Giant Planet Darker Than Black Paint

A planet blacker than coal? That’s what astronomers say they've discovered in our home galaxy with NASA’s Kepler telescope. Orbiting only about three million miles out from its star, the Jupiter-size gas giant planet ~ named TrES-2b ~ reflects almost none of the starlight that shines on it, according to a new study.

"Being less reflective than coal or even the blackest acrylic paint ~ this makes it by far the darkest planet ever discovered," lead study author David Kipping said. "If we could see it up close it would look like a near-black ball of gas, with a slight glowing red tinge to it—a true exotic amongst exoplanets."

The Kepler spacecraft was specifically designed to find planets outside our solar system. But at such distances ~TrES-2b, for instance, is 750 light-years from us ~ it's not as simple as snapping pictures of alien worlds. Instead, Kepler uses light sensors called photometers that continuously monitor tens of thousands of stars as it looks for the regular dimming of stars.

Such dips in stellar brightness may indicate that a planet is transiting, or passing in front of a star, relative to Earth, blocking some of the star's light. In the case of the coal-black planet, blocking surprisingly little of that light.

Image shows TrES-2b, mostly black with a reddish glow.

Click here for the article.

Heartbeat Is Clue to Personality Type

A new study in Germany identifies heartbeat "signatures" ~ wave patterns in the heart's electrical activity ~ that are linked to personality types.

People with certain heartbeat signatures scored higher on tests of neuroticism ~ meaning these individuals tend to experience more negative emotions, such as anxiety and a depressed mood. They also tended to experience fewer positive emotions, including happiness and cheerfulness. Measures of the heart's electrical activity could also be used to predict people's agreeableness, a personality trait that describes how compassionate or empathetic an individual is. 

The study suggests such heartbeat signatures may provide a way to measure personality that is more objective than current methods. Personality is commonly assessed using questionnaires, but these are subject to bias ~ people may choose responses that they think are more acceptable for their gender, for instance, or they may misperceive their own traits, the researchers said.

"We hope that with this method, we have found something that is perhaps more accurate, and more relatable, than many other measures of personality," said study researcher Stefan Koelsch, a professor of biological psychology at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Researchers may also be able to identify heartbeat signatures that are characteristic of certain emotional disorders, such as depression, Koelsch said. Such signatures could one day help diagnose these disorders, or identify people at risk for them, he said. 

Click here for the LiveSciencearticle. 

Higgs Boson Spells Doom and Gloom

The long-sought Higgs boson might doom our universe to an unfortunate end, researchers say. The mass of the particle is a key ingredient in a calculation that predicts the future of space and time.

"This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there'll be a catastrophe," says Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. "It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out."

The Higgs boson particle is a manifestation of an energy field pervading the universe called the Higgs field, which is thought to explain why particles have mass. After searching for decades for proof that this field and particle existed, physicists at the LHC announced in July 2012 that they'd discovered a particle whose properties strongly suggest it is the Higgs boson.

Click here for the article.

Human Genetic Variations Changing Rapidly

In the most massive study of genetic variation yet, researchers have determined that the age of more than one million variants ~ or changes to our DNA code ~ found across human populations is quite young. 

The chronologies tell a story of evolutionary dynamics in recent human history ~ the last 10,000 years ~ a period characterized by both narrow reproductive bottlenecks and enormous population growth.

According to Wired.com:

The evolutionary dynamics of these features resulted in a flood of new genetic variation, accumulating so fast that natural selection hasn’t caught up yet. As a species, we are freshly bursting with the raw material of evolution. 

“Most of the mutations that we found arose in the last 200 generations or so. There hasn’t been much time for random change or deterministic change through natural selection,” said geneticist Joshua Akey of the University of Washington. “We have a repository of all this new variation for humanity to use as a substrate. In a way, we’re more evolvable now than at any time in our history.” 

But these findings can also been seen from another angle. They teach us about human evolution, in particular the course it’s taken since modern Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa. 

