When is exoplanet news “juicy”? Yesterday at a Kepler press conference held at NASA Ames, Roger Hunter, Kepler project manager, introduced the proceedings as juicy. And as three scientists presented the findings, it turned out to be a good adjective. The researchers believe they have discovered the first water worlds (besides Earth) in our galaxy.

Two systems are providing new evidence of rocky Earth-like planets in the habitable zone—the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water. Kepler 62 has five planets total, but two of those, 62e and 62f, orbit inside the habitable zone. Kepler 69 has two planets but only one in the habitable zone, 69c.

For exoplanets and their stars, size matters when it comes to habitability. At 1,200 light years away, the star Kepler 62 is two-thirds the size of our Sun. That brings the habitable zone in a bit closer to the star. The two planets of interest, 62e and 62f, are 1.6 and 1.4 times the diameter of Earth, respectively. This also puts them in the “just-right” size for habitability.

At the press conference, William Borucki, Kepler science principal investigator at NASA Ames, said that 62e and 62f “are the best candidates to be habitable, not just within the habitable zone.”

Computer models suggest that the largest rocky planets will have a diameter no greater than 1.5 times that of Earth’s, explained Lisa Kaltenegger of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. And a planet’s mass, between 1.2-2.5 times Earth’s mass, can be an indicator for liquid water. While Kepler 62e and 62f are too small to measure their mass, Kaltenegger and her team’s modeling makes these planets very wet, indeed.

Kepler 69c, on the other hand, is 2,700 light years away and 1.5 times Earth’s diameter. It orbits near the inner, hotter edge of its star’s habitable zone. Thomas Barclay, Kepler scientist from the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute, likens it to a super Venus, rather than a super Earth. “We don’t have anything like it in our solar system,” he said.

“The Kepler spacecraft has certainly turned out to be a rock star of science,” said John Grunsfeld, at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The discovery of these rocky planets in the habitable zone brings us a bit closer to finding a place like home. It is only a matter of time before we know if the galaxy is home to a multitude of planets like Earth, or if we are a rarity.”

The findings are published this week in Science (Kepler 62) and the Astrophysical Journal (Kepler 69).

For an interactive on Kepler’s planetary discoveries and their orbits, click here.

Image: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech

When is an exoplanet not an exoplanet? When it’s a white dwarf, of course. Well, at least in the case of KOI-256 (Kepler Object of Interest, number 256).

NASA’s amazing exoplanet hunter, the space-based Kepler mission, spotted an object transiting the red dwarf star, KOI-256, using its standard technique—as the object passes in front of its star, Kepler detects a decrease in the star’s light.

But something looked different about this star. In addition to the dip in brightness from the transiting object, the star’s brightness seemed to vary in a way that suggested it was behaving quite oddly. So Phil Muirhead, of the California Institute of Technology, began to explore further.

Muirhead and colleagues first used a ground-based telescope to get another look. Measuring the star’s radial velocity, they discovered that the red dwarf was wobbling around like a spinning top. Because of this, the scientists suspected the object wasn’t an exoplanet after all, but something much more massive—likely a white dwarf.

A white dwarf is essentially what a dead star leaves behind—a hot cinder, incredibly massive for its size. It “weighs” a lot more than an exoplanet, so Muirhead needed to figure out how much mass exists in the KOI-256 system.

To measure the combined mass of the two objects in the binary pair, the researchers used a technique called gravitational lensing: one of the consequences of Einstein’s general theory of relativity is that gravity bends light, so scientists use gravitational lensing to figure out how much mass is bending (or lensing) light from more distant sources. And while the technique has been utilized to measure the mass of galaxies, it’s the first time it has been used to “weigh” a binary star system. Since we know the approximate mass of a red dwarf, we can then estimate the mass of the companion, which indeed turns out to be a white dwarf.

“This white dwarf is about the size of Earth but [with] the mass of the Sun,” says Muirhead. “It’s so hefty that the red dwarf, though larger in physical size, is circling around the white dwarf.”

The red dwarf orbits the white dwarf in just 1.4 days. This orbital period is so short that at an earlier time the stars must have previously undergone a “common-envelope” phase in which the red dwarf orbited within the outer layers of its companion star—a giant star that eventually died and left behind the white dwarf we see today.

