 The Colorado Statesman |
Colorado governor candidate refuses to back down
Washington Post AP Secretary of State Bernie Buescher has to certify the ballot by the close of business Friday, and Maes says he's not going anywhere. Maes has faced a growing chorus of calls to drop out of the race amid several campaign missteps and questions about … Buck, Coffman withdraw support for Maes; deadline looms Maes out in Colorado? Secretary of State to Certify Ballot Despite Candidate Uncertainty |
Colorado governor candidate refuses to back down – Washington Post
Report: Cowboys trade WR Patrick Crayton to Chargers – SportingNews.com
 SB Nation Dallas (blog) |
Report: Cowboys trade WR Patrick Crayton to Chargers
SportingNews.com The Dallas Cowboys have traded wide receiver Patrick Crayton to the San Diego Chargers, ESPN.com's Adam Schefter reports. The Cowboys get a seventh-round pick in the 2011 draft in exchange for Crayton. Crayton's agent, Fred Lyles, told the Dallas … Dallas Cowboys reach agreement to trade Patrick Crayton to San Diego Chargers Cowboys trade Crayton to Chargers, acquire seventh-round pick Cowboys ship Patrick Crayton to Chargers |
Eagles trade for OL Wells, cut 10; Abiamiri to PUP – Kansas City Star
 TSN |
Eagles trade for OL Wells, cut 10; Abiamiri to PUP
Kansas City Star By Sports Network The Philadelphia Eagles have traded for Arizona Cardinals offensive lineman Reggie Wells, the team announced Friday. The 29-year-old Wells, who was acquired in exchange for an undisclosed 2011 draft pick, started every game for the … Eagles bolster interior line by acquiring G Reggie Wells from Cardinals Eagles Acquire Guard Wells for 6th-Round Pick Eagles acquire Reggie Wells for guard depth |
“Earth-like” Exoplanet Could Have a Comet’s Tail
When the super-Earth COROT-7b was discovered in 2009, it was heralded as the rockiest, most truly Earth-like exoplanet yet. But a new study suggests it’s more like a comet.
In a paper to be published in the journal Icarus, an international team of astronomers led by Alessandro Mura of the Italian Institute for Interplanetary Space Physics in Rome argue that, given the planet’s likely composition and distance from its star, COROT-7b probably loses its surface elements to space in a long, comet-like tail of charged particles.
COROT-7b is less than twice the size of Earth and about five times Earth’s mass, and orbits a sun-like star about 390 light-years away. Because COROT-7b’s density is similar to Earth’s, astronomers hailed it as the first rocky exoplanet discovered and one of the best candidates for hosting extraterrestrial life.
But the rocky world also sits almost 100 times closer to its star than the Earth is to the sun, and it orbits its star once every 0.85 Earth days. The temperature on the daylight side of the planet is a scorching 4000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough for minerals on the rocky surface to break down and release charged particles into space, where they would be picked up and blown away by the stellar wind.
“We expect that the stellar radiation pressure and the plasma environment will cause the build-up of an elongated comet-like exosphere,” the authors write. Depending on what the planet is made of, and whether it was once the rocky core of a “super-Neptune” as some have suggested, the tail could be composed of elements like sodium, oxygen, magnesium or silicon oxide.
The researchers compare this vision of COROT-7b with Mercury, which has a similarly antagonistic relationship with the sun and also leaks charged particles in a long tail.
“The planet appears to be more like a ’super-Mercury’ under much extremer environmental conditions,” the researchers write.
The team suggests that a tail composed of sodium or calcium could theoretically be detected on COROT-7b from ground-based telescopes. Although detecting such a tail would probably eliminate COROT-7b as a candidate habitable world, “this project would be the very first attempt to learn something of the mineralogy of a rocky planet orbiting another star.”
Image: 1) Artist’s impression of COROT-7b, ESO/L. Calcada. 2) Model of COROT-7b’s proposed sodium tail, assuming the planet is 4000 degrees Fahrenheit at its surface. A. Mura et al, Icarus 2010. doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2010.08.015
See Also:
- Smallest Exoplanet Is Most Earth-like Yet
- At Last! First Real Evidence for a Rocky Exoplanet
- Astronomers Closer to Exoplanet ‘Holy Grail’
- Mercury Flyby Maps New Territory
- This Just in: Mercury More Exciting Than Mars
Follow us on Twitter @astrolisa and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.
