Word: borucki
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...planet, where life could in theory be found - it might seem like a letdown to stumble instead on a world bigger than Jupiter, hotter than molten iron and, with a density like that of Styrofoam, the most insubstantial planet ever seen. But when NASA astronomer Bill Borucki stood before a packed audience at this week's meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington to announce the discovery of Styrofoam World, along with four other huge, hot planets, he didn't seem even slightly disappointed. (Watch a video about Galileo and the Year of Astronomy...
...Borucki heads the Kepler Mission, a space-based planet-hunting telescope that went into solar orbit last spring to search for distant worlds like our own. While the first five worlds detected are nothing like Earth, nobody expected them to be. What's important, Borucki declared, was that "these five new exoplanets come from the first six weeks of data." An additional eight months of Kepler observations are already in the can and awaiting analysis, meaning many more planets are undoubtedly lurking on hard drives at the NASA Ames Research Center in California, where Kepler is headquartered. "We're going...
...ridiculously hot. That proximity also means they move very fast, completing three or even more transits in the first round of observations - which is just the kind of data stream the Kepler team prefers. "We want to see at least three transits to be absolutely sure," says Borucki...
Through a teardrop of ancient amber -- fossilized tree sap as hard as plastic and as translucent as glass -- the scientists beheld their quarry: a small stingless bee that shared the earth with giant mastodons. With sterile instruments and gloved hands, microbiologist Raul Cano and his student Monica Borucki proceeded with an improbable experiment. First they delicately extracted the bee's diminutive digestive tract. Then they placed the tissues in nutrient-rich broth. Within a week the mixture turned cloudy, a sign that bacterial spores, dormant inside the bee for 25 million to 40 million years, had suddenly, miraculously surged back...
...then some. For the stunt pulled off by scientists in Michael Crichton's novel and Steven Spielberg's movie -- retrieving strands of dinosaur DNA from amber, then using it to recreate monsters from the past -- belongs to the realm of fiction. By contrast, the article in which Cano and Borucki describe their achievement appeared last week in the pages of the journal Science. And while the Jurassic Park scientists cloned DNA to re-create approximations of dinosaurs and used frog DNA to fill in the genetic code, Cano's team claims to have revived the exact ancient organism, totally intact...