The short orbital period also means the red dwarf’s days are numbered. In a few billion years, the intense gravity of the white dwarf will strip material off the red dwarf, forming a hot accretion disk of in-falling material around the white dwarf.

New Scientist offers an animation of the two stars currently in action (with a rockin’ soundtrack). The research is published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

It was a weekend full of aliens and black hole theories at the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara, California. Scientists, professors, artists, authors, and science enthusiasts gathered for SETIcon II, a conference organized by the SETI Institute to learn about and celebrate recent developments in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

The conference consisted of a series of panels discussing everything from potential asteroid resources to Hollywood Sci-Fi movies.

Each discussion had a diverse set of panelists that complimented each other—each speaker with a different background, adding different perspectives to each panel. For example, in a panel titled “Black Holes in Space—Hearts of Darkness”, Robert J. Sawyer, Andre Bormanis, Alex Filippenko, and Leonard Mlodinow discussed theories about black holes while also calling upon movies and books to identify and clarify any misconceptions.

Alex Filippenko, Seth Shostak, Richard Rhodes, and Marc Okrand even discussed religion (with much sensitivity… especially because SETI has been accused of being a religion) during the “Did the Big Bang Require a Divine Spark?” panel.

The panelists Cynthia B. Phillips, Mark R. Showalter, and Charles Lindsay informed the audience about planetary art in “The Magnificence and Majesty of the Outer Solar System” while a slideshow of the artfully embellished planets played in the background.

In addition to the regular excitement about science, the conference was heavily fueled by Kepler’s recent success. The Kepler telescope is currently looking for planets in the habitable zone, because these planets are likely to be more earth-like and therefore more likely to be suitable for life.

The telescope has already found over 2,000 transiting planets, an abundance that led NASA to approve the extension of the Kepler mission until 2016. The panelists could not hide their enthusiasm: such success in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is worthy of celebration.

The conference also included an evening honoring Jill Tarter, director of the search for intelligent life and inspiration for Jodie Foster’s role in the movie, “Contact”.

Whether a Battlestar Galactica enthusiast or a NASA researcher, it was truly a conference for everyone.

Alyssa Keimach is an astronomy and astrophysics student at the University of Michigan and volunteers for the Morrison Planetarium.

The third Thursday of every month, the Morrison Planetarium hosts “Universe Update” at the 6:30 planetarium show during NightLife. I select my favorite astronomy stories from the past month, and I give a brief run-down of current discoveries while taking audiences on a guided tour of the Universe. As you may or may not know, the planetarium sports a three-dimensional atlas of the Universe, so we can take you places virtually while talking about the latest astronomy news.

I always start at Earth and work my way out to cosmological distances, so I’ll list the news stories in the same order—from closest to farthest from home.

Fourth graders from the Emily Dickinson Elementary School in Bozeman, Montana, proved themselves more creative than NASA engineers! Crazy rocket scientists named their two lunar-orbiting spacecraft “GRAIL-A” and “GRAIL-B” (where, of course, “GRAIL” is an acronym, which stands for “Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory”). The elementary school students selected the names “Ebb” and “Flow,” which NASA selected as the winning contribution in a nationwide contest. The GRAIL mission measures the ebb and flow of gravity, in a sense, as the two spacecraft orbit the Moon and measure variations in its gravitational pull. From the GRAIL website:

As they fly over areas of greater and lesser gravity, caused both by visible features such as mountains and craters and by masses hidden beneath the lunar surface, they will move slightly toward and away from each other. An instrument aboard each spacecraft will measure the changes in their relative velocity very precisely, and scientists will translate this information into a high-resolution map of the Moon’s gravitational field.

A little farther from home, new reports from a comet impact on the Sun that took place last July. We like to describe comets as “dirty snowballs,” and as you might imagine, a comet getting too close to the Sun stands a snow ball’s chance in… Well, a million-degree plasma irradiated by incident solar flux. The comet evaporated over a period of about 20 minutes, and as described in a paper that appears in today’s Science magazine, it probably measured between 150 and 300 feet across and had a mass equivalent to an aircraft carrier. According to Karel Schrijver, a solar scientist at Lockheed Martin in Palo Alto, the comet moved speedily to its demise: “It was moving along at almost 400 miles per second through the intense heat of the Sun—and was literally being evaporated away.”

