Male Fish Punish Unruly Females -- And Benefit, Study Says

Cheaters may not prosper—but punishers do, according to a new study.

Male cleaner fish will chase and pester female fish if they interfere with the male's mealtime—the first evidence of a species benefiting from third-party punishment.

If you're a cleaner fish, it's bad table manners to nibble on the mucous layer of "client" fish, which are generally bigger than the cleaners. Clients stop by multifish cleaning "stations" to get rid of their parasites, which become food for the cleaners.


But biting off a chunk of tasty mucous means the larger fish may flee—so one mischievous cleaner can deprive another from a meal.

The male "loses something if the female cheats the client, and that's why he corrects the behavior," said study co-author Redouan Bshary, a behavioral ecologist at Switzerland's Université de Neuchâtel.

Not that males are always respectable: They'll cheat, too, but females endure most of the punishment simply because they're weaker, he added.

"Imagine you are collaborating with Mike Tyson," Bshary said. "If you cheat he will punish you, but if he cheats you probably won't do anything." 


Scientists had observed male cleaner fish chasing mucous-eating females in the wild.

But to determine if the males were punishing females, Bshary and colleagues created an experiment. They provided aquarium-dwelling bluestreak cleaner wrasse with a plate of fish flakes—their boring, everyday diet—and prawns, which are about as delectable as fish mucous. (See a wrasse picture.)

Each time a female ate a prawn, scientists removed all the food from the tank.

The team observed that the males chastised prawn-eating females—and that the females obeyed by stopping the behavior.

The study, published today in Science, "is really the first to show a direct benefit to the individual who does the punishing," according to Sarah Brosnan, a behavioral scientist at Georgia State University.

The discovery also offers a "potential explanation for how [punishing] might have evolved in other organisms as well—but this may not hold for other types of social [animals]," added Brosnan, who was not involved in the research.

For example most human studies of third-party punishment show that—unlike in cleaner fish—the individual doesn't benefit, according to Peter Richerson, an expert in human cultural evolution at the University of California, Davis.

Though controversial, some scientists say these experiments show that human do-gooders evolved to benefit the group, rather than the individual, Richerson said.

But he doesn't think the cleaner fish study will lend much insight into human behavior.

"No such issue arises in the [fish] experiment because the males benefit directly from punishing defector females."

Sherlock Holmes

In a dynamic new portrayal of Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous characters, "Sherlock Holmes" sends Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and his stalwart partner Watson (Jude Law) on their latest challenge. Revealing fighting skills as lethal as his legendary intellect, Holmes will battle as never before to bring down a new nemesis and unravel a deadly plot that could destroy the country.


Too many are there films about this infamous detective but none whatsoever has actually portrayed Holmes in such manner that was written by Doyle and described by Holmes' assistant, Dr Watson as "Bohemian in nature". Almost all films or TV movies dedicated for this character presented Holmes as a stoic robotic deductive monster - more or less an interpretation of the drawing by Sydney Paget rather than the description of the writer. However, director Guy Ritchie translated the role as he is; witty, eccentric, untidy man with no penchant for order.

Cinematography-wise, the dark nuance is similar to David Yates' work in "Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince". Interesting, in a sense that it captures the aura of the late 19th to early 20th century where science is dominating the scene and the foggy dirty London signifies the industrial revolution at its height. Even the steamboat scene at Thames looks exquisite from the way it was shot.

Most of the known characters are present in this film - from Holmes to Lestrade, even to their pug and the gypsy woman who works for the detective. Robert Downey Jr. in his quest to become the perfect Holmes did a mighty fine job in stripping off the cliche look that people would go for. In his rowdy and disorderly appearance, he manages to humanise the character to a T. Jude Law plays a fine Dr Watson and manages to share an equal limelight with Downey. However, it is a bit of a shame that Irene Adler lost her mystery as "The Woman" who was ever able to outplay Holmes. The costume choice made Rachel McAdams look like a "Soho girl" instead of a lady, though she did a pretty good job in her role.

