Pink Handfish

Photograph courtesy Karen Gowlett-Holmes

Using its fins to walk, rather than swim, along the ocean floor in an undated picture, the pink handfish is one of nine newly named species described in a scientific review of the handfish family released in May.
Only four specimens of the elusive four-inch (ten-centimeter) pink handfish have ever been found, and all of those were collected from areas around the city of Hobart (map), on the Australian island of Tasmania.
See more pictures: "Nine Fish With 'Hands' Found to Be New Species."

Source: 
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/12/photogalleries/101207-top-ten-weird-new-animals-2010/#/new-handfish-species-pink_20881_600x450.jpg

Sneezing Snub-Nosed Monkey

Photograph courtesy Ngwe Lwin

A new monkey species in Myanmar is so snub-nosed that rainfall is said to makes it sneeze—but that's apparently the least of its problems, conservationists announced in October.

The only scientifically observed specimen (pictured) had been killed by local hunters the time researchers found it—and was eaten soon after.
Get the full story: "New Snub-Nosed Monkey Discovered, Eaten."

Source: 
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/12/photogalleries/101207-top-ten-weird-new-animals-2010/#/snub-nosed-sneezing-monkey-found-eaten_27911_600x450.jpg

"Yoda Bat"

Photograph courtesy Piotr Naskrecki, Conservation International

This tube-nosed fruit bat—which became a Web sensation as "Yoda bat"—is just one of the roughly 200 species encountered during two scientific expeditions to Papua New Guinea in 2009, scientists announced in October.
Though seen on previous expeditions, the bat has yet to be formally documented as a new species, or even named. Like other fruit bats, though, it disperses seeds from the fruit in its diet, perhaps making the flying mammal crucial to its tropical rain forest ecosystem.
See more pictures: "Tube-Nosed Bat, More Rare Species Found." 

Source: 
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/12/photogalleries/101207-top-ten-weird-new-animals-2010/#/papua-new-guinea-new-species-bat_27185_600x450.jpg

New Purple Octopus?

Photograph courtesy Bedford Institute of Oceanography

This unidentified purple octopus is one of 11 potentially new species found during a July deep-sea expedition off Canada's Atlantic coast.
The 20-day expedition aimed to uncover relationships between cold-water coral and other bottom-dwelling creatures in a pristine yet "alien" environment, according to the researchers' blog.

Source: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/12/photogalleries/101207-top-ten-weird-new-animals-2010/#/newfoundland-deep-sea-species-octopus_23992_600x450.jpg

NASA Finds Smallest Earthlike Planet Outside Solar System

Rocky world 1.4 times Earth's size is "missing link," astronomer says.

An artist's rendering of the new rocky planet Kepler-10b.

