About 950 light years away exists a star resembling the sun, orbited by two earth-like planets.

The two planets, Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, were discovered by the Kepler spacecraft, which was launched by NASA in 2009 primarily for the purpose of seeking planets. The telescope has provided evidence for dozens of planets similar to the earth in size, but Francois Fressin, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, was the first to contribute a report supporting the claims.

Though the planets are consonant to earth in diameter, one being only 3 percent larger while the other is 10 percent smaller, they exist under temperatures far higher than ours: 1400 degrees and 800 degrees Fahrenheit. This heat implies that the planets do not support life similar to that of earth’s, but perhaps instead something of an unintelligent form, like bacteria or mold.

These discoveries prove that the Kepler is capable of uncovering planets similar to earth in mass, and are encouraging in the continued search for life on other planets.

…but it won’t impact.

On Tuesday, an asteroid a quarter mile wide is passing between the earth and the moon, reaching with 200,000 miles of the earth. Don Yeomans, the manager of NASA’s Near Earth Object Program said, according to Boston.com ”We’re extremely confident, 100 percent confident, that this is not a threat.”

The asteroid’s passing will actually benefit research for scientists, as they can use information gathered from it to prepare for a potential larger, more destructive visitor from space.

Asteroid 2005 YU55 may contain carbon, which makes it a prime example of asteroids that may, in the future, host watering and fueling stations for astronauts, according to Yeomans.

Kepler-16b orbits two suns, just like Tatooine

Remember one of the opening scenes from “A New Hope” where Luke kicks the dirt and looks out at Tatooine’s double suns setting in the distance? Well scientists have found a planet that fit the bill.

The NASA Kepler spacecraft has identified a planet — very creatively named Planet Kepler-16b — that orbits two suns.

It was the first time that we Earthlings have observed what is known as a circumbinary planet.

But Kepler-16b is also an oddball because it falls within a radius of the double-star system that scientists thought was too close for a planet to form.

The planet orbits its stars every 229 days.

ATF fire engineers put out a fire after the testing is completed. (Media credit/Courtesy of the ATF)

How do you investigate fire? By burning something, of course.

Arson is one of the hardest crimes to solve. It’s often easy to prove that a fire was deliberately set, but solving the crime is another matter.

That’s where the forensic techniques applied at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosive Fire Research Laboratory come into play. According to the ATF, arsonists around the country are being caught every week thanks to the science at work here.

When two people were killed in an overnight arsonist’s rampage in Northampton, the ATF was called in, and the bureau is currently using its cutting edge forensics in an attempt to solve this brutal spate of crime in a small Massachusetts town.

“Progressive fire crime scene analysis, state-of-the-art technology and analytical fire investigative tools are used to determine an arsonist’s means, timeline and opportunity,” said Eric Pe±a, senior special agent and certified fire investigator (CFI) programs manager for the ATF’s fire lab.

One of the fire lab’s biggest tasks is to reconstruct the actual scenes of fires. In a controlled environment on its 35-acres in Ammendale, Md., the ATF will burn rooms, buildings, cars and anything else it needs to destroy in order to solve crime.

Investigators build a scale model of a crime scene with scale props like furniture and fixtures placed exactly as they appeared in, say, a house fire. A full-scale structure is also built to test fire theories.

Last year the lab did 184 test burns for criminal investigations. It can take anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months to set up and conduct an investigative burn depending on the size and scope of the burn.

The smallest fire tests involves candles or fuel spills. The largest, the ATF says, involve three-story buildings up to 60 feet long that are used to investigate fires in apartment complex, hotels, stores and even churches.

Three Massachusetts high school students recently made it into the eastern region semifinals of the Siemens Competition, which will head into National Finals in New York in early December. One of them, Minhye Kim, a Brookline High School senior, took a moment with Blast Magazine to discuss her findings as a young researcher.

Blast: Congratulations on your research studies! Could you explain briefly what your research focused on?

Minhye Kim: Thank you! The title of my project is "Hepatitis B Virus Infection Increases the Risk for Developing Diabetes." I studied and found the mechanism that links the two diseases together.

Blast: What was your inspiration for this research?

MK: I was actually having a conversation with my mentor and he… mentioned something very interesting. He said that over 350 million people worldwide are infected with HBV. I had no idea HBV was such a serious health problem. So, I did a little research on my own and found out HBV leads to different liver diseases. I knew from past knowledge that glucose production happens in the liver and glucose production is very important in type 2 diabetes. So, I was curious whether HBV had anything to do with type 2 diabetes.