Taking the period of which Dr Watson is moving away from 221 Baker Street to marry his dream woman, the only rust in this solid performance is the rapidity of the film. Although clocking at 2 hours and 8 minutes, every single scene is done in such quickness that for those who are new to the character and the British accent will find it difficult to follow every detail and explanation.

Anyway, this reviewer has deducted that from the way the film ended, there will be a sequel and it will involve a professor. Here's a clue - he's Holmes greatest enemy. The game's afoot!


Sherlock Holmes Official Website
Sherlock Holmes Museum 

Avatar

"Avatar" is an emotional journey of redemption and revolution. The story tells of a wounded ex-marine, who thrust unwillingly into an effort to settle and exploit an exotic planet rich in bio-diversity, and eventually crosses over to lead an indigenous race in a battle for survival. Thus, combining the elements of massive spectacle and intimate character that made James Cameron's "Titanic" the highest grossing film of all time.


It is nominated as the best movie of 2009.Avatar won most of the box office against other competitive rivals-2012 and Sherlock Holmes.


IMBD ranking 32th weight up its best movie of 2009 award!


Avatar Official Website 
IMDB Ranking

"Blue Moon" to Shine on New Year's Eve

For the first time in almost 20 years, a bright "blue moon" will grace New Year's Eve celebrations worldwide.
If the skies are clear, revelers looking up at midnight will get an eyeful of the second full moon of the month—commonly called a blue moon. The last time a blue moon appeared on New Year's Eve was in 1990, and it won't happen again until 2028.

A blue moon isn't actually blue—as commonly defined, the name reflects the relative rarity of two full moons in a month and is linked to the saying "once in a blue moon."

With this New Year's Eve blue moon, "there is nothing scientific about it, and it has no astronomical significance," said Mark Hammergren, a staff astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Illinois.

"But I believe it does give us some insight into history and makes us think of how our calendar system has derived from motions of objects in the sky."

The popular definition of a blue moon isn't the only one—and it's one that's based on an editorial error, astronomers contend.

The widespread definition of the second full moon in a month stems from errors made in an astronomy magazine, when a writer misinterpreted how the term was used in theMaine Farmer's Almanac.

Later studies of almanacs published from 1819 to 1962 revealed that the term "blue moon" actually refers to the "extra" full moon that can occur in a year due to differences between the calendar year and the astronomical year.

Most years on average have 12 full moons, with 1 appearing each month.

That's because the lunar month—the time it takes the moon to cycle through its phases—corresponds closely to the calendar month.

But the calendar year is actually based on the solar cycle, or the time it takes Earth to make one trip around the sun. This means a year is not evenly divisible by lunar months, so every three years or so there are 13 full moons.

The farmer's almanac further divided the year into four seasons, with each season lasting three months. When a given season saw four full moons, the almanac dubbed the third moon as a blue moon.

Ultimately, a blue moon as defined by the calendar isn't that rare, added Hammergren. The term's significance instead lies in the way it links people to the motions of the cosmos.

"Just being able to recognize that we can have a full moon twice in a month and have [folklore] attached really highlights the fact that humans have been astronomers their entire existence," he said.

Before the editorial error, the term "blue moon" more often referred to the rare instances when the moon actually seemed to turn blue, as can happen under certain atmospheric conditions.

"After a forest fire or volcanic eruption, there may be enough particulate matter in the air so that the moon can take on a bluish tinge," Hammergren said.

For instance, a "true" blue moon occurred in 1950 after a large forest fire in Canada blew smoke across most of the Northern Hemisphere.

Another appeared in 1980 after the last major eruption of Mount St. Helens, which sent tons of ash into the upper atmosphere.

Although rumblings at the Mayon Volcano in the Philippines seem to signal a major eruption is imminent, experts don't think Mayon's current output will make this New Year's Eve full moon turn blue.

Even if the 2009 New Year's Eve blue moon has astronomers scoffing, nighttime partygoers may still get moonstruck.

Rising in the east at sunset, the New Year's Eve full moon will reach its highest point at midnight, noted Jack Horkheimer, director of the Miami Space-Transit Planetarium and host of PBS television's long-running show Star Gazer.

"Full moons around winter solstice rise their highest for the entire year," Horkheimer added.