The smallest planet yet spied outside our solar system has been found orbiting a sunlike star about 560 light-years away, astronomers announced today. Known as Kepler-10b, the planet is just 1.4 times Earth's size and 4.6 times its mass.
The planet, found using NASA's Kepler spacecraft, is the first of the more than 500 known exoplanets that's definitively rocky—much like Earth, Mars, Venus, or Mercury—the study team says. Launched in March 2009, Kepler was designed to hunt for potentially habitable Earthlike planets.
Astronomers have been studying Kepler-10b since its discovery in 2009, when the team detected a periodic dimming of the host star as the planet passed in front of the star.
Finding such a small planet this way was no easy feat—seen from a similar distance, Earth passing in front of the sun would cause a 0.01 percent reduction in the star's brightness, said Natalie Batalha of San Jose State University, lead author of an upcoming paper describing the find.
"Imagine you have 10,000 light bulbs and you take one away. That's the change in brightness we're looking for," Batalha said today during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington.
Still, after using Kepler and other instruments to precisely calculate the new planet's size, mass, and density, Batalha said, "we know without question that this is a rocky world."
Smallest Planet Has Density of Iron
Before figuring out the nature of Kepler-10b, the scientists looked at the host star's properties, as revealed by starquakes, acoustic disturbances that make the entire star ring like a bell.
"In the same way that we use a sonogram to probe an unborn fetus and earthquakes to probe the interior of the Earth, we use starquakes to probe the interior structure and properties of the star itself," Batalha said.
"A tiny star would yield different [vibration] frequencies than a large one, just as when you strum a violin you're going to get a different sound than when you strum a cello."
Using starquakes, Batalha and colleagues were able to accurately determine the size, mass, and age of the star, which in turn allowed them to make very fine-tuned estimates of the new planet's characteristics.
Astronomers carefully studied the tiny variations in starlight to determine Kepler-10b's size. The observations also revealed that the planet is very close to the star, orbiting once every 20 hours.
(Related: "Five New Planets Found; Hotter Than Molten Lava.")
Using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the Kepler team made precise measurements of minute shifts in the wavelengths of the host star's light. This data showed how the star nodded back and forth in response to the planet's gravity, allowing the team to calculate the masses of both objects.
Based on this combined data, the team concludes that Kepler-10b must be a rocky world with an average density of 8.8 grams per cubic centimeter—about the same as a chunk of iron.
Rocky World is "Planetary Missing Link"
Being rocky, however, is no guarantee that a planet will be habitable. In the case of Kepler-10b, one side of the planet always faces the star, so that side would have a surface temperature of 2,500 degrees F (1,370 degrees C), Batalha estimates.
It's highly unlikely that such a world would retain an atmosphere, since the searing hot gases would rapidly escape into space.
Still, Kepler-10b is an enormously important find, said Geoffrey Marcy, a planet hunter at the University of California, Berkeley. Marcy, who is involved in the Kepler mission, was not a core member of Batalha's team.
"In astronomy, we've been discovering giant gas planets for 15 years. But the ultimate goal is to discover habitable worlds, like Earth," he said at the AAS meeting. (Related: "New Planet System Found—May Have Hidden 'Super Earth.'")
According to Marcy, Kepler-10b is the "planetary missing link."
"It's definitely not a gas giant like Jupiter. Nor is it habitable—it's too hot. This is a transitional planet somewhere between a gas giant and what we've been hoping to find."
One other possibly rocky planet, COROT-7b, might be even more Earthlike in size and mass, Batalha agreed. But its star is much more active with flares and other disturbances, making it difficult to nail down important parameters with the needed precision. (See "'Super Earth' May Really Be New Planet Type: Super-Io.")
"For Kepler-10, we were lucky," she said. "It's a very quiet star."

Source:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/01/110110-nasa-kepler-10b-new-planet-found-rocky-science-space/

 

Thunderstorms Shoot Antimatter Beams Into Space

"This is a fundamental new discovery about how our planet works," expert says.

An illustration shows high-energy electrons and positrons from Earth traveling into space.

