Word: solar
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Call it one giant leap for mankind's search for life on other planets. Researchers now have the first conclusive evidence of water on a planet outside our solar system, according to a paper in today's issue of the journal Nature...
...asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres, mysterious bodies orbiting in the belt of rubble that circles the sun between Mars and Venus. NASA vehicles have been this way before, but they've usually been just passing through on their way to the planets in the outer solar system. This time the asteroid belt itself will be the destination, and the ship will get there courtesy of the young technology of ion propulsion...
There's good reason to spend so much time and money--Dawn carries a $446 million price tag--getting to Ceres and Vesta. The composition and reflectivity of the bodies suggest they were formed within the first 3 million years of the solar system's life, whereas Earth was something of a late arrival, coming along about 27 million years later. A close look at Ceres and Vesta, then, is a close look at a local cosmos that our planet wasn't even around to see. "These two objects are our best opportunity for going back into time," says Christopher...
Wandering the cavernous information hall at Live Earth's Tokyo site on Saturday - munching on a whole-grain, locally made peanut butter muffin and browsing for a 100% hemp towel - I noticed the solar panels. Like the events in Sydney, Shanghai, London, Washington and other cities, Live Earth Tokyo was intended as a rock festival-cum-environmental fair, where concertgoers could learn about the energy-saving benefits of fluorescent lightbulbs while jamming to groups like Genesis, who reformed for the London show. Organizers had stressed that the massive festivals themselves would be as green as could be - the Tokyo show...
...carbon footprint in any given show usually comes from the audience traveling to the concert, and though Live Earth promised to offset those emissions, it wasn't yet clear how - not to mention that offsets are inherently dicey. The Tokyo show drew much of its electricity from an existing solar plant on the grid, but that meant that Tokyo homes and businesses normally supplied by solar would have needed to supplement their power from dirtier sources. That's a net loss for the environment. Many rock stars who sat out Live Earth felt the same way. "We're using enough...