“We’ve gone from several hundred million people to seven billion in a blink of evolutionary time,” said Akey. “That’s had a profound effect on structuring the variation present in our species.”

For practical reasons, rare genetic variants have only been studied for the last several years because it’s been too expensive. Genomics focused mostly on what are known as common variants.

Click here for the article.

Earth at Night

Using data from the Suomi NPP satellite, here's an animated composite of the earth at night, made possible by light-detection instruments that are hundreds of times more sensitive than previous models. 

Debunking the End of the World

Scientist Don Yeomans of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Near-Earth Object Program here runs through several scenarios that are frightening to people who believe the world is ending on December 21. Here he briefly discusses the Mayan calendar, planet collisions, comets, solar storms, planetary alignments, pole shifts and other potential Earth destroyers. Earlier today the federal government released an announcement that the world is not going to end in 2012. Talk about a relief!  ;-)

"No Evidence for It"

Here "The Science Guy" Bill Nye explains the dangers of denying the validity of evolution. Denying evolution clouds all scientific thinking at a time when scientific thinking has never been more needed in the world. "We need scientifically literate taxpayers and voters," he says, in reference to the younger generation. Listening to some of the recent scientifically ignorant statements coming out of Congress, I think "The Science Guy" is onto something.

Nazca Lines Still Provoke Mystery

Since their startling discovery in Peru’s coastal area during the 1920s, mystery still surrounds the so-called Nazca lines, depicting several massive images decipherable only from high altitudes.

The vast majority of the lines date from 200 BC to 500 AD, to a time when a people referred to as the Nazca inhabited the region. The earliest lines, created with piled up stones, date as far back as 500 BC.

According to LiveScience.com:

The purpose of the lines continues to elude researchers and remains a matter of conjecture. Ancient Nazca culture was prehistoric, which means they left no written records.  

One idea is that they are linked to the heavens with some of the lines representing constellations in the night sky. Another idea is that the lines play a role in pilgrimage, with one walking across them to reach a sacred place such as Cahuachi and its adobe pyramids. 

Yet another idea is that the lines are connected with water, something vital to life yet hard to get in the desert, and may have played a part in water-based rituals.

In the absence of a firm archaeological conclusion a number of fringe theories have popped up, especially several aligned with “ancient astronaut” theories. A less radical suggestion is that the Nazca people used balloons to observe the lines from high altitudes, something for which there still is no archaeological evidence.

Click here for the article.

Crop Circles Becoming More Frequent

Human pranksters are responsible for most crop circles in the world, but as with UFO phenomena, a certain number defy any logical explanation. One thing for certain, they're becoming more frequent, with at least one made every day somewhere in the world.

According to LiveScience.com:

Crop-circle enthusiasts have come up with many theories about what creates the patterns, ranging from the plausible to the patently absurd. One explanation in vogue in the early 1980s was that the circles were accidentally produced by the especially vigorous sexual activity of mating hedgehogs. As the patterns became more complex that idea was abandoned, but some of the theories that replaced it were equally outlandish. Some people have suggested that the circles are somehow created by incredibly localized and precise wind patterns, or by scientifically undetectable Earth energy fields and meridians called ley lines. 

 . . . While there are countless theories, the only known, proven causes of crop circles are humans. Many people believe that crop circles have been reported for centuries (for example mistakenly suggesting that a 1678 woodcut of a folkloric legend about Satan harvesting wheat is evidence of a crop circle); but in fact the first ones appeared only in the 1970s. Their origin remained a mystery until September 1991, when two men confessed that they had created the patterns for decades as a prank to make people think UFOs had landed. They never claimed to have made all the circles — many were copycat pranks done by others — but their hoax launched the crop-circle phenomenon. Most crop-circle researchers admit that hoaxers craft the vast majority of crop circles. But, they claim, there's a remaining tiny percentage that they can't explain.

The LiveScience.com article explores the attributes common to most crop circles and what are some of the suspected causes.

