Word: planetful
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Uncle Sam's Energy Lag In his story on how to solve the energy crisis, Jeffrey D. Sachs says President George W. Bush "dithered for eight years instead of investing in new technologies for a sustainable planet" [June 9]. This year alone, the Bush Administration will dedicate more than $5 billion to research, develop and promote technologies including low-emission coal, renewables, nuclear power and vehicles powered by advanced biofuels, electricity and hydrogen. More than $40 billion in loan guarantees will help put such technologies to use. The President's 2009 budget calls for nearly $1 billion in public...
...Even Mayor's newest, smallest planets are unlikely to be pastoral places. All of them lie so close to their suns that they complete one orbit in 50 days or less - compared to the lazy, 365-day journey Earth makes - meaning that any water or incipient life on their surfaces would simply sizzle away. But HARPS is already sensitive enough to spot planets that are 100,000 times smaller than their parent star. Refinements both in HARPS itself and in the next generation of planet-hunting telescopes should make them able to spot smaller and smaller stellar wobbles. Those little...
...There was never much doubt that planets other than the known nine (or the known eight, now that Pluto has been demoted) existed, but it wasn't until 1995 that the first of these so-called exoplanets was discovered. The vast distance between stars makes a comparatively small body like a planet invisible to even the sharpest-eyed telescopes. Instead, astronomers had to rely on a less-direct method, looking for tiny wobbles in the star itself. A star that couldn't stand still was almost certainly being tugged on by something, and that something was likely...
...Thanks to the evocatively named High-Accuracy Radial-Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), a telescope mounted atop La Scilla Mountain in Chile, Mayor and his team were able to detect a litter of new planets, some as small as four times the mass of Earth - tiny by exoplanet standards. One star, just 42 light-years away, is home to a trio of such worlds - which Mayor is now calling "super-Earths." The largest of the three is just 9.5 times as big as Earth, the smallest just 4.2 times. It was not only the modest size of all the new worlds...
...Constitution has bestowed on American politics is this: some 50 million people just finished choosing the parties' two nominees in a grueling, yearlong primary campaign that cost millions of dollars and captivated the world. But when it comes to picking vice-presidential nominees, only two people on the planet get a vote: John McCain and Barack Obama. Between an explosion of democracy in the spring and an even bigger explosion of self-determination in the fall is a brief interlude of, well, something that Vladimir Putin could probably live with...