Blast: What is the goal of your research?

MK: The goal of my research was to find whether HBV and type 2 diabetes were linked at all. Actually, no previous research had been done about my topic of research. So there really wasn’t anything known about the link between the two diseases.

Blast: How long did it take you to come up with all the background information and analysis for your study?

MK: There were definitely lots of readings to do! There were a few days when I would just read manuscripts and not do anything else, like running experiments. I would say the entire project took about a year. It spanned throughout my junior year.

Blast: And being so young and talented in this field, do you feel or hope that more young people will get involved in research like this?

MK: Yeah! I think it would great for young people to go out there and have research internships because it’s an awesome experience. You find out what is like to be a scientist in a real-life setting and it’s worth it!

Blast: What is your ambition for the future? Do you plan on studying science or medicine?

MK: I definitely want to go to medical school. I want to become a pediatrician and have my own diabetic clinic for children… if there is no cure for diabetes by then.

Winners of the regional event are invited to compete at the National Finals at New York University December 3 — 7. For more info visit http://www.siemens-foundation.org.

The Siemens Foundation contributes over $7 million annually to support the field of science, math, engineering and technology in the United States. The Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology encourages and recognizes high school students who challenge themselves through their studies and research, and may obtain national recognition for their high school research projects in science and technology.

Lizards are born with a nifty adaptation. When too much stress is put on the joint between their body and tail “" like say when a predator grabs the lizard’s tail “" the two separate, hopefully giving the lizard the chance to run away. Over the span of a couple weeks, the lizard will actually regrow all the different vascular, nervous, and structural tissues, forming a completely new tail. It’s an impressive feat, and one that humans are quite incapable of.

The ability to grow new tissues in a lab is an area of much fervor. The long list of people waiting for an organ transplant certainly could use it, as could land mine victims. One of the largest hurdles in tissue engineering is the development of bone, which requires certain chemical signals to grow. While researches have long known what these signals are, they have yet to be able to deliver them in a way that leads to proper bone growth.

Now, researchers at Tel Aviv University have developed a new technology meant to aide the human body in growing new bone. The scientists developed a flexible scaffolding of soluble fibers that promote the growth by trapping the growth-stimulating drugs within the scaffold, preventing them from being metabolized too quickly by the body, and holding them in specific locations to dictate the growth pattern of the new bone.

While the technology is far from being ready to test in human subjects, the scientists predict that the technology could be used at first to grow new bone for dental implants. Further developments could eventually allow the technology to be adapted for cosmetic surgeries, allowing patients to grow their own implants.

“Our fibers provide all the advantages that clinicians in tissue regeneration are calling for,” says Professor Meital Zilberman. “Being thin, they’re ideal when delicate scaffolds are called for. But they can also be the basic building blocks of bones and tissues when bigger structures are needed.”

Further research will be aimed at growing new types of tissues, and eventually developing complete sets of tissues. We may never be able to grow a new arm on our own, but science may give us a way in the future.

"Damn Scientists" t-shirt at Threadless.com

If we were to make a list to things that we were supposed to have because this is the future, right behind our personal jetpack would be a levitation device. While we’re still waiting on that jetpack, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA has invented a device capable of floating a mouse in midair.

In everyday terms, the scientists created a magnet so strong that it could repel water molecules, which only react to magnetism is the strongest of magnetic fields. In scientific terms, the group using a superconducting, supercooled electromagnet to create a magnetic field of 17 teslas, 10,000 times stronger than the Earth’s average magnetic field. Because water molecules are diamagnetic, all of the water molecules generate a magnetic field of their own that opposes the field that generated them. The result is a force capable of levitating the mouse in midair.

Scientists have previously levitated objects and animals like grasshoppers and frogs, but this is the first time that they have used a mammal. Mice are also used as model organisms in the vast majority of medical research, hence the “gravity” of the accomplishment. (And sorry, we couldn’t help ourselves.)

The scientists plan to use the device to study the long-term effects of microgravity on the mice. While the first mice put in the device flipped around and became disoriented, adjustments have allowed the scientists to keep the mice in place, and even feed them, allowing them to basically live inside the field. Studying the physical effects of low gravity was (obviously) only possible during space flight. Now, this land-based research will prove useful for future space exploration where astronauts might have to live for extended periods of time in space.