A fair bit farther from the scorching heat of the Sun, the Dawn spacecraft is sending back gorgeous images of the asteroid Vesta, including this gorgeous snapshot of a crater on the asteroid’s surface. Dawn has entered a low-altitude orbit that gives it a close look at the potato-shaped planetoid. Learning more about such objects should help us better understand the formation of the solar system, and after its stay at Vesta, Dawn will move on to Ceres, the dwarf planet (like Pluto) that resides between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Beyond our own solar system, of course, we are rapidly discovering planets in orbit around other stars: these extrasolar planets (or exoplanets) now number in excess of 700, and astronomers find more all the time.

As I described in one of my updates from the American Astronomical Society meeting last week, astronomers have announced the discovery of the most compact extrasolar planetary system yet detected. Looking at the KOI 961 system side-by-side with Jupiter and its major satellites strikes me as a particularly illuminating comparison: only 70% larger than Jupiter, the host star (the smallest known to have planets) has at least three planets (the smallest yet found) in orbit around it, the smallest of which is about the size of Mars. John Johnson, an astronomer at Caltech, announced the superlative system last week, and on April 2nd, he will give a talk in the Morrison Planetarium as part of our Benjamin Dean Lecture Series, “The Quest for Habitable Planets Orbiting Red Dwarfs.”

And astronomers have help in their search. Just this week, we had a glimpse into the democratization of astronomy… Viewers of a British television program(me) may have discovered a new exoplanet! Evidence from the Kepler mission suggests the existence of a Neptune-sized planet around the star SPH10066540, orbiting every 90 days at a distance equivalent to Mercury from our Sun. The discovery awaits confirmation, but you don’t have to watch telly in the U.K. to join in the search for such objects. You can go to the PlanetHunters website and start sifting through Kepler data in hopes of finding a planet of your own…

In another of my posts last week, I mentioned the spectacular new Spitzer image of Cygnus X, a massive star-forming region in the constellation (you guessed it) Cygnus. Ten times the size of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, Cygnus X appears to host some 26,000 possible young stellar objects, according to an announcement last week.

Moving farther from home, I talked a bit about the new dark matter map that I previously described in a post from Austin. It turns out that analyzing the light from 10 million galaxies call tell you a lot about where dark matter resides, and since dark matter drives the formation of much of the structure in the Universe, that knowledge helps us understand more about the evolution of the cosmos…

The dark matter maps tell one part of the story, but we also rely on studies of the cosmic microwave background to tease out how the Universe has evolved over time. Since 2003, the gold standard of such measurements have come from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). But ESA’s Planck mission recently completed its survey of the cosmic microwave background: the sensor used to make the observations ran out of its coolant a little less than a week ago. It had collected more than two years’ worth of data, however, and the first new high-resolution maps will be released early next year. (Hey! It takes a while to process all that data.)

That’s all for now. Check back for next month’s update! Or come to NightLife on Thursday, 15 February, and check out “Universe Update” live in the Morrison Planetarium.

Ryan Wyatt is the director of the Morrison Planetarium and Science Visualization at the California Academy of Sciences.

Image: SOHO (ESA & NASA)

Reporting from day three of the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas…

As you almost certainly already know, astronomers have found many, many planets in orbit around stars other than the Sun. My iPhone app tells me there are 725 such known extrasolar planets or “exoplanets.” With that many objects to study, and new ones being discovered like clockwork, astronomers have started to characterize different kinds of planets and planetary systems.

One nagging (well, intriguing) question is how many planets exist. Exoplanets certainly seem to be plentiful, but how plentiful, exactly? One of today’s announcements makes a bold claim:

Our Milky Way galaxy contains a minimum of 100 billion planets according to a detailed statistical study based on the detection of three extrasolar planets by an observational technique called microlensing. … [Our] galaxy contains a minimum of one planet for every star on average. This means that there is likely to be a minimum of 1,500 planets within just 50 light-years of Earth.

