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.”

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Long since lost to the Guatemalan jungle, the temple is finally showing its faces to archaeologists, and revealing new clues about the rivalrous kingdoms of the Maya.

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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

The remains of the Curtain Theatre, which opened in 1577, were found behind a pub in Shoreditch, east London, as part of regeneration works.

The venue was immortalised as “this wooden O” in the prologue to Henry V.

It is hoped the site could be opened to the public, with plays staged there in the future.

Archaeologists from the Museum of London Archaeology (Mola) stumbled across parts of the playhouse’s yard and gallery walls after development began on the site last October.

“This is a fantastic site which gives us unique insight into early Shakespearean theatres,” lead archaeologist Chris Thomas said.

‘Significant discovery’

The Curtain was operated by theatre manager James Burbage and was home to Shakespeare’s Company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, from 1597 until The Globe opened two years later.

The theatre disappeared from historical records in 1622 but could have remained in use until the outbreak of the Civil War, 20 years later.

Plays thought to have premiered there include Henry V, Romeo and Juliet and Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour.

“This is one of the most significant Shakespearean discoveries of recent years,” a spokesman for Plough Yard Developments, which owns the site, said.

“Although The Curtain was known to have been in the area, its exact location was a mystery.

“The quality of the remains found is remarkable and we are looking forward to working with Mola, [the] local community and Shakespearean experts to develop plans that will give the public access to the theatre remains as part of a new development.”

Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director Michael Boyd added: “I look forward to touching the mud and stone, if not wood, and feeling the presence of that space where Shakespeare’s early work, including the histories, made such a lasting impact.”

Further excavations are expected to take place later this year.

[ verbatim source: bbc news ]