Via Kompas.com

A steamy ‘waterworld’ six times bigger than Earth has been discovered orbiting a faint star 40 light years away.

The planet is believed to be too hot to sustain Earth-type life, but could consist of 75 per cent water. Evidence suggests it has an atmosphere, and astronomers believe it to be more Earth-like than any ‘exoplanet’ previously found outside the Solar System.

The planet is classified as a ’super-Earth’, half-way in size between small rocky planets such the Earth and ice giants similar to Uranus and Neptune. Although its parent star is a dim ‘red dwarf’ 3,000 times less bright than our sun, it hugs the star so closely that its surface temperature is 200C.

Do newborn babies have accents? Yes. Babies are found to cry in their mother’s tongue, reports scientists
Only days after birth, babies have a bawl with language. Newborn babies cry in melodic patterns that they have heard in adults’ conversations—even while in the womb, say medical anthropologist Kathleen Wermke of the University of Würzburg in Germany, and her colleagues.

By 2 to 5 days of age, infants’ cries bear the tuneful signature of their parents’ native tongue, a sign that language learning has already commenced, the researchers report in a paper published online November 5 in Current Biology.

The question is how about a baby with parents of different mother-tongues, such as from Javanese mother and Madurese father (like me)?

Gene therapy fixes color blindness in monkeys
A simple injection of cells has cured monkeys of color-blindness—giving a green light to future research into improving human vision with gene therapy, a new study says.

Calling the procedure his gene therapy “dream,” researcher Jay Neitz said that “ultimately this could be a tool that could cure all sorts of eye diseases.”

It’s too early to say that the technique can help color-blind people who can’t see red or green, but study co-author Neitz is confident.

Close study of the sediment timeline shows that increased ice melt coincides with the birth of the Industrial Age. It’s strong evidence that global warming is man’s work, researchers say.
Long-term climate records from the Arctic provide strong new evidence that human-caused global warming can override Earth’s natural heating and cooling cycles, U.S. researchers reported this week in the journal Science.

For more than 2,000 years, a natural wobble in Earth’s axis has caused the Arctic region to move farther away from the sun during the region’s summer, reducing the amount of solar radiation it receives. The Arctic is now 600,000 miles farther from the sun than it was in AD 1, and temperatures there should have fallen a little more than 1 degree Fahrenheit since then.

Instead, the region has warmed 2.2 degrees since 1900 alone, and the decade from 1998 to 2008 was the warmest in two millenniums, according to a team headed by climatologist Darrell S. Kaufman of Northern Arizona University.
Global Warming in picture

NASA: Space station work 81% complete as solar arrays unfurled
Ten years after its construction began, the International Space Station now has full power capability.

Mission controllers commanded the unfurling on Friday of the platform’s fourth and final pair of solar arrays.

The huge solar wings had been delivered to the ISS by the Discovery shuttle and installed by its astronauts with the help of the station’s robotic arm.

When taken up to full capacity, the station’s arrays should now generate as much as 120 kilowatts of electricity.

The addition of the final set of solar wings will double the amount of power available for scientific experiments aboard the station – from 15kW to 30kW.

The $590-million mission, jointly managed by JPL and NASA, will examine a star-rich stretch of sky for a planet where water could exist in liquid form suitable for humans to stay.
In a timed exposure, spectators watch from Cocoa Beach as the Kepler satellite launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday on a three-year mission to find Earth’s twin, a Goldilocks planet where it’s neither too hot nor too cold, but just right for life to take hold.

The Delta II rocket, carrying the widest-field telescope ever put in space, lifted off the launch pad at Cape Canaveral at 10:49 p.m. Eastern time.

Psychedelic bouncing fish ‘discovered’ in Indonesia
A funky, psychedelic fish that bounces on the ocean floor like a rubber ball has been classified as a new species, a scientific journal reported. The frogfish — which has a swirl of tan and peach zebra stripes that extend from its aqua eyes to its tail — was initially discovered by scuba diving instructors working for a tour operator a year ago in shallow waters off Ambon island in eastern Indonesia.

The operator contacted Ted Pietsch, lead author of a paper published in this month’s edition of Copeia, the journal of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, who submitted DNA work identifying it as a new species.

The fish — which the University of Washington professor has named “psychedelica” — is a member of the antennariid genus, Histiophryne, and like other frogfish, has fins on both sides of its body that have evolved to be leg-like.
Psychedelic Fish or Frog Fish In Picture