"Even if you are downtown in a large city, if it is clear at the stroke of midnight the moon will be very visible if you look up."

In any location, the high, silvery orb will seem like a floodlight cast on the landscape, added Horkheimer, who is organizing a national moon-howling contest around this year's blue moon.

"This is especially true where the ground is covered with a blanket of snow. There is nothing quite so spectacular as a snow-covered scene under a December full moon at midnight."

Nexus One review

The Nexus One. In the modern climate of hyped (and over-hyped) smartphone launches, Google's official entry into the phone-sales game has excelled in a department where many find difficulty: generating legitimate excitement. Of course, long before the name Nexus One or the recent bounty of pictures and details existed, the very concept of a "Google Phone" had been ingrained in the public conscience, predating even the Open Handset Alliance and Android itself; the company dabbled in the concept of direct sales through its offering of the Android Dev Phones 1 and 2 (alias Ion), but this time, it's a public retail ordeal, not a couple of one-off developer specials. The genuine-article Google Phone is finally here -- for better or worse.

The device, a Snapdragon-powered, HTC-built phone looks -- on paper, at least -- like the ultimate Android handset, combining a newly tweaked and tightened user interface with killer industrial design. A sleek, streamlined phone that can easily go toe-to-toe with the iPhone 3GSs, Pres, and Droids of the world, powered by the latest version of Android (2.1 "Flan," if you're counting), and hand-retooled by Google. But is it all it's cracked up to be? Can the Nexus One possibly live up to the hype ascribed to it? And more importantly, is the appearance of the phone the death knell for the OHA and a sign of the coming Android autocracy? In our exclusive review of the Nexus One, we'll answer all those pressing questions and more... so read on for the full scoop!


As we said in the intro -- and our previous hands-on write up -- the Nexus One is nothing if not handsome. From its ultra-thin body to sleek, curved edges, the phone is absolutely lustworthy. While it's unmistakably HTC, there are plenty of design cues that feel authentically Google as well -- and it's that balance which makes the phone such an intriguing piece of hardware.



When you first lay eyes on the Nexus One, you can almost hear someone at Google say something like, "Make us something as sexy as the iPhone, but let's not forget what got us here" -- "what got us here" being the G1, which Google worked tightly with HTC to create. Whether you love or hate the iPhone, it's hard to deny its obvious physical attractiveness, and it's clear that Google and HTC made strides to bring an Android handset into the same realm of base desirability that Apple's halo device occupies. For the most part, they've succeeded. The phone shape finds itself somewhere between the iPhone and Palm Pre -- taking the Pre's curved, stone-like shape and stretching it into something resembling a more standard touchscreen device (a la the Hero or Instinct). The body of the handset is comprised of what appears to the eye as two interlocking pieces, a main, dark gray housing (coated in a soft-touch treatment) which is intersected and wrapped by a lighter gray, smooth, almost metallic band. The overall effect is fluid, though we're not crazy about the choice of coloring -- we would have liked to see something a little more consistent as opposed to the two-tone, particularly when the choice of hues is this drab and familiar. Still, the shape and size of the phone is absolutely fantastic; even though the surface of the device houses a 3.7-inch display, the handset generally feels trimmer and more svelte than an iPhone, Hero, and certainly the Droid.

HTC has managed to get the thickness of the phone down to just 11.5mm, and it measures just 59.8mm and 119mm across and up and down -- kind of a feat when you consider the guts of this thing. In the hand it's a bit lighter than you expect -- though it's not straight-up light -- and the curved edges and slightly tapered top and bottom make for a truly comfortable phone to hold. On the glass-covered front of the device there are four "hardware" buttons (just touch-sensitive spots on the display) laid out exactly as the Droid's four hard keys: back, menu, home, and search. Clearly this is going to be something of a trend with Google-approved devices.


