Word: planck
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Juliane Kaminski of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, began exploring the verbal gifts of dogs when she saw a television show about a border collie named Rico--an animal that to all appearances could fetch dozens of different objects in response to their names. Kaminski put Rico to a rigorous test and confirmed that the dog could learn names for more than 200 toys, balls and other items. "I think Rico is a highly talented dog," says Kaminski, "but we've also found new dogs that do what Rico...
...ordinary water, but it's salt water, with sodium turning up in the samples no matter how many times the ring material was retested. "Our measurements imply that besides table salt, the grains also contain carbonates like soda," says Frank Postberg, a Cassini scientist working at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany. (See a photo-essay of the world's most competitive space programs...
...Planck telescope, named after the German physicist Max Planck, aims to reveal more about how the universe was formed nearly 14 billion years ago by mapping "fossil light." This relic radiation of the Big Bang - part of the Cosmic Microwave Background - should tell astronomers more about how the large-scale structures of the universe formed and evolved...
...Planck will also attempt an extraordinary mathematical feat: calculating the total number of atoms in the universe. With that information, it can infer the total density of the mysterious quantity known as dark matter. "We're looking at the physics at the very beginning of the physical universe," says ESA director of science David Southwood...
...will be two months before Planck and Herschel reach their final destination, a gravitational "sweet spot" known as the Lagrange Point 2, where they can stay fixed in the same location relative to the earth and sun. Once there, they will need trillions of samples and bits of raw data before they can start generating their sky maps. But even if they deliver a fraction of the results that the eggheads on Earth are promising, the pictures should still be out of this world...