This planet is a hot Jupiter, meaning it’s a massive gas giant that orbits in tight proximity to its star. That may not sound like home, but its star could double for our Sun… if you ignore its location.

This artist’s conception depicts a newly discovered solar system in the Beehive Cluster, a conglomeration of over a thousand stars that all seem to move around a shared gravitational center. This particular cluster is still newly formed, relatively speaking, and it’s the type of cluster where all the stars formed at the same time from the same giant cloud of dust and gas. A huge number of stars form in clusters such as these, so it’s been a crucial question for astronomers to determine whether stars in clusters like the Beehive could support planets.

Before this new discovery, we had detected a pair of planets orbiting stars in clusters, but these stars were super-giants. These two newly found planets, which have the catchy names Pr0201b and Pr0211b, were discovered around a pair of Sun-like planets. They’re both hot Jupiters, which means they’re completely incapable of supporting life. But if an Earth-like planet formed around either of these stars — and the presence of the hot Jupiters suggests that’s not an impossible proposition — then the view of the star from that world would be much the same as our own daily view of the Sun. But the night sky would be an explosion of starlight unlike anything we can easily imagine.

And while that’s a pretty amazing thought, it’s not all that these two new planets have to teach us. NASA researcher Russel White explains:

“The relatively young age of the Beehive cluster makes these planets among the youngest known. And that’s important because it sets a constraint on how quickly giant planets migrate inward — and knowing how quickly they migrate is the first step to figuring out how they migrate. Searches for planets around nearby stars suggest that these metals act like a ‘planet fertilizer, leading to an abundant crop of gas giant planets. Our results suggest this may be true in clusters as well.”

[ sources: io9 & nasa / jpl ]

In the 1600s, Europeans exploring the American southeast wrote of a purification ritual practiced by the native people, involving dancing, vomiting, and large amounts of what the travelers called black drink. Served from shell cups, the highly caffeinated tea was brewed from the shrub Ilex vomitoria, a species of holly. In a new study, researchers have found the first direct evidence of black drink — not in shells from Florida or Mississippi, but in ceramic beakers at the ancient city of Cahokia outside what’s now St. Louis, Missouri. The finding hints at a trade network that flourished centuries before Christopher Columbus landed in the New World, in which caffeinated drinks had Starbucks-like importance and possibly religious significance.

[ continued ]

Watched Curiosity touch down with Teddy tonight.

FUCK YEAH, SCIENCE!

FUCK YEAH, NERDLOVE!

[ link via Austin ]

As a child, astronomer Jill Tarter would walk along the beaches of western Florida with her father and look up at the stars.

“I assumed, at that time, that along some beach on some planet, there would be a small creature walking with its dad and they would see our sun in their sky, and they might wonder whether anyone was there,” she tells Fresh Air’s Dave Davies. “But I never thought about it professionally until graduate school.”

[ read on ]

Happy birthday, St. Nikola, Patron Saint of Awesome.

• Perfectly preserved mahogany box found at house in Derbyshire
• Comes complete with 29 bottled concoctions
• Remedies include Manna, Steers’s Opodeldoc and peppermint water
• Expected to fetch over £3,000 at auction

It contains a collection of healing potions and cure-alls unlikely to be prescribed by any GP today.

But a perfectly preserved medicine chest dating back to the reign of George III is expected to fetch more than £3,000 when it sells at auction later this week.

The mahogany box, described as a ‘medicinal time capsule’, comes complete with 29 exotically named bottled concoctions that would have been used by doctors to treat ailments such as gout, depression and indigestion.

[ read on ]

10 of the Most Dangerous Chemicals in the World
10 of the Deadliest Proteins on Earth

Mustafa invented a way of tapping this quantum effect via what’s known as the dynamic Casimir effect. This uses a “moving mirror” cavity, where two very reflective very flat plates are held close together, and then moved slightly to interact with the quantum particle sea. It’s horribly technical, but the end result is that Mustafa’s use of shaped silicon plates similar to those used in solar power cells results in a net force being delivered. A force, of course, means a push or a pull and in space this equates to a drive or engine.

[ read on @ gizmodo ]

Paleontologists don’t always speculate about the existence of gigantic, winged reptiles living alongside humans in the 21st century, but when they do, they back that speculation up with plenty of scientific evidence.

In this, the first installment in a two-part series, paleontologist Mark Witton explores an obviously speculative, totally puerile, and completely awesome topic — what modern life would be like in the company of pterosaurs — through a decidedly systematic, rigorous, and research-based lens. How big would these pterosaurs have been? Might we have farmed them for their meat? And perhaps most important of all: could we ride them?…

What would life be like if pterosaurs were alive today? Via io9.