Well, okay, that’s exciting, and very possibly true, but note that phrase, “based on the detection of three extrasolar planets.” I like statistics as much as the next person, but a large gulf separates the numbers three and 100 billion. Looking at the abstract (brief summary) of the article online, I would draw attention to the uncertainty in the numbers they present—for example, they estimate that the percentage of stars with “super-Earths” (planets five to ten times as massive as Earth) effectively lies between 25% and 97%. That’s quite a range!

William Welsh, of San Diego State University, announced two new planets discovered by the Kepler mission, creatively named Kepler-34b and Kepler-35b. He described the planets as “fluffy Saturns,” far bigger than Earth and too close to their parent stars for liquid water to exist on their surfaces (well, if they have surfaces, cf. that “fluffy” descriptor). What makes them special? They both revolve around binary stars: in other words, each planet orbits two stars, which in turn revolve around one another.

Previously, the planet Kepler-16b had made news as “the real Tatooine” (at least that’s how we described it on Science Today back in September), making reference to the Skywalker clan’s home planet in Star Wars. So now we know of three such examples—a “new class of planetary systems,” in Welsh’s words—and astronomers expect to find many more.

Another Kepler announcement came from John Johnson at Caltech. Working with publicly available data, his team discovered an unusual little collection of planets: the smallest planets yet detected (all smaller than Earth, with the smallest about the size of Mars, the most compact system of planets ever discovered, and the least massive star known to harbor a planet (a red dwarf). A lot of firsts! Because the discoveries don’t come from the official Kepler team, they are designated KOI 961.03, KOI 961.02, and KOI 961.01 (where “KOI” stands for “Kepler Object of Interest”).

BTW, the parent star KOI 961 is only 70% larger than Jupiter, and indeed, the planets orbit the star in distances similar to the Jupiter system… So personally, I like the diagram that compares the system to Jupiter and its moons.

Johnson also fired off one of the better quips at the meeting: “transiting planets are like cockroaches—if you see one, you know there are others [you’re not seeing].” The reason? A planet only appears to transit its parent star from a particular vantage point, which means that for every one we observe to transit, there are presumably many more that we don’t see because the geometry isn’t quite right.

Also, on April 2nd, Johnson will speak at the Academy’s Morrison Planetarium as part of our Benjamin Dean Lecture Series. His talk, “The Quest for Habitable Planets Orbiting Red Dwarfs,” will give attendees an opportunity to learn more about KOI 961—as well as more exciting results to come!

Ryan Wyatt is the director of the Morrison Planetarium and Science Visualization at the California Academy of Sciences.

The “awwww, how cute” part of this article

We couldn’t pass this article by—river turtle embryos that communicate with each other to coordinate when they hatch! The research, published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, demonstrates that Murray River turtles speed up to catch up with their faster developing siblings. Wired UK reports:

Achieving this synchronicity isn’t easy. Although the eggs are always laid at the same time in the same nest, those at the top of the nest near the sun-drenched soil develop much faster than those buried deeper in the cooler soil. However, Murray River turtles are able to tell whether their fellow hatchlings are more or less advanced and adapt their pace of development accordingly, allowing the slow-coaches to play catch-up.

The study authors are still unsure how and why the turtle embryos do this. Stay tuned…

Just as cute are photos of developing Anolis lizards on New Scientist. Researchers hope that images like these will help us understand more about vertebrate development.

Our favorite traveling worm, C. elegens

This week, Universe Today noted that the worm Caenorhabditis elegans (or C. elegans) could be the first earthling to Mars. C. elegens is no stranger to space travel, its traveled a few times on various space shuttle missions. They do well in space, developing and reproducing normally. So how about deep space travel? Universe Today says lucky worms, but there is a broader purpose:

Similar biologically to humans in some ways, they are being studied by scientists at the University of Nottingham in the UK to help see how people are affected by long-duration space travel.

Kepler 21-b

Might this be C. elegens’ destination after Mars? Not likely. The latest confirmed exoplanet is 350 light years (2000 trillion miles) away and hot, hot, hot! It orbits its parent star much closer than Mercury orbits the Sun, but it is Earth-like in its size and mass. So what makes this one so special? We’re getting closer, says Discover’s Bad Astronomer:

this is an amazing detection; the planet is pretty small, very far away, and its parent star very luminous. These all combine to make this a tough world to detect, but that goes to show you: we’re getting really good at this sort of thing.

