"It may be hard to imagine a planet blacker than coal, but that's what astronomers say they've discovered in our home galaxy with NASA's Kepler space telescope.

Orbiting only about three million miles out from its star, the Jupiter-size gas giant planet, dubbed TrES-2b, is heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (980 degrees Celsius). Yet the apparently inky world appears to reflect 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," added Kipping, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

NASA's Planet Detector

The Earth-orbiting 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—using light sensors called photometers that continuously monitor tens of thousands of stars—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..."

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"Seeing regular updates from the International Space Station (ISS) is a special joy of mine, especially since the shuttle fleet was retired last month. As poignantly noted by Irene in "Atlantis' Final Reentry Seen From Space," although the shuttle is gone, the U.S. presence on the ISS certainly is not.

So, in a stunning photograph taken by NASA astronaut Ron Garan through a space station window, a single Perseid meteor was captured as the piece of comet dust slammed into the Earth's atmosphere.

"What a 'Shooting Star' looks like #FromSpace Taken yesterday during Perseids Meteor Shower..." Garan tweeted from his Twitter account on Sunday. Garan is approaching the end of his six-month stay aboard the orbital outpost after he was launched as part of the Expedition 27 crew in April.

Interestingly, Garan's meteor doesn't look much different from a meteor you would see from the ground, but there is a key difference: this meteor is falling away from the observer (Garan); whereas for us terrestrial folk, meteors fall toward us.

It must have been a magical sight; one that is likely often seen from orbit, but rarely captured in a photograph."

-- That's not scary at all... While sitting in a little tin can that is ISS!

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-- I'm back! I haven't had the chance to post the last few days, so whatever I post next might be a bit out of date. Sorry and I hope you check back soon!

"Rumour has it that the proponent of the Wankel rotary combustion engine, Mazda, may be planning to drop the tech it first adopted nearly five decades ago. The next-gen Renesis rotary has been in development since 2007, but economic hardship is ever slowly pushing the Japanese automaker towards ending things on that front.

According to reports, there’s a huge, ongoing discussion within the company on whether it should continue pursuing movement on the Wankel front. So says the automaker’s executive officer of product planning and powertrain development, Kiyoshi Fujiwara.

Fujiwara states that the development of the rotary has been halted at the moment, and not just because of technical issues – three major problems were identified with the current rotary engine generation, though two of these three blocks have been overcome. Seemingly, with the need to cut costs, Mazda leadership is cutting back on programs, and the one with the engine happens to be on the list..."

-- Not dedicated cult-like lover of the Wankel engine or anything, but it's always sad to see a technology that still has huge potential to grow getting scrapped and replaced with the mainstream option, especially when that technology is something as legendary as the Wankel Rotary. Hopefully this remains a rumor.

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"The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has imaged part of the Hickson Compact Group 7, or HCG 7 for short. This grouping is composed of one lenticular (lens-shaped) and three spiral galaxies in close proximity. In this image, one of the spirals dominates the foreground, with many more distant galaxies peppering the background. Observing tightly-knit galaxy groups like HCG 7 is important because they evolve in a different way from their more spaced-out counterparts in less crowded regions of the Universe.

A recent study using Hubble data analysed the star clusters in HCG 7. Three hundred young clusters and 150 globular clusters were charted, and their ages and distributions measured. The results suggest that the rate of star formation has been fairly steady through time, although quite high in the central regions. Additional studies, including searches for material between the galaxies, hint that the stars in the HCG 7 galaxies formed by converting their gas without any gravitational influences caused by merging with other galaxies. This is puzzling, as the galaxies are depleting their supplies of gas at a rate that suggests that they have merged in the past.

This raises the question of whether the group really has evolved serenely, or if there are mysterious processes at work that are yet to be understood. The currently known information is contradictory and an encouragement for further studies to discover the real story behind HCG 7..."

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-- "Featured in this sharp telescopic image, globular star cluster Omega Centauri (NGC 5139) is some 15,000 light-years away. Some 150 light-years in diameter, the cluster is packed with about 10 million stars much older than the Sun. Omega Cen is the largest of 200 or so known globular clusters that roam the halo of our Milky Way galaxy. Though most star clusters consist of stars with the same age and composition, the enigmatic Omega Cen exhibits the presence of different stellar populations with a spread of ages and chemical abundances. In fact, Omega Cen may be the remnant core of a small galaxy merging with the Milky Way. "

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"Everything you wanted to know about bug sex (but didn't bother to ask) is explained in a new book by insect expert Marlene Zuk. Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love and Language from the Insect World, describes a world of small — but surprisingly sophisticated — insect behavior.

Insects are not mindless robots; they can learn just like other animals, says Zuk, a biologist at University of California, Riverside. "An ant who finds a food source will come back to recruit others to go to the same food source," she tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. The ant that knows where to go will show the others what to do. "It looks like a parent teaching a child how to ride a bicycle. ... They steer the other individual and will actually wait for them to catch up and make sure they're going in the right direction."

The book answers all sorts of questions about insect behavior, including how wasps recognize each other, why some crickets remain silent and how bees debate. The book also details how insects reproduce — in every imaginable way..."

-- Giggity!

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"Neutrinos are downright weird!

Produced in prodigious numbers in the sun, supernovae, nuclear reactors and particle accelerators, neutrinos are extremely hard to detect because they hardly interact with other material at all.

If we think about photons from the sun hitting blacktop during the summer, it is quite obvious that they interact and that their energy is absorbed by the blacktop (making it hot to the touch).

But even though 10s of billions of neutrinos pass through each square centimeter of that blacktop per second, most of them do not interact. In fact most pass through the Earth and through much of the universe without interacting with anything.

In order to study these mysterious particles, we need large detectors, and we have to reduce backgrounds from cosmic rays by placing those detectors deep underground.

