The biggest tree-5000 years old - Sico8. Dark alien planet discovered by NASA. An alien world blacker than coal, the darkest planet known, has been discovered in the galaxy. The world in question is a giant the size of Jupiter known as TrES-2b. NASA's Kepler spacecraft detected it lurking around the yellow sun-like star GSC 03549-02811 some 750 lightyears away in the direction of the constellation Draco. The researchers found this gas giant reflects less than 1 percent of the sunlight falling on it, making it darker than any planet or moon seen up to now. [The Strangest Alien Planets] "It's just ridiculous how dark this planet is, how alien it is compared to anything we have in our solar system," study lead-author David Kipping, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told SPACE.com.
"However, it's not completely pitch black," co-author David Spiegel of Princeton University said in a statement. "It's a mystery as to what's causing it to be so dark," Kipping said. This article was reprinted with permission from SPACE.com. Transit of Venus: Scientists hope to learn from rare event. While the Transit of Venus is generating public excitement, there is special interest from experts who hope they can learn from the rare event. Jean-Michel Désert, a Harvard University researcher, will take part in a nearly 400-year-old astronomical obsession — tracking Venus as its orbit carries it directly between Earth and the sun. This rare event, known as a transit of Venus, takes place only once every century or so, usually in pairs spaced eight years apart.
The next one won't happen until Dec. 11, 2117. FULL COVERAGE: Transit of Venus "This is a great opportunity for us," Désert said. "This is a new century, and there's a new set of astronomical questions for which the transit can prove important," added Jay Pasachoff, an astronomer at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. Pasachoff has been lobbying his fellow astronomers to take the transit seriously, writing last month in the journal Nature that squandering the opportunity to collect as much data as possible would be "a crime. " Wind Map. An invisible, ancient source of energy surrounds us—energy that powered the first explorations of the world, and that may be a key to the future. This map shows you the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the US. The wind map is a personal art project, not associated with any company.
We've done our best to make this as accurate as possible, but can't make any guarantees about the correctness of the data or our software. Please do not use the map or its data to fly a plane, sail a boat, or fight wildfires :-) If the map is missing or seems slow, we recommend the latest Chrome browser. Surface wind data comes from the National Digital Forecast Database. If you're looking for a weather map, or just want more detail on the weather today, see these more traditional maps of temperature and wind. Planetary Resources& asteroid mining plan may violate space law. Artist rendering of an asteroid by Gary Cornhouse/Thinkstock Images. Should asteroids rich in precious metals be regarded, in legal terms, like the fish in the sea? That is one approach the United Nations could take as it struggles to come to terms with mining plans announced by Planetary Resources, a startup company based in Seattle. In just under two years, Planetary Resources says it will launch the first of a series of space telescopes into low-Earth orbit in a bid to spot nearby asteroids of a size and mineral composition potentially worth mining.
When a strong candidate is found, it plans to dispatch a robotic probe to assess the asteroid's precious metal content, with platinum a priority. If that is found, yet-to-be developed robots will be dispatched to mine it. If it is small enough, the asteroid could be brought into an Earth orbit first, to make the process easier. Planetary Resources' plans seem well advanced and others are not far behind. - StumbleUpon.
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