Littlest exoplanet (Science News, ScienceNOW)
The Kepler orbital telescope has the job of finding planets around other stars, and it has been doing very well. It has just proved that it can spot the hard ones -- the little ones. It has found a planet only a bit larger than the Moon, in a star system 220 light-years away.
Nuthin' (New Scientist)
If you have a vacuum and nothing comes into it, nothing is going to happen there, right? Not necessarily, not in quantum mechanics. In that (very well tested) theory, there are different kinds of vacuum, with different levels of energy. Vacuum above the bottom energy level is unstable and can spontaneously drop to a lower level. We assume the vacuum around us is the stable, bottom-level kind, but we don't know.
The recent discovery of the Higgs particle, and the measurement of its mass, raises somewhat the chance that we are not in the stable vacuum. So it is possible that, somewhere in the depths of space, a bit of vacuum will drop down to a lower energy level. This bubble of other-vacuum would expand at the speed of light, sweeping away our familiar universe in a wave of destruction unstoppable by anyone but the Doctor -- and it sounds like his kind of problem.
However, we don't know for sure yet, because of the margin of error in the measurements on the Higgs.
Smaller protons (Science News)
And they were pretty small already! Protons are not points; they were measured to be about 0.88 quadrillionths of a meter wide. Recent measurements with new techniques find they are about 4% smaller than we thought -- 0.84 quadrillionths. This might be due to nothing more than measurement uncertainties, but there is no sign of systematic error in the old measurements. This leaves open the interesting possibility that there is something new and interesting going on here.
Dolphin names (ScienceNOW)
We've known for some time that every dolphin has its own individual call (which we hear as that warbling squeal). Now, we find that they also call out each other's calls. Are the calls actually names? Are they calling out their own names and each other's? Too soon to tell, but maybe.
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