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It seems to me that “Earthlike” is overused in the media. One always ends up using too many qualifiers. Gliese 876’s orbit is very un-Earthlike, and its mass is too. Let’s wait until the star-to-planet distance of a future exoplanet ranges from that of Venus to Mars and the mass is no more than twice […]
By Science News -
Planetary SciencePlanet Hunt Strikes Rock: Hot kin of Earth orbits nearby star
Astronomers have found the closest known cousin to Earth, a solid world just 15 light-years beyond the solar system.
By Ron Cowen -
AstronomyMaking waves
Locked in a deadly embrace, two white dwarf stars may be the strongest source of gravitational waves now flooding our galaxy.
By Ron Cowen -
AstronomyThe supernova that wasn’t
A brilliant stellar outburst once thought to be a supernova explosion actually left the star intact.
By Ron Cowen -
AstronomyAndromeda gets bigger
A new study reveals that the diameter of the Andromeda galaxy's disk spans some 220,000 light-years, three times as big as had been estimated.
By Ron Cowen -
PaleontologyNewfound dinosaur wasn’t sticking its neck out
Fossils of a new, 10-meter-long sauropod species excavated in South America suggest that, unlike most of its massive kin, the creature had a relatively short neck.
By Sid Perkins -
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TechSlick trick snags catalyst
A costly type of catalyst sticks to Teflon, suggesting a new way to recover these chemicals from solutions.
By Peter Weiss -
AnthropologyClimate shift shaped Aussie extinctions
Stone Age people lived virtually side-by-side with now-extinct animals in western Australia for 6,000 years.
By Bruce Bower -
Health & MedicineStriking a Better Bargain with HIV
Because a drug frequently used to block the transmission of HIV from mother to infant may have negative consequences for the mothers, researchers are looking for inexpensive treatments that will benefit both mother and child.
By Ben Harder -
MathPieces of Numbers
A long-sought proof has forged an intriguing link between numbers expressed as sums and as products.
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HumansLetters from the June 18, 2005, issue of Science News
Road worriers “Navigating Celestial Currents: Math leads spacecraft on joy rides through the solar system” (SN: 4/16/05, p. 250) gives the casual reader the distorted view that one could travel the solar system at will by using these methods. These are generally small perturbations on the much larger primary propulsion requirement that is fixed by […]
By Science News