Duke Nukem Forever Lives Again at PAX
You can take that toe tag off Duke Nukem Forever again: The game, presumed dead after developer 3D Realms pulled the plug on it last year, is alive and kicking at Penny Arcade Expo.
Gearbox Software has taken the reins of the first-person shooter, which will supposedly be published by Take-Two Interactive next year, according to The Wall Street Journal. At least a portion of the game is being shown to attendees at PAX 2010, the massive videogame gathering this weekend in Seattle.
“We’re in the polishing phase now. This is a game where we cannot make a promise we cannot fulfill,” Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford told the paper.
The oft-delayed videogame, a sequel to 1996’s Duke Nukem 3D, became the perennial winner of Wired’s Vaporware Awards.
GameLife editor Chris Kohler is playing Duke Nukem Forever at PAX. Wired.com will have a full report as soon as possible.
See Also:
- Learn to Let Go: How Success Killed Duke Nukem
- Storyboard: Duke Nukem Forever's Spectacular Failure
- Video: Duke Nukem Forever Gameplay Footage
Panasonic cranks out new 31 and 19 Series Toughbooks for Japan
Panasonic’s gone on a real tear here, releasing two new Toughbook models at once. While you grapple with the implications of such a thing, let’s get down to details. The new 31 and 19 Series Toughbooks are 13.1-inch and 10.4-inch models, respectively, and as far as specs go, they both pack in a 160GB hard drive, up to 6GB of DDR3 SDRAM (with 2GB coming standard), and Intel QM57 Express chipset, and 1024 x 768 resolution displays. Both come with Windows 7 Professional pre-installed, and the Toughbook 31 has a 2.4GHz Intel Core i5 CPU, the 19′s go a 1.2 GHZ inside. Other than that they’ve both got Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1, an HDMI slot, four USB ports, and an SD card slot. Of course, they’re also drop resistant in addition to being dust and waterproof. They’ll be available starting in mid-September in Japan.
Panasonic cranks out new 31 and 19 Series Toughbooks for Japan originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Glint of Starlight Could Reveal Liquid Oceans on Exoplanets
The sparkle of starlight off water could be the clincher for finding oceans on extrasolar planets. And it could be observable with the tech that will be deployed in the next generation of space telescopes.
“A glinting planet looks different from a non-glinting planet, and it’s detectable with current technology,” said Tyler Robinson, a graduate student at the University of Washington and lead author of a new paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters. “This is one step toward proving there’s liquid water at the surface of an extrasolar planet.”
The proposed technique for finding wet worlds takes advantage of the same effect that makes sunsets on the Pacific coast so spectacular. The idea was suggested by Carl Sagan in 1993, and has been used to confirm the presence of liquid lakes on Saturn’s moon Titan.
“The oceans do a really good job of reflecting light like a mirror,” Robinson said. “Especially when you have the sun really low on the horizon, most of the sunlight comes reflected off of the water towards you. The same thing happens on the scale of a planet.”
Robinson and his colleagues showed that when a planet appears crescent-shaped to an Earthly observer, starlight reflecting off oceans can make the planet appear up to twice as bright as a planet with no oceans. They also showed that the sparkle of starlight off oceans looks different from light scattered through clouds.
Most other proposed techniques for finding water on an extrasolar planet rely on taking its spectrum, or detailed measurements of the planet’s atmosphere, and looking for the chemical fingerprint of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen. But this strategy would show only that the planet hosts water vapor, not liquid oceans, and the technology is still a long way off.
“To get a good spectrum would require a big telescope that is still 10 or 20 years away from being designed or launched,” said exoplanet expert Darren Williams of Penn State University, who has also studied ways to search for exo-oceans but was not involved in the new work. “That’s really becoming a long-range, futuristic sort of thing.”
Robinson and his colleagues proved that the glint effect could be observable with the telescope touted as the successor to Hubble: the James Webb Space Telescope, slated to launch in 2014. If the telescope is accompanied by a shield to block starlight, as suggested in the New Worlds Observer mission concept, it will be sensitive to the light glinting off extrasolar oceans.