Image produced of a single pentacene molecule.

Scientists have managed to do something thought impossible. Even though that actually happens every day because that’s kind of the point of science. Nevertheless, scientists at IBM have managed to produce an image of a single molecule.

Even though microscopes come in many different forms, they all work via the same premise. Light microscopes use light waves, electron microscopes use waves of electrons. Specimens reflect those waves, which our eye perceives or computers interpret. All waves have a certain wavelength, or size. Anything smaller than that wavelength is unable to reflect the wave back, just like how waves at the beach continue to wash past you when you’re standing alone, but a sea wall will stop them in their tracks.

Diagram of how atomic force microscopy forms its images.

Simple compounds, like the molecule of pentacene that the group at IBM imaged, are much smaller than any wavelengths of light we can currently use to image them. Pentacene is about 0.7 nanometers across; a typical grain of sand is about 2,000,000 nanometers across.

The scientists used an “atomic-force microscope” which uses what is essentially a ridiculously tiny tuning fork with a single molecule of carbon monoxide at the end to poke at the molecule. The tuning fork returns different vibrations above the atoms of the molecule than above the surface the molecule was on. To eliminate any stray gas molecules or vibrations from interfering with the measurements, the experiment was performed in a vacuum at -450 degrees.

The resulting image actually shows the structure, including the carbon and hydrogen atoms of the molecule. The scientists hope to further refine the technique, where it will prove very useful in the further development of nanotechnology.

More often than not, it takes the metaphorical equivalent of a snow shovel to peel us out of bed in the mornings, and we suspect that it is likely the same with many of you. We’ve always just blamed it on not being a morning person, but it turns out that the amount of sleep that you need may be written in your genes.

While all mammals need sleep, most species have different sleep needs. For example, your average housecat sleeps around 13 to 16 hours a day, while human adults usually need between 8 and 10 hours.

Ying-Hui Fu, a neurologist at the University of California at San Francisco, recently conducted a survey of sleep patterns in a large sample of people. In this group were a mother-daughter pair who were initially indentified as “morning people.”

However as the study went on, Fu noticed that the two actually were sleeping around five hours a night”"almost half the usual sleep need. Further study revealed that the two actually didn’t have any sleep related problems, as one would have assumed with someone getting so little sleep. The two women just didn’t need as much sleep as most of us do.

Fu hypothesized that their suppressed sleep needs might be due to a mutation to the DEC2 gene that they both shared. Scientists have long known that the DEC2 gene is partly responsible for governing our biological clocks, determining when we should be awake or asleep. To test this, Fu developed transgenic mice that had the corresponding mutation in the mouse’s Dec2 gene. Sure enough, the mice slept less than their counterparts without the mutation. They also recovered more quickly after sleep deprivation.

Because these finding are very new, scientists are only willing to posit that our sleep needs have some sort of genetic hardwiring. From these experiments, it’s not possible to tell whether the DEC2 mutation allows those with it to get by on less sleep or if the mutation itself is actually causing them to sleep less. Clearing, something as complicated as your biological clock is going to be controlled by much more than a single gene.

Either way, you can feel just a little bit less bad about being lazy when you have to wake up knowing it’s not your fault. Plus you can tell your friends who need less sleep that they’re mutated.

The mystery of the deformed frogs is a news story that pops up every now and then on the evening news or PBS “" supposedly, we like to be reminded every few months about how each of us is personally responsible for slowly but surely ruining the entire planet. Up until this point, scientists had proposed that the chemicals we were leeching into the environment and therefore into the frogs’ watery homes was interfering with their development, causing frogs to be born without limbs, with extra limbs, or other abnormalities.

While in pictures these malformed frogs were obviously eye catching for the environmentalist crowd, it turns out there’s actually a much more benign and biological explanation beyond all the fear mongering. The missing limbs and the extra limbs actually have two completely separate causes. While some scientists are still firmly entrenched in the “chemical cause” camp, biologists Stanley Sessions and Brandon Ballengee observed tadpoles in the wild for a few years, and noted that the tadpoles were actually being predated on by dragon fly nymphs.

The scientists observed back in their lab that the dragon fly nymphs would, more often than not, eat only parts of the tadpoles, usually just removing a limb. The tadpoles would then return back, and grow up, sans said limb. Despite missing parts of their bodies, many of the tadpoles were still able to grow up, metamorphosizing into frogs, who managed to live quite a long time.