Click here for thearticle.

Dark Matter and a Parallel Universe

Here theoretical physicist Michio Kaku talks about the concept of dark matter being regular matter, just located in a parallel universe very near us. Plus, he briefly lays out several other current concepts regarding the origin of dark matter.

Lying Can Make Your Health Suffer

Biblical lying about Joseph's cloak.

Researchers recently determined that avoiding lying can make you healthier. (As a side note, previous research has shown that the average American lies 11 times a week.)

"It's certainly a worthy goal to have people be more honest and more genuine and interact with others in a more honest way," says psychologist Robert Feldman of the University of Massachusetts. "That would be ultimately beneficial.”

Each week for 10 weeks, 110 individuals, ages 18-71, took a lie detector test and completed health and relationship measures assessing the number of major and minor lies they told that week.

Researchers instructed half the participants to "refrain from telling any lies for any reason to anyone. You may omit truths, refuse to answer questions, and keep secrets, but you cannot say anything that you know to be false." The other half received no such instructions.

Over the study period, the link between less lying and improved health was significantly stronger for participants in the no-lie group, the study found. When participants in the no-lie group told three fewer minor lies than they did in other weeks, for example, they experienced, on average, four fewer mental-health complaints and three fewer physical complaints. Mental health complaints included feeling tense or melancholy; physical complaints included sore throats and headaches.

Click here for the article.

Painting depicts Biblical story of Joseph's brothers lying about his blood-smeared tunic, by Diego Velazquez, 1630.

Lucid Dreaming Providing More Insights

Flying is a frequent occurrence in lucid dreams.

People who can deliberately control their dreams during sleep ~ known as “lucid dreamers” ~ might offer insight into the self-reflection capabilities of the mind.

According to LiveScience.com:

It is difficult to get a full picture of what goes on in the brain when we make the transition from sleep to wakefulness. In fact, the specific areas of the brain underlying our restored self-perception and consciousness when we wake up have eluded scientists, according to a statement by the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. 

But a team of researchers was able to get a picture of that isolated activity in lucid dreamers.  

"In a normal dream, we have a very basal consciousness, we experience perceptions and emotions but we are not aware that we are only dreaming,” study researcher Martin Dresler, of Max Planck, said in a statement. "It's only in a lucid dream that the dreamer gets a meta-insight into his or her state."

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans, the team compared the activity of the brain during one of these lucid-dreaming periods with the activity just beforehand in a normal dream. The results showed that a specific cortical network is activated when lucid consciousness is attained.

Click here for the article.

Key Myths Have Links to Real-World Society

Beowulf slaying his foe.

Ancient myths including Beowulf, Homer’s Illiad and the traditional Irish poem Táin Bó Cuailnge likely are based on real communities and people, according to researchers who compared the complex web of the characters’ relationships with the type of social networks occurring in real life.

Scientists at Coventry University calculated characters’ popularity based on how many relationships they had with other characters and whether they were friends or enemies. Then they examined the overall dynamic between the cast as a whole.

According to the The Telegraph:

Their results, published in the journal Europhysics Letters, showed that the societies depicted in the stories strongly mirrored real social networks of company directors, film actors and scientists which had been mapped out by other academics.

In contrast they found that four works known to be entirely fictional ~ Shakespeare's Richard III, Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, the first installment of Rowling's Harry Potter series and Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo ~ contained telltale signs of being fictional.

"In the myths but also in real social networks, you tend to have sub-communities who do not know anybody else," says Pádraig Mac Carron, co-author of the report. "In fiction, everyone tends to be completely connected with each other."

"In reality you also have popular people with hundreds of friends, then a few people with maybe 70, and a lot of people with a lot less friends," he adds. "But [in fiction] you get a lot of characters who have the same number of friends. Almost everyone that Harry Potter knows and interacts with also meets and interacts with Ron and Hermione, for example."

Click here for the article.
Small photo shows Page 1 of Beowulf.