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A scorched alien planet is flying so close to its parent star that its atmosphere is being swept off it in a glowing tail like some sort of giant comet, NASA announced Thursday. The existence of the planet and its strange tail, which was suggested in previous studies, was confirmed recently by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. These new observations of the gas giant planet, called HD 209458b, suggest strong winds from its nearby star are blowing the atmosphere off the scorched world and shaping it into a comet-like tail. "Since 2003 scientists have theorized the lost mass is being pushed...

Last night I took a sickening trip into the Alternative Progressive Universe that is MSNBC and settled in to the orbit of Planet Olbermann with its toxic and hate-filled atmosphere. If you ever have the chance to visit Planet Olbermann on any given night, you have to suspend all rational thoughts or beliefs on this mostly dead planet. Olbermann sought to boost his argument that Israel’s boarding of a so-called Peace Flotilla was somehow illegal and to support this, he brought on a satellite (Carter-Era Ambassador), Edward Peck. In falling within the gravitational pull of Planet Olbermann, Peck said that...

NEW YORK (AFP) – The planet is overheating, under-resourced, and almost out of time, but technical innovation and green economics could save the world, experts and leaders Thursday told an international conference here. Video-linked panels in New York, Monaco, Mexico City, Beijing, London, Nairobi and New Delhi painted an alarming picture of global poverty and environmental degradation. They called on the United States and other rich countries to show leadership, for example by investing in carbon capture technology and other long-term methods of reducing greenhouse gasses. But developing countries, where pollution is growing rapidly, can also play a big role...

It's easy to lose track of how long your shower's getting--especially when it's 10 degrees out and the only thing that roused you from bed was the vision of a steamy cascade of water. Well, Waterpebble is here to guilt you out of your wasteful ways. The little round device monitors water going down the drain. It records the length of your first Waterpebble shower and uses that as a benchmark, then indicating via a series of gently flashing "traffic lights" when you need to get out of the shower already! Green tells you to start showering, amber means you're...

Iceberg AheadClimate scientists who play fast and loose with the facts are imperiling not just their profession but the planet. By Fred Guterl | NEWSWEEK Published Feb 19, 2010 One of the most impressive visuals in Al Gore's now famous slide show on global warming is a graph known as the "hockey stick." It shows temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rising slowly for most of the last thousand years and turning steeply upward in the last half of the 20th century. As evidence of the alarming rate of global warming, it tells a simple and compelling story. That's one reason...

(CNN) -- Astronomers announced this week they found a water-rich and relatively nearby planet that's similar in size to Earth. While the planet probably has too thick of an atmosphere and is too hot to support life similar to that found on Earth, the discovery is being heralded as a major breakthrough in humanity's search for life on other planets. "The big excitement is that we have found a watery world orbiting a very nearby and very small star," said David Charbonneau, a Harvard professor of astronomy and lead author of an article on the discovery, which appeared this...

GOP cautions Obama against climate commitmentThe Associated Press Friday, December 04, 2009 WASHINGTON — Even as he prepares to argue for action at the international climate conference, President Barack Obama is getting some reminders of the domestic political divide — and anxiety — over climate change. Twenty congressional Republicans, including the top House GOP leadership, sent a letter to the president Friday expressing their "grave concern" that the U.S. delegation might commit to mandatory greenhouse gas emissions reductions. "Only a treaty ratified by the United States Senate or legislation agreed to by Congress may commit our nation to any mandatory...

<p>WASHINGTON – Astronomers have found 32 new planets outside our solar system, adding evidence to the theory that the universe has many places where life could develop.</p> <p>Scientists using European Southern Observatory telescopes didn't find any planets quite the size of Earth or any that seemed habitable or even unusual. But their announcement increased the number of planets discovered outside the solar system to more than 400.</p>

WASHINGTON — Astronomers have found what appears to be a gigantic suicidal planet. The odd, fiery planet is so close to its star and so large that it is triggering tremendous plasma tides on the star. Those powerful tides are in turn warping the planet's zippy less-than-a-day orbit around its star. The result: an ever-closer tango of death, with the planet eventually spiraling into the star. It is a slow death. The planet WASP-18b has maybe a million years to live, said planet discoverer Coel Hellier, a professor of astrophysics at Keele University in England. Hellier's report on the suicidal...