While frogs with missing limbs have a rather mundane explanation, the frogs with extra limbs have a much more exotic explanation. Sessions established that the frogs had been infested by small parasitic flatworms called Riberoria trematodes. These works burrowed into the rapidly developing tadpoles and actually rearranged the cellular structure of the frogs as they were developing, resulting in their leg precursor cells to actually spawn multiple limbs.

Of course, the fact that this problem turned out not to be our fault doesn’t mean we’re off the hook. Pollution is still a problem, even if its effects aren’t as obvious as a three-legged frog.

Enron blindsided a whole country with its multi-billion dollar collapse in December 2001. People who watched their retirement funds dry up overnight wondered, “Could we have seen this coming?”.

While Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling’s circle of fools shouldered most of the blame, there were many employees in the company aware of shady dealings. Now, scientists studying the emails released after the company’s collapse have found interesting patterns that could have been used to indicate a forthcoming problem in a company. The cool part? The scientist studied only who e-mailed who, and never once looked at the content of the emails.

Mapping a social network.

Using social networks”"not to be confused with social networking itself”" to reach interesting conclusions is nothing new. Researchers have found that you can reliably determine a person’s sexual orientation just by looking at his network of friends on Facebook, even if he has chosen not to respond to the “Interested In” field. Similar techniques have been used to show that everyone in the world really is connected to Kevin Bacon through six degrees.

Using this same concept, Ben Collingsworth and Ronaldo Menezes at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne studied the frequency of emails as well as the connections between those sending them. Instead of finding a drastic change in at the brink of crisis, the scientists found that the biggest changes actually took place a month before.

As workers began to sense danger, they began to turn their social networks inward, communicating more frequently with a smaller group of people whom they presumably trusted more. Instead of the 100 groups of people who were typically in direct contact with each other before, there suddenly became 800.

Of course, further evidence is always needed in science, and this case is no different. The problem is that privacy issues abound; no one likes an email snoop. Should these issues ever be overcome, the tools used to detect these patterns could prove very useful for HR departments in any company in the future as an early warning sign to problems.

I know the robot revolution is becoming a played out meme on the internet these days, but that’s mostly because the world around us is actually becoming more and more automated. Our GPS units are learning about us as we drive. In February, the L train in New York started overnight operations with a fully computer-controlled conductor. Now, my day job as a scientist could be replaced soon by automated workstations.

A group at Aberystwyth University in the UK has developed a completely automated workstation, which is capable of developing scientific hypotheses and then designing future experiments to verify them, all without any intervention from scientists. Using this workstation, named “Adam,” the scientists discovered the genetic coding for an orphan enzyme than had no known parent gene. While this may not sound like quite an accomplishment, this is actually an impressive feat that would have been rather labor-intensive and time-consuming for the scientists to carry out by hand.

The workstation is basically a fully fleshed-out molecular biology laboratory. It’s controlled by four computers, and comes with centrifuges, spectrophotometers to measure cell growth, automated liquid handlers and freezers among many different tools. The workstation can carry out 1,000 experiments simultaneously, each lasting five days, while making measurements every thirty minutes on each sample. The software then compiles all of the data it collects, makes statistical inferences, and then designs future experiments, and again carries them out in an iterative process. The human scientists simply added laboratory consumables and removed waste — Adam carried out the rest of the work.

Science is no stranger to automation. The vast majority of drug discovery work is done on liquid handing robot. However, the vast majority of this work is just brute force. For example, in the case of drug discovery, each well of a 384 well plate is loaded with a slightly different version of a molecule to see which version has the most activity. The most promising candidates are selected (in a process called hit-picking), and then further developed. Adam performed a similar process, determining which of the 1,200 known coding regions in the yeast genome actually coded a certain gene. But whereas, in drug development, scientists try every version of a drug they can synthesize, Adam was able to intelligently select which avenues of development were the most promising, eventually determining that three separate genes actually coded together for the one final product.

Clearly a lot of human work went into developing the software and logic algorithms that controlled Adam, so scientists aren’t going to be replaced by robots anytime soon. Adam didn’t design himself, after all. However, work of this kind could accelerate scientific discovery and development. As computers become more powerful, we’ll be able to analyze larger and larger data sets, finding patterns that would otherwise be too difficult for the human mind to tease out. The work done by this group is pioneering, and could be changing the face of science as we know it.