Unlike the Droid, the Nexus One has a trackball just below those buttons that should feel very familiar to Hero users -- the placement feels a bit awkward here, and there's literally nothing in the OS that requires it. Along the left side you've got a volume rocker, up top there's a sleep / wake / power button on one end, and a 3.5mm headphone jack on the other, and along the bottom there's a micro-USB port, a mic hole, and three gold dots that look destined for some kind of dock (which would jibe with what we'veseen and heard). Around back you'll find the strangely pronounced 5 megapixel camera and accompanying LED flash, along with Google's Android mascot holding up a QR code -- a decidedly geeky Google touch that we expect won't make it to the final retail version. The layout of the phone is solid, though we would have liked a physical camera key (no biggie), and we actually had some real trouble with those four dedicated buttons. Hopefully it was just our review unit, but the target areas seemed to be too high on the row, and we found ourselves consistently accidentally tapping them while composing an email or text message, or missing them when we tapped a little too low. It wasn't a deal breaker, but it was definitely maddening -- especially considering that we don't have similar issues on the Droid.

Despite the minor niggles, HTC and Google have put together pretty damn good looking and feeling phone; it's not without faults, but they're pretty few and far between.


As you've heard, the Nexus One runs atop the much-hyped, rarely seen 1GHz Snapdragon CPU from Qualcomm (the same processor powering the HD2) -- really the highlight of this show. The phone also has 512MB of both RAM and ROM, but those hoping for new application storage options will find themselves out of luck yet again -- you're still limited to that small partition for app use. The display is an AMOLED, 480 x 800 capacitive touchscreen, and the handset also contains a light sensor, proximity sensor, and accelerometer, along with an HSPA-capable GSM radio (AWS and euro 2100MHz bands only for 3G -- sorry AT&T users), WiFi, the prerequisite AGPS chip, and a microSD slot (which comes loaded with a 4GB card, but is expandable to 32GB). By late-2009 / early-2010 standards, there's really nothing notable about the guts of this phone beyond the presence of a Snapdragon processor, and even that left something to be desired. The phone is fast, assuredly, but not so much of a leap up from the Droid that we felt it kept pace with the boost we were expecting. Scrolling lists and opening apps seemed speedy, but put simply, it's not a whole new Android experience (we'll talk more about this in the software section).


The 3.7-inch display should be stunning -- and is for the most part -- but we did have some issues with it (at least on the unit we have). In terms of touch sensitivity, the display is as good or better than any Android phone we've used. While the resolution is high (480 x 800), it's missing 54 pixels that we expected given the size of the Droid's screen. It didn't bother us that much, but it's noticeable in certain apps -- Gmail for instance, where you have to scroll further in some menus than you do on the Droid. The big issue with the screen, though, is actually the color balance. We found colors on the Nexus One, particularly in the reds and oranges, to be severely blown-out and oversaturated -- a common effect with AMOLED displays like the Nexus One's. At first we thought Google had tweaked some of the Market settings because the highlight orange was so bright, but comparing images on the web across different displays, the Nexus One consistently looked brighter then it should have. Oh, and using this thing in daylight? Forget about it. Like most screens of this type, the Nexus One is a nightmare to see with any kind of bright light around, and snapping photos with it on a sunny day was like taking shots with your eyes closed.


Nexus One official website

Hands on and video: Lenovo’s Lephone

Lenovo gave us a chance to check out their latest smartphone today at CES 2010. It’s Android-based with a complete facelift and hardly any of the original OS sticking out. I doubt they intended it to be, but it seems like a sort of interesting mix of webOS, iPhone, and Android features. I quite liked it.

Apologies for the noise in the video above, it was captured in an incredibly crowded area. But you get the gist. Just cruise through and check out the screens and animations.

In shape it’s quite pleasing, a little big, but with a good heft and solid feel. The screen is a gorgeous 3.7″ 800×480 OLED one, although I couldn’t confirm whether it’s the same that’s in the Nexus One. It’s got volume buttons on the left side, there, and a reprogrammable button on the right. It’s got a Pre-like dark area at the bottom that’s also touch-sensitive, and works as either a home button or for simple swiping gestures.

The OS is Android, and should be 2.0 at launch, though they declined to say when that might be. It’s completely skinned, though — Lenovo has it equipped with a sort of dual mode home screen, with one (the flower) being a contact jump-off point: you scroll through your contacts and then can pick a petal to message, call, or whatever. It’ll work if you can choose which contacts are included in that scrolling list, but if you have a couple hundred it’ll get confusing mighty fast. The other home screen is a series of widgets, they call it Widget Space, with stuff like weather, stocks, latest emails, that sort of thing.