We could find planets in other galaxies using today's technology, according to a new simulation. The study gives credence to a tentative detection of a planet in Andromeda, our nearest large galactic neighbour. The idea is to use gravitational microlensing, in which a distant source star is briefly magnified by the gravity of an object passing in front of it. This technique has already found several planets in our galaxy, out to distances of thousands of light years. Extending the method from thousands to millions of light years won't be easy, says Philippe Jetzer of the University of Zürich in...

A collision of Earth with Mercury, Mars or Venus possible in distant future.

HATFIELD, England – In the search for Earth-like planets, astronomers zeroed in Tuesday on two places that look awfully familiar to home. One is close to the right size. The other is in the right place. European researchers said they not only found the smallest exoplanet ever, called Gliese 581 e, but realized that a neighboring planet discovered earlier, Gliese 581 d, was in the prime habitable zone for potential life. "The Holy Grail of current exoplanet research is the detection of a rocky, Earth-like planet in the 'habitable zone,'" said Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist at Geneva University in Switzerland....

HATFIELD, England – In the search for Earth-like planets, astronomers zeroed in Tuesday on two places that look awfully familiar to home. One is close to the right size. The other is in the right place. European researchers said they not only found the smallest exoplanet ever, called Gliese 581 e, but realized that a neighboring planet discovered earlier, Gliese 581 d, was in the prime habitable zone for potential life. ... An American expert called the discovery of the tiny planet "extraordinary."

How kangaroo burgers could save the planet25 December 2008 by Bijal Trivedi COWS, sheep and goats may seem like innocent victims of humanity's appetite for meat, but when it comes to climate change they have a dark secret. Forget cars, planes or even power stations, some of the world's worst greenhouse gas emitters wander idly across rolling pastures chewing the cud, oblivious to the fact that their continuous belching (and to a lesser degree, farting) is warming the planet. Take New Zealand, where 34.2 million sheep, 9.7 million cattle, 1.4 million deer and 155,000 goats emit 48 per cent of...

Something else for Al Gore to worry aboutDecember 19, 2008 letter to the editor I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but I have detected a new crisis that I have named "the daylight change crisis". I first noticed it sometime around the end of June this year. I started paying attention and created computer models and sure enough I was right! We are losing daylight at an astonishing rate. Each day we are losing approximately 2 minutes of day light and my computer models predict total darkness by next July. I have been able to detect this phenomenon...

<p>NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Snow is falling in the New Orleans area.</p> <p>The National Weather Service says a mixture of sleet and snow is falling Thursday morning from Baton Rouge east across much of southeastern Louisiana.</p> <p>The winter weather closed some schools and created hazardous driving conditions.</p>

WASHINGTON (AFP) – NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered both carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide in the atmosphere of a distant planet, in a key step for finding extraterrestrial life, the space agency said Tuesday. Detecting organic compounds that can be a by-product of life processes on an Earth-like body could one day "provide the first evidence of life beyond our planet," NASA said in a statement. The discovery was made on a Jupiter-size planet 63 light years away from Earth that is too hot for life, and is all gas and liquid. "We're not closer to discovering life on...

Planets circle the stars that dot the heavens. Before 1995, we couldn’t have said that with any certainty. Now we know of more than 300 planets orbiting distant stars, and we have a fleet of telescopes looking for them. The ultimate goal is to find another Earth orbiting a star like the Sun, but the quest on the way to that Holy Grail has yielded some strange benchmarks. CoRoT-exo3b, a dense planet orbiting another star COROT-exo-3b compared to Jupiter Meet the planet COROT-exo-3b. It orbits a star slightly larger, hotter, and brighter than the Sun. The star is not an...

Britons should be subjected to random carbon spotchecks and intensive surveillance of their diets, transport and waste disposal habits, says the Government's architecture and design quango in a new report today. The word "monitoring" occurs 19 times in the 32-page publication by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). If the proposals in the report What Makes An Eco Town?are implemented few aspects of life will go unrecorded. CABE says the strict monitoring is needed to ensure the carbon footprint of the eco-town dwellers remains at one-third of the British average, which is the requirement for what's called...