New Earth-sized planet found

Astronomers have found a planet only an astronomical stone's throw away, at four light years, raising the chances that there is a habitable planet orbiting in Earth's neighbourhood.

Researchers say the newly discovered planet is too close to its sun to support known forms of life - it has a surface temperature estimated at 1200C. But previous studies suggest that when one planet is discovered orbiting a sun there are usually others in the same system.

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The Earth-sized planet, the discovery of which was announced by Stephane Udry and Xavier Dumusque, of the Geneva Observatory, orbits one of the suns in the three-star Centauri system, roughly 40 trillion kilometres away.

Read more: Times Live

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Dinosaur flatulence may have warmed Earth

In a major new climate finding, researchers have calculated that dinosaur flatulence could have put enough methane into the atmosphere to warm the planet during the hot, wet Mesozoic era.

Like gigantic, long-necked, prehistoric cows, sauropod dinosaurs roamed widely around the Earth 150 million years ago, scientists reported in the journal Current Biology on Monday.

And just like big cows, their plant digestion was aided by methane-producing microbes.

“A simple mathematical model suggests that the microbes living in sauropod dinosaurs may have produced enough methane to have an important effect on the Mesozoic climate,” researcher Dave Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University said in a statement.

Read details: Express Tribune

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Earth's "Heartbeat" detected from space

Space 30 Nov

It may sound strange - and so it did to scientists, fr they too for the first time, detected earth's heartbeat from space, a phenomena called the Schumann resonance. 

What has been discovered is that "Lightning flashes in the skies above the Earth about 50 times every second, creating a burst of electromagnetic waves that circle around the planet's atmosphere. Some of these waves combine and increase in strength, creating something akin to an atmospheric heartbeat that scientists can detect from the ground and use to better understand the makeup of the atmosphere and the weather it generates."

This detection was surprising because the resonance was thought to be confined to a particular region of the atmosphere, between the ground and a layer of Earth's atmosphere called the ionosphere.

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