It’s got the usual fixins: GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and all that, and it’s running on a Snapdragon processor, though I couldn’t seem to suss out the RAM or internal storage. We’ll hear more about that soon. The lady I spoke with had been using it as her phone for a good two months, so this is definitely final hardware apart from any radio bits to conform it to certain networks.

Durex Get it On Viral

World's Biggest Cave Found in Vietnam

A massive cave recently uncovered in a remote Vietnamese jungle is the largest single cave passage yet found, a new survey shows.

At 262-by-262 feet (80-by-80 meters) in most places, the Son Doong cave beats out the previous world-record holder, Deer Cave in the Malaysian section of the island of Borneo.

Deer Cave is no less than 300-by-300 feet (91-by-91 meters), but it's only about a mile (1.6 kilometers) long.

By contrast, explorers walked 2.8 miles (4.5 kilometers) into Son Doong, in Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park, before being blocked by seasonal floodwaters—and they think that the passage is even longer.

In addition, for a couple of miles Son Doong reaches more than 460-by-460 feet (140-by-140 meters), said Adam Spillane, a member of the British Cave Research Association expedition that explored the massive cavern.

Spillane was in the first of two groups to enter the cave. His team followed the passage as far as a 46-foot-high (14-meter-high) wall.

"The second team that went in got flooded out," he said. "We're going back next year to climb that wall and explore the cave further."

A local farmer, who had found the entrance to the Son Doong cave several years ago, led the joint British-Vietnamese expedition team to the cavern in April.

The team found an underground river running through the first 1.6 miles (2.5 kilometers) of the limestone cavern, as well as giant stalagmites more than 230 feet (70 meters) high.

The explorers surveyed Son Doong's size using laser-based measuring devices.

Such modern technology allows caves to be measured to the nearest millimeter, said Andy Eavis, president of the International Union of Speleology, the world caving authority, based in France.

"With these laser-measuring devices, the cave sizes are dead accurate," he said. "It tends to make the caves smaller, because years ago we were estimating, and we tended to overestimate."

Eavis, who wasn't involved in the survey, agreed that the new findings confirm Son Doong's record status—despite the fact that he had discovered Borneo's now demoted Deer Cave.

"This one in Vietnam is bigger," Eavis conceded.

However the British caver can still claim the discovery of the world's largest cave chamber, Sarawak Chamber, also in Borneo.

"That is so large it may not actually be beaten," he said. "It's three times the size of Wembley Stadium" in London.

Son Doong had somehow escaped detection during previous British caving expeditions to the region, which is rich in limestone grottos.

"The terrain in that area of Vietnam is very difficult," said expedition team member Spillane.

"The cave is very far out of the way. It's totally covered in jungle, and you can't see anything on Google Earth," he added, referring to the free 3-D globe software.

"You've got to be very close to the cave to find it," Spillane said. "Certainly, on previous expeditions, people have passed within a few hundred meters of the entrance without finding it."

The team was told that local people had known of the cave but were too scared to delve inside.

"It has a very loud draft and you can hear the river from the cave entrance, so it is very noisy and intimidating," Spillane said.

Of more concern to the caving team were the poisonous centipedes that live in Son Doong.

The explorers also spotted monkeys entering through the roof of the cave to feed on snails, according to Spillane.

"There are a couple of skylights about 300 meters [985 feet] above," he said. "The monkeys are obviously able to climb in and out."

A biologist will accompany the team on its return visit next year to survey the cave's subterranean wildlife.

Eavis, of the International Union of Speleology, added that there are almost certainly bigger cave passages awaiting discovery around the world.

"That's the fantastic thing about caving," he said.

Satellite images hint, for example, that caves even larger than Son Doong lie deep in the Amazon rain forest, he said.

Nearby "Super Earth" May Have Oceans, Thick Atmosphere

A newfound "water world" orbiting a star just 40 light-years away is the first known Earthlike planet close enough for us to "sniff" its atmosphere, astronomers say.

