Click here to view the embedded video.

Wow, the WISE spacecraft launched from Vandenberg AFB this morning.  I posted the video in case anybody who wanted to see it could.  I was busy trying to solve some stupid “crises” at work and missed it completely – the so called “crises” was some billing error that turned out to be nothing to do with me.

The launch was just the first mile stone for WISE, the second occurred  shortly after the spacecraft separated from rocket, it oriented itself so the solar panels could soak up the sunlight it will need for power.  Once that was complete, another 17 minutes passed and valves on the cryostat opened so the WISE instrument can cool down.

The WISE instrument must be colder than the objects it is observing and some of them can be very cold.  So they use….get this…hydrogen ICE (!!!) for the cooling.  Oh dear, we are looking at – 447 ^oF.  WOW!

On another note, did anybody get to see the meteor shower?  I am hearing it was very good.  It was raining here, yeah rain.  When the rain started the thermometer read 32 ^oF, not good, however we climbed to near 40 and right here so I am glad about that.  I am going to try and watch tonight, but I’m not real hopeful.

Those hoping to read Marian’s response to the riddle, you need only to wait a bit longer.  Don’t worry, it’s coming.

Video source

We should probably stop being amazed at the things octopuses can do and just accept that they’re just unfathomably cool (pun fully intended). Case in point: The veined octopus totes around coconut shells that it then hides in. Check out the footage, courtesy of Australia’s Museum Victoria:

In another video on YouTube that Ed Yong features in his post on Not Exactly Rocket Science, a coconut-clad octopus is strolling along the ocean floor on two tentacles and doing a pretty good job of disguising itself as a rolling coconut.

So what’s the big deal? Well, as Yong points out, the veined octopus uses the coconut shells as actual tools and is able to deploy them as needed. Unlike hermit crabs that live inside their body armor, the veined octopus only uses its armor when it senses danger. It’s able to seal itself inside a hollow coconut husk using its suckers to hold two halves of a shell in place.

Because it has the foresight to carry around the components of a make-shift panic room, this means the octopus is even smarter than originally believed. Scientists are now discovering that some marine invertebrates possess abilities once thought to be reserved for humans.

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Video: Museum Victoria

In the not too distant future, testing for certain cancers may be completed in less time than it takes to watch an episode of Scrubs. A new portable device, expected to be about the size of a paperback book, works by detecting biomarkers in the blood, substances that suggest that a patient is diseased. The sensor, which uses nanotechnology, is so accurate that it could pick up a grain of salt in a swimming pool, claim the researchers [Telegraph]. With just a small amount of blood and 20 minutes, doctors can have an electronic read out of biomarker concentrations at their fingertips. The research, led by Mark Reed at Yale University, may lead to quick, easy, and low-cost cancer tests.

Reed says the technology would be ideal for measuring lung cancer biomarkers in a phlegm sample, or colon or ovarian cancer biomarkers in a blood sample, making their technology the first to measure biomarkers from normal samples of bodily fluids. Previous technologies work in much the same way, but can only detect biomarkers in purified solutions, not the real thing — meaning fluid samples from patients [U.S. News and World Report]. The applications aren’t limited to cancer biomarker measurements; the researchers say they could also measure cardiovascular disease biomarkers in small blood samples. The scientists have published their research in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

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Image: Mark Reed / Yale University

Astronomers announced today the discovery of at least four — and as many as six — planets orbiting two nearby stars. These planets are relatively low mass, ranging from 5 to 25 times the mass of the Earth. For comparison, Jupiter is over 300 times more massive than the Earth, and Uranus 15 times our mass.

Three of these extrasolar planets orbit the nearby star 61 Virginis, which is only about 28 light years away (that’s a stone’s throw in galactic terms). 61 Vir has been a target for planet hunters for some time because it’s very much like our Sun: while it has slightly less mass and is a tad less bright, its temperature is almost the exactly the same as the Sun’s. It’s about 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than the Sun. It’s bright (easily visible to the unaided eye from a dark site), making it easy to study. It also has a very similar chemical composition as the Sun, which may be important in the planet-making business. And now we know it has planets! Little ones, too.

Here is a schematic of the system:

Inner planets in our solar system are shown with dotted lines, and the three 61 Vir planets as solid lines. As you can see, they all orbit closer than Earth does to the Sun, and the third one out has a fairly elliptical orbit. In order from their star, the planets have masses of approximately, 5, 18, and 24 times the Earth’s mass (they may be somewhat more depending on our viewing geometry, which is difficult to determine). They orbit 61 Vir in 4, 38, and 124 days respectively. While all of these are far more massive than the Earth, they represent big steps forward in finding more Earthlike planets, since they are in fact low mass compared to other planets found, and the outer one takes longer to orbit than usual as well.

Interestingly, recent Spitzer Space Telescope observations indicate a fairly hefty ring of dust around 61 Vir as well, at a distance of about twice the distance of Neptune from the Sun. This probably comes from collisions of comets and asteroids, meaning that this system 300 trillion kilometers away really does look a lot like our own solar system.

On top of that, another sunlike star, HD 1461, was found to have at least one planet orbiting it. The planet has about 7.5 times the Earth’s mass, and orbits close in, taking six days to circle the star once. There may be two other planets orbiting this star as well, but the signals from them are just a bit too weak to be sure.

All of these planets were found by analyzing the stars’ light and looking for a periodic Doppler shift. As a planet orbits its star, it in turn pulls the star around very slightly, and that can be seen as a teeny shift in the wavelength of the starlight. And by teeny, I mean really teeny; it’s only been the past 15 or so years that this method has been refined enough to yield results.

So this is very cool, and brings us another step closer to what we all really want to find: a terrestrial planet orbiting a star in an Earthlike orbit. That doesn’t guarantee life — heck, it doesn’t even guarantee the planet will look anything like Earth at all (just take a peek at Venus and Mars to confirm that), but this new discovery does mean that lower-mass planets are abundant in the galaxy. And that’s very cool news indeed.

Orbital schematic credit: Chris Tinney