To test whether the glint would be visible to the new space telescope, Robinson imagined he was an alien observer looking back at Earth. He used data from weather satellites and NASA’s EPOXI mission to build a computer model of what Earth would look like to a distant observer, including weather patterns, seasonal changes and wind speeds over the oceans that would influence the height of waves.
The model “does explain what we can observe on our own planet from other spacecraft in the solar system, so you can trust the model that they’re using to do these calculations,” Williams said.
Unfortunately, even the James Webb Space Telescope won’t be able to take sharp enough images of exoplanets to tell whether the planet is in a crescent phase, much less directly see a glint. The telescope will just see a dot of light getting brighter and dimmer as it circles its star.
“We have to look for evidence of this glint when we just have this pale, tiny speck of light on our camera,” Robinson said.
So Robinson and colleagues added up all the light reflected by the model Earth to see if the glint would light up the whole planet enough to be seen from space. They found that Earth in the crescent phase would be twice as bright with a glint as without it. “That’s significant,” Robinson said. “A factor of two is a really big deal.”
The researchers also found that the glint effect is strongest in the near infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, just beyond what the human eye can see. These wavelengths of light are not as badly scattered as they pass through a planet’s atmosphere. Conveniently, they are also the wavelengths that the new space telescope will be most attuned to.
“The James Webb Space Telescope is really well suited to do this,” Robinson said.
Looking for the glint would not be the first line of investigation, however. Rather, Robinson imagines the technique could confirm that a good exo-Earth candidate, a plant that is about Earth’s size planet and lies the right distance from its star to support liquid water, actually does have oceans at its surface.
“We would first worry about whether the planet is even remotely Earth-like before looking for the glint,” he said.
“What’s nice about this result here is that we have a chance of doing interesting things with Earthlike planets with the James Webb Space Telescope, which is basically sitting on the hangar waiting to be launched into space,” commented Williams “We can do that in our research lifetimes. That’s the most exciting thing about this.”
Image: 1) Astrophysical Journal Letters/Tyler Robinson. Left: NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory. Right: Earth and Moon Viewer. 2) NASA
See Also:
- The New Exoplanetology: ‘I Learned It by Watching You, Earth
- Most Earth-Like Extrasolar Planet Found Right Next Door
- Kepler Shows Exoplanet Is Unlike Anything in Our Solar System
- Photo: Shining Lake Confirms Presence of Liquid on Titan
- The Lagoons of Titan: Oily Liquid Confirmed on Saturn Moon
Follow us on Twitter @astrolisa and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.
Galaxy Tab with WiMAX coming to Sprint this November?
The CDMA-equipped Samsung Galaxy Tab has so far been nothing more than a sticker in a random snapshot and some whispers about Verizon, but Boy Genius Report is saying that the Tab’s also bound for Sprint‘s network this November, on both its 3G and 4G (i.e. WiMAX) network — à la the Galaxy S / Epic 4G. No word from Sammy HQ on this one, but it’s worth noting that in our briefing, a Samsung rep mentioned that an American carrier could put Qik on it and, well, that’s kind of Sprint’s thing. We don’t suppose anyone heard its preferred dessert choice in the process, hm?
Galaxy Tab with WiMAX coming to Sprint this November? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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An American trailblazer – ESPN
 CBC.ca |
An American trailblazer
ESPN Clive Mason/Getty Images Brian McBride helped clear the path for players such as Clint Dempsey and Jozy Altidore to play in the English Premier League. It seems almost unfair that my most enduring memories of Brian McBride involve … Fire forward McBride to retire after season Brian McBride, American Soccer Legend, Announces Retirement McBride announces retirement |
Strong quake strikes near Christchurch, New Zealand – CNN
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Strong quake strikes near Christchurch, New Zealand
CNN By the CNN Wire Staff (CNN) — An earthquake that struck New Zealand on Saturday caused "a lot of damage," though there are no reports of serious injuries or major damage, an emergency official said. "It was like a freight train running through the … Strong quake hits New Zealand Powerful 7.4 quake hits New Zealand's South Island Strong earthquake rocks New Zealand's South Island |
