NASA mission piles on the planets

By Alan Boyle

The science team for NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting mission nearly doubled their list of confirmed planets beyond our solar system in one fell swoop today, announcing the discovery of 26 planets spread among 11 star systems. Their sizes range from just a little bit bigger than Earth to super-Jupiter-size, but they’re all closer to their parent stars than Venus is to our own sun.

The accelerating pace of discovery is matched by the diversity seen in the worlds discovered so far, one of the Kepler mission’s co-investigators, Harvard astronomer Dimitar Sasselov, told me today.

“There is more diversity out there than our limited imaginations could come up with, which is good,” he said.

The $ 600 million Kepler mission, launched in 2009, now has a list of 61 confirmed planets, and another 2,326 planetary prospects……………. continues on msnbc.com

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Microwaves can be seen being blocked and scattered without (l), and “reconstructed” (r) with the cloak

Researchers have “cloaked” a three-dimensional object, making it invisible from all angles, for the first time.

However, the demonstration works only for waves in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

It uses a shell of what are known as plasmonic materials; they present a “photo negative” of the object being cloaked, effectively cancelling it out.

The idea, outlined in New Journal of Physics, could find first application in high-resolution microscopes.

Most of the high-profile invisibility cloaking efforts have focused on the engineering of “metamaterials” – modifying materials to have properties that cannot be found in nature.

The modifications allow metamaterials to guide and channel light in unusual ways – specifically, to make the light rays arrive as if they had not passed over or been reflected by a cloaked object.

Previous efforts that have made 3-D objects disa……………. continues on BBC News