Under a mountain in southern China, a new experiment is trying to answer key questions about neutrinos and their impact on the world around us. The Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment started taking data this month, recording interactions of antineutrinos, a neutrino's counterpart with the same mass and opposite spin, as they travel away from powerful reactors of the China Guangdong Nuclear Power Group.

But before I explain Daya Bay in more detail, let me first provide a little background.

Neutrinos were first postulated by Wolfgang Pauli in the 1930s to explain the energy of radioactive decays, and were given their name, which means "little neutral one," by Enrico Fermi. But it was not until the 1950s that they were first discovered, in experiments by Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan at nuclear reactors in Washington state and South Carolina, leading to a Nobel Prize in 1995..."

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"The Arctic may be the world's next geopolitical battleground. Temperatures there are rising faster than anywhere else in the world, and the melting ice will have profound consequences on the roof of the world, opening strategic waterways to shipping, reducing the ice cap on Greenland, and spurring a rush to claim rights to the wealth of natural resources that lie beneath. NPR examines what's at stake, who stands to win and lose, and how this could alter the global dynamic.

It appears as just a speck on the horizon, a slightly darker shape against a vista of Arctic ice. Soon enough, the ship's bridge makes the announcement: "Polar bear, starboard."

Crew and passengers onboard the CCGS Louis S. St.-Laurent, Canada's largest icebreaker, head to the open deck, binoculars and cameras ready, and watch as the bear lumbers from one ice floe to another, quickly dipping into the inky blue water and effortlessly pulling himself back up again.

Often, a bear will head toward the ship and gaze up at the people gazing down at it, head tilted to one side. The massive creatures don't demonstrate any fear, just curiosity.

That's likely because they rarely see anything like a ship passing through the Northwest Passage, a series of waterways winding through Canada's Arctic archipelago of 36,000 islands. It's midsummer and the first time the coast guard icebreaker, affectionately known as the Louis, is making its way through the ice-choked waters this season.It appears as just a speck on the horizon, a slightly darker shape against a vista of Arctic ice. Soon enough, the ship's bridge makes the announcement: "Polar bear, starboard."

Crew and passengers onboard the CCGS Louis S. St.-Laurent, Canada's largest icebreaker, head to the open deck, binoculars and cameras ready, and watch as the bear lumbers from one ice floe to another, quickly dipping into the inky blue water and effortlessly pulling himself back up again.

Often, a bear will head toward the ship and gaze up at the people gazing down at it, head tilted to one side. The massive creatures don't demonstrate any fear, just curiosity.

That's likely because they rarely see anything like a ship passing through the Northwest Passage, a series of waterways winding through Canada's Arctic archipelago of 36,000 islands. It's midsummer and the first time the coast guard icebreaker, affectionately known as the Louis, is making its way through the ice-choked waters this season..."

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-- Ah... Mother Russia.

"Compared to most other animals, humans are unusual in our tendency to help each other out. We donate to charity. We give blood. We show kindness to strangers, even when we stand to gain nothing in return. This behaviour is so odd that the natural question arises: are we alone in such selflessness? And if any animal could help to answer that question, it’s the chimpanzee, one of our closest relatives.

Dozens of scientists study the behaviour of chimps, looking at how these apes act towards their peers. But the results of these studies have been frustrating for many in the field. People who watch captive and wild chimps have documented hundreds of cases of seemingly altruistic behaviour. They have seen individuals helping each other to climb walls, consoling each other after fights, sharing food, risking death to save companions from drowning, and even adopting the babies of dead and unrelated peers. Anecdotes like these suggest that chimps, like humans, behave selflessly towards each other.

But experiments have often shown otherwise. In some studies, chimps choose to help their peers retrieve out-of-reach objects rather than doing nothing. But when chimps have a choice between two equal actions – say, cashing in a token that leads to personal gain versus another that also benefits a partner – they only looked out for themselves. One paper bore the title “Chimpanzees are indifferent to the welfare of unrelated group members”. Another concluded that “chimpanzees made their choices based solely on personal gain”.

Collectively, these studies championed a view of chimps as reluctant altruists, who only act selflessly in response to pressure, and who generally don’t help unfamiliar chimps, “even when they are able to do so at virtually no cost to themselves”. But Frans de Waal from the Living Links Centre at Emory University thinks that this portrait is wrong. He says, “The authors of these studies moved from not finding evidence for prosocial choice to thinking they had proven its absence.”

De Waal thinks that the previous tests handicapped the chimps by putting them in situations that masked their altruistic tendencies. They couldn’t communicate, they had to cope with complicated equipment involving levers, and they often sat so far apart that they had little understanding of how their choices affected their fellows. With his colleague Victoria Horner, de Waal designed a new experiment to account for these problems. And, lo and behold, chimps spontaneously helped their partners, even without any prompting..."

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"Homosexuality has a long way to go in the United States, but an even tougher, bleaker road to pass through in other parts of the world. Particularly in Africa and the Middle East where the Islamic law is held in extreme rigor, homosexuality is dealt with as an outright crime and is sometimes even punishable by death. Here are the worst forms of government-mandated punishment for simply being homosexual in different parts of the world..."

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"Established in 1995, Mexico's Cabo Pulmo Marine National Park is slightly more than 7,000 hectares of coastal waters in the Gulf of California, offshore from the small village of Cabo Pulmo. The park’s establishment followed a period of determined lobbying by the village’s 100 or so residents, who had become alarmed at overfishing and declines in the area’s marine life.

The reserve is no more than 5 kilometers (3 miles) wide and measures just 14 kilometers (almost 9 miles) north to south. And yet its impact on the marine life within it, such as these Devil Rays, has been profound – so much so that researchers have dubbed it “the most successful marine reserve in the world.”"

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