audiovideodisco - Slashdot User

Submission + - "Most Earth-Like" Planet Gets Major Demotion (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by

audiovideodisco

on Tuesday March 08, 2011 @12:16PM

audiovideodisco writes: "Last month, the team behind NASA's Kepler planet-finding mission announced the discovery of the most Earth-like planetary candidate ever spotted: KOI 326.01, an approximately Earth-sized planet orbiting in in the habitable zone of its star. There was much excitement; one astrophysicist even calculated the value of the new planet as exactly $223,099.93. But when an innocent fact-checker's question sent one of the researchers back to look at some figures, she noticed that the star's brightness was listed incorrectly in a reference catalog, throwing the planet's properties into doubt. After jiggering the calculations, the Kepler team now says that KOI 326.01 is neither Earth-sized nor in the habitable zone, and may actually be orbiting a different star. The Kepler researcher says "We'(TM)re seeing the scientific method playing out in real time."

While this news is a bit of a downer, Kepler is just getting going, and it's expected to find many, many more Earth-like planets."

Submission + - "Argonaut" Octopus Sucks Air Into Shell as Ballast (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by audiovideodisco on Tuesday May 18, 2010 @07:51PM

audiovideodisco writes: Even among octopuses, the Argonaut must be one of the coolest. It gets its nickname—"paper nautilus"—from the fragile shell the female assembles around herself after mating with the tiny male (whose tentacle/penis breaks off and remains in the female). For millennia, people have wondered what the shell was for; Aristotle thought the octopus used it as a boat and its tentacles as oars and sails.

Now scientists who managed to study Argonauts in the wild confirm a different hypothesis: that the octopus sucks air into its shell and uses it for ballast as it weaves its way through the ocean like a tiny submarine. The researchers' beautiful video and photographs show just how the Argonaut pulls off this trick. The regular (non-paper) nautilus also uses its shell for ballast, but the distant relationship between it and all octopuses suggests this is a case of convergent evolution.

Submission + - Is Your IM Buddy Is Really a Computer? (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by

audiovideodisco

on Thursday March 26, 2009 @11:32AM

audiovideodisco writes: "Every year the Loebner Prize goes to the chatbot (and the corresponding human companion) that fares best on a Turing test administered by a panel of judges. DISCOVER talked to Kevin Warwick, the professor who runs the competition, to get pointers on how one would go about detecting a bot. While there are some general approaches you can use, nothing is foolproof — and asking about Sarah Palin can be downright deceptive. One judge concluded an interlocutor was a bot because it didn't recognize Palin's name... but it turned out the chatter was a French librarian who'd simply never heard of her."

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