Dubbed GJ 1214b, the planet is only about 2.7 times larger than Earth and about 6.5 times more massive.

Based on its density, scientists think GJ 1214b is made up of about three-quarters liquid water with a solid core of iron and nickel and an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium—not unlike Earth.

But in most other ways, the planet is a "very different beast" from our home world, the researchers say.

"It's basically one big ocean," said study leader David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"There are no continents of rock floating on top or peaking up through the water."

Moreover, GJ 1214b is hotter than Earth and its atmosphere is ten times thicker than our own, the study authors say.

This would make things difficult for life as we know it. For starters, the atmospheric pressure on the planet's surface must be immense, and very little light would be able to penetrate the haze to reach the oceans.

The new super-Earth was discovered using the MEarth project, a suite of small, ground-based telescopes set to detect minute changes in the brightness of dim, red stars known as M dwarfs.

Periodic dips in starlight can be caused by planets that partially eclipse, or transit, their host stars. Because M dwarfs are dimmer than stars like our sun, it's easier to spot light reductions caused by smaller Earth-size planets.

Although GJ 1214b isn't directly visible, the exact changes in starlight due to its transit allowed astronomers to measure the planet's size and mass, offering clues to its composition.

And because the water world is so close to Earth, Charbonneau added, space-based optical telescopes such as Hubble or Kepler could one day be used to "sniff out" the exact chemicals in the planet's atmosphere.

"Some of the light from the star passes through the atmosphere [on its way to Earth], and imprinted on that are features of whatever atoms and molecules are present," Charbonneau said.

Overall, the discovery is a "landmark find" that fills a knowledge gap in planetary science, said Greg Laughlin, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the study.

"I've always wondered what a six-Earth-mass planet would be like," Laughlin said. "Now we know. It's something completely alien to our own solar system."

Five New Planets Found; Hotter Than Molten Lava

Five new planets have been found orbiting distant stars—the first confirmed new worlds from NASA's recently launched Kepler space telescope mission, astronomers announced today.

Like many of the more than 400 exoplanets—planets outside our solar system—found to date, the new planets are so-called hot Jupiters. They're about the same mass as Jupiter and orbit very close to their host stars, which makes the planets relatively easy to spot from Earth.

The smallest of the new planets is about the same size as Neptune, though much more massive. All of the planets are hotter than molten lava and could turn gold to goo, according to NASA temperature estimates.

Dubbed Kepler 4b, 5b, 6b, 7b, and 8b, the five new planets range in temperature from 2,000 to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,090 to 1,650 degrees Celsius), William Borucki, Kepler's principal investigator, said today during a press briefing at the American Astronomical Society's annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

One of the worlds, Kepler 7b, is among the lowest-density planets yet found, with about the same density as Styrofoam, he said.

These planets are "certainly no place to look for life—that will be coming later," with discoveries of Earth-like planets, Borucki said.

Kepler's main goal is to find rocky, Earthlike planets orbiting in stars' habitable zones—the regions in which planets receive enough heat from their stars for liquid water to exist.

While the new finds don't meet those criteria, they do show that the instrument is working as expected—offering "a tantalizing hint at what we can expect in a few years' time," noted Greg Laughlin, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"It's wonderful to see Kepler working so well."

epler looks for extrasolar planets by spying the decrease in starlight as a planet transits, or crosses in front of, its host star, as seen from Earth.

The orbiting telescope, which launched last March, spotted the five new worlds in its first six weeks of operation.

Each planet's existence was later confirmed using a method called radial velocity, which looks for the wobble in a star's orbit caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet.

The radial velocity observations were "a beautiful match" for Kepler's data, Borucki said. "It completely confirms that we really have planets here."

Having both sets of data creates a "truly valuable situation" in planet hunting, UCSC's Laughlin added.

That's because each method does more than just help confirm the other. Each technique provides different types of information, which help build a more complete picture of the alien world.

Radial velocity, for example, gives details about a planet's mass and orbit, while transits can reveal a planet's size relative to its star. This in turn tells astronomers about the planet's density.

