Star Friendly Lamps

Summary: For those of us who love to look at the stars in the night sky, we often are disappointed by the limited amount of starts we can see due to the light pollution cause by city lights. Researchers have now realized what I would have thought to be blindingly obvious, conventional streetlamps need to be altered. If you look at a typical street lamp you will notice that, not only does it not light some of the street below it leaving dark spots on the road, it also lights up the sky around it. Until we get hovercrafts, this is pointless. Researchers have now realized that they can instead use LED lights to build streetlamps. Using some Aluminum, the light rays can be focused to shine entirely on the street with minimal light polluting our beautiful night sky. These researchers do not have a prototype yet so we will be waiting a while for these better street lamps, but some progress is better than no progress.


BBC News: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22292129

2 New Earths?

Summary: NASA scientists have found two new planets within the habitable zone of a star. These two planets, Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f, are the most earth-like so far. Though they are too far away to study closer with our current telescope technology, in the future we may be able to determine if these planets do indeed contain flowing water.


BBC News: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22200476

Curiosity and other updates

Summary: Curiosity has discovered that most of Mars's atmosphere has since departed into space. Scientists discovered this by looking at the chemical of argon. Argon reacts with very little so the only way the lighter isotopes will have given way to a majority of the heavier isotopes is by escaping into outer space. The article does not comment on what this means when trying to determine whether or not Mars ever had flowing water other than to say that scientists are still split.


BBC News: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22063337


Summary: The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) in the sky has made some observations that may give additional evidence to dark matter. Stay tuned.

BBC News: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22016504


Summary: The LHC is being upgraded so that is can find new particles. Not too much info at this moment.


BBC News: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21941666