Model Greatly Improves Predictions for Species Facing Climate Change

UCLA life scientists and colleagues have produced the most comprehensive mathematical model ever devised to track the health of populations exposed to environmental change.

The research, federally funded by the National Science Foundation, is published Dec. 2 in the journal Science.

The team’s groundbreaking integral projection model, or IPM, unites various sub-disciplines of population biology, including population ecology, quantitative genetics, population genetics, and life-span and offspring information, allowing researchers to link many different data sources simultaneously. Scientists can now change just a single variable, like temperature, and see how that affects many factors for a population. (more…)

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Moral Dilemma: Would You Kill One Person to Save Five?

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Imagine a runaway boxcar heading toward five people who can’t escape its path. Now imagine you had the power to reroute the boxcar onto different tracks with only one person along that route.

Would you do it?

That’s the moral dilemma posed by a team of Michigan State University researchers in a first-of-its-kind study published in the research journal Emotion. Research participants were put in a three dimensional setting and given the power to kill one person (in this case, a realistic digital character) to save five. (more…)

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Frogs’ Amazing Leaps Due to Springy Tendons

*The secret to frogs’ superlative jumping lies in their tendons. Researchers at Brown University, filming frogs jumping at 500 frames per second with special X-ray technology, show that the frog’s tendon stretches as it readies its leap and then recoils, much like a spring, when the frog jumps. The finding could explain how other animals are exceptional leapers. Results appear in Biology Letters.*

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Some species of frogs and many other animals are able to jump far beyond what appear to be their capabilities. The trained contestants in the frog-jumping competition in Calaveras County, Calif., come to mind, but even ordinary frogs can leap several times farther than their physiology would seem to allow.

“Muscles alone couldn’t produce jumps that good,” said Henry Astley, who studies the biomechanics of frog jumping at Brown University. (more…)

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