Planet-hunting missions such as Kepler have shown us that the densities of exoplanets are all over the map, Laughlin said.

Some of the biggest worlds, for instance, have been found to be unexpectedly "puffed up" by an as-yet unexplained heat source.

Kelper 5b, for instance, is much more massive than Jupiter but is much less dense then water, said mission co-investigator Dimitar Sasselov.

"It's like looking at a football team," Laughlin said. "You might guess that they're all 250 to 300 pounds. But then you find out that some of them are 25 pounds—that would come as a surprise."

Although Kepler's five new planets are the only ones confirmed by the mission so far, the telescope's first few months of data actually contain hundreds of candidates.

The Kepler mission, expected to last at least three and a half years, will likely announce many more new worlds in coming years as astronomers are able to confirm the planets' existence.

But it will take several Earth years before Kepler scientists can be sure they've seen an Earth-size world in its star's habitable zone, Laughlin said.

That's because a planet orbiting at the right distance from its star will be farther out than a hot Jupiter and so will take much longer to complete an orbit of its star—making transits much rarer.

To be sure you've seen a planet, "you have to watch long enough to see three to four transits," Laughlin said.

Overall, though, the new finds help make it clear that planets with otherwise similar traits can have very different personalities, Laughlin noted.

"It's not a situation of, You've seen one, you've seen them all."

Isaac Newton: Who He Was, Why Google Apples Are Falling

Today on the Google home page, an animated apple is falling, over and over, with a satisfying plunk—a 367th birthday tribute to SirIsaac Newton.

The English scientist was born especially tiny but grew into a massive intellect and still looms large, thanks to his findings on gravity, light, motion, mathematics, and more.

Legend has it that Isaac Newton formulated gravitational theory in 1665 or 1666 after watching an apple fall and asking why the apple fell straight down, rather than sideways or even upward.

"He showed that the force that makes the apple fall and that holds us on the ground is the same as the force that keeps the moon and planets in their orbits," said Martin Rees, President of Britain's Royal Society, the United Kingdom's national academy of science, which was once headed by Newton himself.

"His theory of gravity wouldn't have got us global positioning satellites," said Jeremy Gray, a mathematical historian at the Milton Keynes, U.K-based Open University. "But it was enough to develop space travel."

Born two to three months prematurely on January 4, 1643, in a hamlet in Lincolnshire, England, Isaac Newton was a tiny baby who, according to his mother, could have fit inside a quart mug. A practical child, he enjoyed constructing models, including a tiny mill that actually ground flour—powered by a mouse running in a wheel.

Admitted to the University of Cambridge on 1661, Newton at first failed to shine as a student.

In 1665 the school temporarily closed because of a bubonic plague epidemic and Newton returned home to Lincolnshire for two years. It was then that the apple-falling brainstorm occurred, and he described his years on hiatus as "the prime of my age for invention."

Despite his apparent affinity for private study, Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667 and served as a mathematics professor and in other capacities until 1696.

Decoding gravity was only part of Newton's contribution to mathematics and science. His other major mathematical pre-occupation was calculus, and along with German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, Newton developed differentiation and integration—techniques that remain fundamental to mathematicians and scientists.

Meanwhile, his interest in optics led him to propose, correctly, that white light is actually the combination of light of all the colors of the rainbow. This, in turn, made plain the cause of chromatic aberration—inaccurate color reproduction—in the telescopes of the day.

To solve the problem, Newton designed a telescope that used mirrors rather than just glass lenses, which allowed the new apparatus to focus all the colors on a single point—resulting in a crisper, more accurate image. To this day, reflecting telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, are mainstays of astronomy 

Following his apple insight, Newton developed the three laws of motion, which are, in his own words:

• Newton's Law of Inertia: Every object persists in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.

• Newton's Law of Acceleration: Force is equal to the change in momentum (mV) per change in time. For a constant mass, force equals mass times acceleration [expressed in the famous equation F = ma].

• Newton's Law of Action and Reaction: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Newton published his findings in 1687 in a book called Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) commonly known as the Principia.

