Word: planet
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...viewers tend to associate the BBC with wonderfully acted period dramas like Sense and Sensibility and exquisite nature shows like Planet Earth. But how about Help Me Anthea--I'm Infested or Help, My Dog's as Fat as Me or Freaky Eaters? The latter programs have something in common besides the power of their titles to make BBC executives blush: they were all commissioned by the digital TV channel BBC3. Set up in 2003 to cater to those fickle younger audiences, BBC3 has scored several successes, including the exuberantly tasteless comedy Little Britain. Featuring such popular characters...
...world of global competition. In this issue, we present TIME's inaugural "Best Countries for Business," a special report we are producing with the World Economic Forum (WEF). "Best Countries for Business" offers a formidable combination of resources: the globe's most prestigious business organization linked with the planet's best journalists to report on the heated competition among nations for investment. Alex Perry and Zoe Eisenstein file from Africa on the disparate development of Mauritius and Angola. In Denmark, Justin Fox analyzes the country's success amid high tax rates. Asia hand Kathleen Kingsbury examines China's push...
Earlier this month, astronomers from San Francisco State University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington announced the discovery of a fifth planet around the star 55 Cancri, which is 41 light-years away in the constellation Cancer. The find makes that star system the most heavily populated one known other than our sun's and raises to 265 the total of extrasolar planets since astronomers began discovering them in 1995. To skywatchers, however, 55 Cancri is special, not just because of its litter of worlds but because of what it tells us about the possibility...
...newly found planet has about half the mass of Saturn, but its orbit places it about 73 million miles (117 million km) from 55 Cancri, or 20 million miles (32 million km) closer to it than Earth is to the sun. That gives the planet a roughly Earthlike year of 260 days and, more important, puts it in what astronomers call the habitable zone, the distance from its sun at which liquid water can exist. The planet is too dense and gaseous to harbor life as we know it, but if it has any moons, they could be warm enough...
That's a slow process, though. It took 18 years of measurements before the presence of the planet could be confirmed. Now an entirely new planet-hunting strategy, centered on a type of star nobody has been looking at, could reveal in as little as a year a habitable, Earthlike planet--and if the scientists get lucky, more than...