Health & Science

The first ‘Goldilocks’ planet

In recent years, astronomers have discovered nearly 500 planets orbiting distant stars. The biggest question, of course, is whether any of these worlds harbors life. Now, the most promising candidate yet has been found, says The New York Times. Called Gliese 581g, it orbits a fading star—Gliese 581—right in our interstellar backyard, just 20 light-years from Earth. What makes this planet special is that it’s located in the “Goldilocks zone,” the distance from a star at which surface temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water. “This is really the first Goldilocks planet,” said study co-author R. Paul Butler, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Even so, Gliese 581g wouldn’t be a friendly place for people: The same side always faces its sun, making for drastic temperature extremes over most of its surface. But study co-author Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said he suspects life could exist in the temperate zones near its day/night divide. “The chances of life on this planet are almost 100 percent,” he said. Even if this particular planet turns out not to harbor life, other astronomers said, the latest discovery—and the fact that planets seem to be commonplace—suggests that our galaxy could be “teeming” with life.

Pining for pines

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The bristlecone pine trees of the Western U.S. are among the longest-living trees in the world; some are more than 4,000 years old. But they may not have much of a future, says The New York Times. Bristlecones are under a fierce assault from two pests: white pine blister rust, a fungus originally from Asia, and the native pine bark beetle. Both plagues have thrived with warming temperatures and have slowly advanced to higher elevations, once a redoubt for the rugged bristlecones. Blister rust kills young trees quickly, and the beetle kills larger, seed-producing trees, so the combo “severely constrains recovery of the population,” says U.S. Forest Service ecologist Anna Schoettle. Of the three species of bristlecone, so far only the Rocky Mountain variety has been infected with blister rust, but summits in Utah, Nevada, and California are sure to be invaded soon. “Neither the bristlecones nor their ancestors have been faced with a disease like this, and they have not evolved tolerances,” Schoettle says. “So really we’re in uncharted territory.”

How to make time slow down

In his theory of relativity, Albert Einstein put forth a very strange idea: Time moves faster or slower depending on how fast you’re moving and the strength of the gravitational field around you. Subsequent experiments proved Einstein right: Time ticks slightly slower on a fast-moving satellite compared with a stationary one, while a clock in the mountains—farther from Earth’s gravitational field—runs faster than one at sea level. The same weirdness applies at a more intimate scale, but only now have scientists been able to measure it. Using a pair of ultra-precise atomic clocks, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology demonstrated that a clock raised just a foot above the floor ticks marginally slower than the lower one—by a difference of about 90 billionths of a second over 79 years. In a second experiment, they found that a clock moving at as little as 20 mph ticks ever so slightly slower than a nonmoving clock. “People tend to just ignore relativistic effects, but relativistic effects are everywhere,” NIST’s James Chin-Wen Chou tells ScienceNews.org. The effects, however, are rather subtle: Over a lifetime, people who live at the top of a skyscraper age about 100 millionths of a second more slowly than people on the ground floor.

Why women are sorrier

Women needn’t apologize any more than men, and yet they do. In a new study, Canadian researchers found that women apologized more than men and more often felt they’d done something requiring an apology. It’s not that men are less willing to admit fault, the researchers found; rather, men set a higher bar for what they think deserves an apology. Indeed, the study found that, when they considered themselves in the wrong, both men and women apologized about 81 percent of the time. But when subjects were asked to rate the severity of various offenses (like waking up a friend late at night, thereby causing him to perform badly the next day), men were much less likely to think that apologies were in order. They also were less likely to feel offended and that they deserved an apology. If there’s an inequality of “sorrys” between the sexes, it’s just that men “think they’ve done fewer things wrong,” social psychologist Karina Schumann tells LiveScience.com. This gender disparity can cause communications problems and hurt feelings. “So rather than assuming that your partner can read your mind or read your emotions accurately,” she says, “you need to communicate to the partner what you’re experiencing.”