Health & Science

A dense world far, far away

Astronomers have detected the first rocky planet ever found outside our solar system. Until now, most of the some 500 “exoplanets” discovered orbiting distant stars have been Jupiter-size gas giants. The latest find, named Kepler-10b, is only 40 percent larger than Earth, making it the smallest exoplanet yet identified, says The New York Times. The discovery “is a significant milestone in the search for planets similar to our own,” says Douglas Hudgins, a scientist with NASA’s Kepler satellite, which detected the body orbiting a star 560 light-years away. Kepler’s instruments could discern the fractional reduction in the star’s brightness as the planet crossed in front of it every 20 hours. Despite its geological kinship to Earth, Kepler-10b is uninhabitable: It is 20 times closer to its star than Mercury is to the Sun and has a surface temperature hotter than lava. “She’s a scorched world,” says study director Natalie Batalha.

Hottest year for planet Earth

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Last year tied with 2005 as the Earth’s warmest on record, scientists at the National Climatic Data Center announced last week. They found that 2010 temperatures, as recorded on land, ships, and ocean buoys, averaged 1.12 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average of 57 degrees. Since comparable records began being kept, in 1880, nine of the 10 hottest years have occurred since 2000. The latest finding “reinforces the notion that we are seeing climate change,” the center’s chief scientist, David Easterling, tells USA Today. Illustrating the difference between climate and weather, the announcement came on a day when 49 of the 50 U.S. states had some snow on the ground, according to the National Weather Service.

The science of musical arousal

Listening to music may not be as fun as having sex, but it triggers the same pleasure-inducing chemicals in the brain. Neuroscientists at McGill University scanned the brains of volunteers as they listened to their favorite instrumental music, ranging from punk to Beethoven to bagpipes. The scans revealed that as a particularly thrilling moment of music approached, the part of the brain’s striatum region that’s involved in anticipation and prediction released the neurochemical dopamine—the same chemical that gives rise to pleasurable feelings associated with eating, sex, and psychoactive drugs. When the musical climax arrived, dopamine surged through a different part of the striatum. The study recruited only volunteers who claimed to get chills from certain musical passages, but researchers say the dopamine response is probably common to all listeners. Previous research has hinted at a link between dopamine and musical enjoyment, notes Harvard neurologist Gottfried Schlaug, who was not involved in the new finding, but the McGill study “really nails it.”

Anxiety? Banish the thought

So many Americans suffer from anxiety and depression that antidepressants like Prozac and Zoloft have become household terms. But new research suggests that mindfulness therapy—a meditation-based treatment with roots in Buddhism and yoga—can help people with mood disorders feel better without drugs. “I was skeptical at first,” Stefan Hofmann, a psychology professor at Boston University, tells the Los Angeles Times. “I wondered, ‘Why on earth should this work?’” Yet after reviewing 39 studies on the practice involving 1,140 patients, Hofmann’s team concluded that mindfulness therapy relieved anxiety and improved mood; another study published last month found the treatment is as effective as antidepressants at preventing relapses of depression. It doesn’t work for everyone, but experts have found that training patients to observe their own immediate thoughts can often loosen the grip emotions have on their minds—MRI scans of patients’ brains display shifts in mental activity. Jordan Elliott, a 26-year-old marketer, began mindfulness therapy for debilitating anxiety four years ago; he now meditates for 10 minutes each morning and has stopped taking Prozac. “When a negative thought pops off in my head,” he says, “I say to myself, ‘There’s a thought. And feelings aren’t facts.’”

The oldest vintage

Archaeologists working in Armenia have unearthed the oldest wine-production facility ever found. Science Daily reports that the 6,100-year-old site, located in the same cave complex where researchers found a 5,500-year-old moccasin last year, included a wine press, a clay vat for fermentation, a cup, storage jars, and withered vines. The discovery is a thousand years older than the earliest comparable collection of wine-making remains, found in Egypt in the 1980s. Among the Armenian finds is a shallow, 3-foot-wide basin where people likely “were stomping the grapes with their feet, just the way it was done all over the Mediterranean and the way it was originally done in California,” says study co-director Gregory Areshian, an archaeologist at UCLA. The team also found seeds of the same domesticated grape subspecies—Vitis vinifera vinifera—used to make wine today. Dozens of graves near the site led researchers to suspect that the beverage was reserved for ceremonies, says Areshian. “This wine wasn’t used to unwind at the end of the day.”