How long before we find another Earth this way? I’m guessing not very long. A few years at most. If they’re out there, they can’t hide forever.

Locally, NASA Ames is holding the first Kepler conference next week, with more exoplanet discoveries to be discussed. If you’re in the area, try and catch their public talk on Tuesday evening, should be most exciting!

Image: Judy Cebra-Thomas and Scott Gilbert/Swarthmore College/NSF

Unlike Star Wars’ Tatooine, the planet is cold, gaseous and not thought capable of harboring life, but its discovery demonstrates the diversity of planets in our galaxy. Previous research has hinted at the existence of circumbinary planets, but clear confirmation proved elusive.

The new planet is in the Kepler-16 system, which is home to a pair of orbiting stars that eclipse each other from our vantage point on Earth. ScienceNOW has a video of the orbiting stars and further describes them:

They are about 1.5 and 4.5 times smaller than our own sun, and they orbit each other every 41 days, causing brightness dips that have been detected by the Kepler space telescope. Kepler also spied additional dips, produced when a Saturn-sized planet transits across the stars every 229 days.

The gravitational tug on the stars, measured by changes in their eclipse times, was a good indicator of the mass of the third body. Only a very slight gravitational pull was detected, one that only could be caused by a small mass. The findings are described in a new study published last week in the journal Science.

Science News reports how and where we can see the system:

Kepler-16 is visible in the night sky in the constellation Cygnus. Near the swan’s western wingtip are three stars, and the Kepler-16 stars are nearest the middle of the three, visible with binoculars… Next year, Kepler-16b’s transit will cause a 1.7 percent drop in the brightness of the bigger star, which will be visible in parts of Asia to amateur astronomers with telescopes.

Kepler-16b is an inhospitable, cold world about the size of Saturn and thought to be made up of about half rock and half gas. The planet lies outside the system’s habitable zone, which is a defined distance from the stars where liquid water could exist on the surface.

Visual effects supervisor John Knoll of Industrial Light & Magic, a division of Lucasfilm Ltd., the creators of Tatooine, commented about the discovery at a NASA press conference. “Working in film, we often are tasked with creating something never before seen. However, more often than not, scientific discoveries prove to be more spectacular than anything we dare imagine. There is no doubt these discoveries influence and inspire storytellers. Their very existence serves as cause to dream bigger and open our minds to new possibilities beyond what we think we know.”

The news of Kepler-16b was also announced as part of the Extreme Solar Systems (ESS) II conference held in Grand Teton National Park last week. For other news from the conference, click here and here. And for more images of these other worlds, visit this Wired article.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle

A new analysis of data from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft reveals that beneath the surface of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io is an “ocean” of molten or partially molten magma. The magma ocean layer appears to be more than 30 miles thick, making up at least 10 percent of the moon’s mantle by volume. The blistering temperature of the magma ocean probably exceeds 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit (1,200 degrees Celsius). Hotcha!

NASA’s Voyager spacecraft discovered Io’s volcanoes in 1979 and they are the only known active magma volcanoes in the solar system other than those on Earth. The energy for the volcanic activity comes from the squeezing and stretching of the moon by Jupiter’s gravity as Io orbits the immense planet, the largest in the solar system.

Even though the magnetic-field data was taken from Galileo fly-bys of Io in October 1999 and February 2000, it took awhile to detect this magma layer. ScienceInsider reports that

high-flying volcanic debris frustrated space physicists’ attempts to use Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field as a probe of Io’s interior.

The current analysis, over ten years in the making, was published in this week’s edition of Science.

From a hot ocean to hot Jupiters…  Hot Jupiters describe large gaseous exoplanets that orbit very close to their parent star. Some of these hot Jupiters are just plain crazy weird, say scientists, because they orbit their star in the opposite direction.

“That’s really weird, and it’s even weirder because the planet is so close to the star,” said Frederic A. Rasio, a theoretical astrophysicist at Northwestern University. “How can one be spinning one way and the other orbiting exactly the other way? It’s crazy. It so obviously violates our most basic picture of planet and star formation.”