"Newton's Principia made him famous—few people read it, and even fewer understood it, but everyone knew that it was a great work, rather like Einstein's Theory of Relativity over two hundred years later," writes mathematician Robert Wilson of the Open University in an article on a university Web site.

Despite his wealth of discoveries Isaac Newton wasn't well liked, particularly in old age, when he served as the head of Britain's Royal Mint, served in Parliament, and write on religion, among other things.

"As a personality, Newton was unattractive—solitary and reclusive when young, vain and vindictive in his later years, when he tyrannized the Royal Society and vigorously sabotaged his rivals," the Royal Society's Rees said.

Sir David Wallace, director of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, U.K., added, "He was a complex character, who also pursued alchemy"—the search for a method to turn base metals into gold—"and, as Master of the Mint, showed no clemency towards coiners [counterfeiters] sentenced to death."

In 1727, at 84, Sir Isaac Newton died in his sleep and was buried with pomp and ceremony in Westminster Abbey in London.

"Lost" Amazon Complex Found; Shapes Seen by Satellite

Hundreds of circles, squares, and other geometric shapes once hidden by forest hint at a previously unknown ancient society that flourished in the Amazon, a new study says.

Satellite images of the upper Amazon Basin taken since 1999 have revealed more than 200 geometric earthworks spanning a distance greater than 155 miles (250 kilometers).

Now researchers estimate that nearly ten times as many such structures—of unknown purpose—may exist undetected under the Amazon's forest cover.

At least one of the sites has been dated to around A.D. 1283, although others may date as far back as A.D. 200 to 300, said study co-author Denise Schaan, an anthropologist at the Federal University of Pará in Belém, Brazil.

The discovery adds to evidence that the hinterlands of the Amazon once teemed with complex societies, which were largely wiped out by diseases brought to South America by European colonists in the 15th and 16th centuries, Schaan said.

Since these vanished societies had gone unrecorded, previous research had suggested that soils in the upper Amazon were too poor to support the extensive agriculture needed for such large, permanent settlements.

"We found that this picture is wrong," Schaan said. "And there is a lot more to discover in these places."

The newfound shapes are created by a series of trenches about 36 feet (11 meters) wide and several feet deep, with adjacent banks up to 3 feet (1 meter) tall. Straight roads connect many of the earthworks.

Preliminary excavations at one of the sites in 2008 revealed that some of the earthworks were surrounded by low mounds containing domestic ceramics, charcoal, grinding-stone fragments, and other evidence of habitation.

But who built the structures and what functions they served remains a mystery. Ideas range from defensive buildings to ceremonial centers and homes, the study authors say.

It's also possible the structures served different purposes over time, noted William Woods, a geographer and anthropologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence who was not involved in the research.

"For example," he said, "in Lawrence there's a Masonic temple—it is now a bar. There was a bank—it is now a restaurant called Tellers. These things happen."

What most surprised the research team is that the earthworks appear in both the region's floodplains and the uplands.

In general, the Amazon's fertile floodplains have been popular sites for ancient civilizations, while the sparser uplands have been thought to be largely devoid of people, the researchers say.

What's more, the earthworks in both regions are of a similar style, suggesting they were built by the same society.

"In Amazonian archaeology you always have this idea that you find different peoples in different ecosystems," study co-author Schaan said.

"And so it was kind of odd to have a culture that would take advantage of different ecosystems and expand over such a large region."

The uplands sites appear to have been home to as many as 60,000 people, Schaan and her colleagues suggest in their paper, published this month in the journal Antiquity.

That figure is based on estimates of the social organization and labor that would have been required to build the structures hinted at by the remaining earthworks.

According to the University of Kansas' Woods, the population estimate is reasonable, albeit rough, since so little is known about these complexes.

Answers may emerge as researchers continue to excavate the newfound shapes in the coming years.

But Woods is impressed by the possibility that so many people might have once lived in a region long thought uninhabited.

"Traditionally, if you would have asked an anthropologist or archaeologist how many people lived [in these Amazon uplands], they'd say almost zero," he said.

"And so this is astounding that there is 60,000 people making a go of it where there aren't supposed to be any."