Science

Scientists have discovered a planet that orbits two suns, like Luke Skywalker’s home planet Tatooine in Star Wars. Two hundred light-years away from Earth, gaseous Kepler-16b is similar to Saturn in both size and mass and — like the desert planet that nurtured the young Skywalker — enjoys a double sunset — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Astronomers using a telescope in Chile have discovered 50 previously unknown exoplanets.

The bumper haul of new worlds includes 16 super-Earths — planets with a greater mass than our own, but below those of gas giants such as Jupiter.

One of these super-Earths orbits inside the habitable zone — the region around a star where conditions could be hospitable to life.

The planets were identified using the Harps instrument in La Silla in Chile

A nearby star is pummelling a companion planet with a barrage of X-rays a hundred thousand times more intense than the Earth receives from the Sun.

New data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope suggest that high-energy radiation is evaporating about 5 million tons of matter from the planet every second. This result gives insight into the difficult survival path for some planets.

The planet, known as CoRoT-2b, has a mass about 3 times that of Jupiter (1000 times that of Earth) and orbits its parent star, CoRoT-2a at a distance roughly ten times the distance between Earth and the Moon — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Heroin’s long journey to America’s streets begins with the planting of the seed of an opium poppy. The flower’s botanical name is papaver somniferum. The Sumerians called it Hul Gil, the ‘flower of joy.’

The flower is grown mainly by impoverished farmers on small plots in remote regions of the world. It flourishes in dry, warm climates and the vast majority of opium poppies are grown in a narrow, 4,500-mile stretch of mountains extending across southern Asia from Turkey through Pakistan and Laos. Heroin is also increasingly becoming an export from Latin America, notably Colombia — via PBS

The rewards outweigh the risks — when you’re in a group, anyway. A new USC study explains why people take stupid chances when all of their friends are watching that they would never take by themselves. According to the study, the human brain places more value on winning in a social setting than it does on winning when you’re alone.

Georgio Coricelli of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences led a multinational team of researchers that measured activity in the regions of the brain associated with rewards and with social reasoning while participants in the study entered in lotteries.

Their study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — via redwolf.newsvine.com

A world-leading researcher in photonics, a globetrotting plant biologist and the creator of a popular climate change website were some of the winners announced at Tuesday’s Eureka Prizes held in Sydney.

The prizes, awarded by the Australian Museum, recognise the work of Australian scientists, engineers and science journalists.

The Leadership in Science Prize was awarded to Professor Ben Eggleton for his work in the field of photonics.

The 40-year-old leads a team of more than 130 scientists at the University of Sydney, and is the founding director of the Centre for Ultrahigh Bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS).

One of the technologies the group is developing is a photonic chip for use in computing and telecommunications that is faster, smaller, and more energy efficient than electronic chips — via redwolf.newsvine.com

An unmanned spaceship funded by Internet billionaire Jeff Bezos veered out of control and had to be destroyed during a recent test flight, highlighting the dramatic risks of private space ventures.

A vehicle used in an earlier test. An unmanned spaceship funded by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos lost control 45,000 feet off the ground and was destroyed during a recent test. The failure of the craft is a blow to privately funded space ventures.

The spacecraft, developed by closely held Blue Origin LLC, was on a suborbital flight from the company’s West Texas spaceport last week when it started to go off course and ground personnel lost normal contact with the vehicle. Investigators are looking at remnants of the craft recovered on the ground to determine the cause — via redwolf.newsvine.com