When scientists find something weird and crazy, they investigate. And that’s just what Rasio and his colleagues did. Using large-scale computer simulations, they are the first to model how a hot Jupiter’s orbit can flip and go in the direction opposite to the star’s spin. Gravitational perturbations by a much more distant planet result in the hot Jupiter having both a “wrong way” and a very close orbit, according to their research, published this week in Nature.

In other exoplanet news… The Kepler mission’s primary goal is to find Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars, and now you can help find them, too! UC Berkeley astronomers aimed a radio telescope in the direction of Kepler’s most Earth-like candidates last weekend. Once they acquire data on a total of 86 Earth-like planets, they’ll initiate a coarse analysis and then, in about two months, ask an estimated 1 million SETI@home users to conduct a more detailed analysis on their home computers. Join SETI@home or learn more information about the project here.

Io image: NASA/JPL/University of Michigan/UCLA

Earth

The Gulf oil spill—the number of gallons spilled and the controversy surrounding the damage seems to top many lists this year. Nature even named Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, its newsmaker of the year for how she handled the crisis.

Natural disasters often took the front page in 2010 with the Haitian earthquake and the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull topping many lists. The hard-to-pronounce Icelandic volcano also made many of the best science images of the year lists.

DiscoveryNews ends the year on a positive note with “How Humans Helped the Earth in 2010,” a slide show with text concerning recent strides in alternative energy, species and habitat conservation efforts and individual efforts to go green (electric cars, white roofs and saving energy).

For more environmental news of the year, New Scientist’s Short Sharp Science has a great review and the Nature Conservancy has a best/worst list on its site.

Life

Teeny, modified life stole the spotlight this year—the J. Craig Venter Institute’s so-called “synthetic cell” and GFAJ-1—the bacteria that incorporates arsenic into its DNA—or so NASA scientists claimed.  Science writer Carl Zimmer discredited the arsenic bacteria paper on Slate; NASA author Felisa Wolfe-Simon defended herself in Science. Fun stuff!

The spread of pesky bedbugs was number six in Discover’s “Top 100 Science Stories of 2010.”

Nature’s great article this past summer on eradicating mosquitoes was among its readers’ top choices of the year.

Looking for something a little bigger and less controversial? New Scientist has “The coolest animals of 2010,” which includes a scorpion-eating bat and a fly thought to be extinct for over 160 years!

NPR found it was a very good year for Neanderthals—their genome was sequenced, brain examined and diet expanded.

Remarkably, the Census of Marine Life tops the BP oil spill in the Deep Type Flow blog’s biggest marine science stories of the year for its sheer numbers:

…over 500 research expeditions covering every ocean, over 2,500 scientists and the discovery of over 6,000 species new to science and published in over 2600 peer-reviewed papers.

Space

ScienceNow’s most popular story of all time, not just 2010, was “Does Our Universe Live Inside a Wormhole?” A wonderful theory that we also covered last spring.

Exoplanets, in part thanks to the Kepler mission, were all over the news this year—whether it had to do with size, atmosphere or number within a star system. Discover’s interview with local exoplanet hunter (and California Academy of Sciences Fellow) Geoff Marcy made number 11(!) on their 100 top stories list.

A little closer to home, Jupiter’s missing stripe and Neptune’s tale of cannibalism are included in New Scientist’s most popular space stories of 2010.

Our Moon and Saturn’s moons made news throughout the year and the top lists on Universe Today and Wired this week.

Universe Today also included SDO’s new views of the sun in their top stories list. Stunning!

Hubble celebrated its 20^th year in space this year by taking even more beautiful images. Several are included in Bad Astronomy’s “Top 14 Astronomy Pictures of 2010.”

Technology

Electric cars and NASA’s new foray into commercial spacecraft are included in Scientific American’s top ten stories of the year.

The Large Hadron Collider was very busy this year, and topped many lists. Another machine at CERN made news (and also topped Nature’s readers’ choice list) when it was able to capture antimatter for a sixth of a second!

Graphene not only garnered a Nobel Prize this year, the material (and it’s potential) also made news and top science lists of the year.

DiscoveryNews put plastics on their 2010 list—whether its finding new ways of removing plastic from the oceans or engineering smarter plastics.

What was your favorite science story of the year? Share with us by adding it to the comment section below!

Image by Les Stone, International Bird Rescue Research Center/Wikipedia