Thunderstorms can shoot beams of antimatter into space—and the beams are so intense they can be spotted by spacecraft thousands of miles away, scientists have announced.
Most so-called normal matter is made of subatomic particles such as electrons and protons. Antimatter, on the other hand, is made of particles that have the same masses and spins as their counterparts but with opposite charges and magnetic properties.
Recently, radiation detectors on NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope lighted up for about 30 milliseconds with the distinctive signature of positrons, the antimatter counterparts of electrons.
Scientists were able to trace the concentrated burst of radiation to a lightning flash over Namibia, at least 3,000 miles (5,000 kilometers) away from the Earth-orbiting telescope, which was passing above Egypt at the time. (See an Africa map.)
"This is a fundamental new discovery about how our planet works," said Steven Cummer, a lightning researcher from Duke University who was not part of the study team.
"The idea that any planet has thunderstorms that can create antimatter and launch it into space is something out of science fiction. The fact that our own planet is doing it is truly amazing."
Intense Antimatter Beam a Shocker
Scientists already knew that thunderstorms can emit gamma rays—the most energetic form of light—and that gamma rays in turn can create positrons through a process called pair formation.
When a gamma ray with the right amount of energy interacts with an air atom, energy from the gamma ray is converted into matter, one electron and one positron, lightning expert Joseph Dwyer said yesterday during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington.
(Related: "Lightning Creates Particle Accelerators Above Earth.")
Scientists wouldn't have been surprised to see a few positrons accompanying any intense gamma ray burst, added Dwyer, of the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne.
But the lightning flash detected by Fermi appeared to have produced about 100 trillion positrons: "That's a lot," he said.
What seems to have happened is that positrons created by the lightning were herded into a tight beam by Earth's magnetic field, said study leader Michael Briggs of the University of Alabama, Huntsville.
The beam funneled positrons from the Namibian storm to the Fermi spacecraft.
A few milliseconds after hitting the spacecraft, the beam struck a more northerly section of Earth's magnetic field, Briggs added. This caused some of the positrons to bounce back the way they had come, hitting the spacecraft with a second beam, like an echo.
Antimatter a Clue to Lightning
Earth is constantly being bombarded by radiation from the sun, as well as cosmic rays from distant but violent events, such as powerful supernovae. (Also see "Black Holes Belch Universe's Most Energetic Particles.")
Considering the amount of positrons in the beam Fermi detected, the thunderstorm was briefly creating more radiation—in the form of positrons and gamma rays—than what hits Earth's atmosphere from all other cosmic sources combined, Dwyer noted.
The researcher has previously said, however, that the danger of thunderstorm radiation to airline travelers is extremely low.
Duke's Cummer added that nobody knows why some thunderstorms produce gamma rays while most do not.
"We really don't understand a lot of the details about how lighting works," he said. But discovering the creation of positrons "gives us a very, very important clue as to what's happening."
A paper about the discovery of antimatter in thunderstorms has been accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Source: 

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/01/110111-thunderstorms-antimatter-beams-fermi-radiation-science-space/

Help Wanted: One Chief Shark Officer

Looking for a change of pace, a new job perhaps? If you’re ready to swim with the sharks then the Discovery Channel has the perfect opening for you.

“Must enjoy exotic, waterfront locations, buff bodies in bathing suits and having the bejesus scared out of you," reads an ad released by the television channel Tuesday morning. "Looking delicious in a wetsuit is a plus. Sense of humor required.”

In celebration of the impending 24th annual Shark Week, The Discovery Channel is in search of its first ever Chief Shark Officer, “a fun-loving, fast-swimming personality” to head one of the channel’s trademark shows. The job's main duties involve, of course, swimming with sharks -- but also attending premier parties in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami.

“Sharks in general are captivating critters, one of the charismatic megafauna,” shark expert George Burgess told FoxNews.com. Burgess, a director of the Florida Program for Shark Research, believes the elegant animals are a constant reminder of human fallibility.

Sharks have captivated the mainstream consciousness ever since the 1970s, when Steven Spielberg’s pulsating thriller Jaws reminded us all that it may not be safe to go back in the water.

“We expect the natural world to sort of part in front of us and give us assurances that we’re safe all the time. Nothing could be further from the truth,” Burgess said.

In a sense, sharks are nature’s wake-up call -- and though the Discovery Channel promises the accompaniment and supervision of professionals, the danger is very real, he warned.

“They’re one of the few animals on earth that can cause harm to a human or even death,” Burgess said. “In a world that we as humans control in so many different ways because of our brains and our technology, the fact that there is still an animal out there that can kill us flies in the face of our haughty sensibilities.”

It comes as no surprise, then, that one of the advertised benefits of the job is “lots and lots of insurance -- and some great dentistry, naturally.”

The 24th season of Shark Week airs this summer on the Discovery Channel.

Source: 

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/01/11/wanted-chief-shark-officer/?test=faces