The most Earth-like planet ever discovered is circling a star 600 light years away, a key finding in an ongoing quest to learn if life exists beyond Earth. The temperature on the planet is a balmy 22°C and TWICE the size of our world.

The planet, called Kepler-22b, joins a list of more than 500 planets found to orbit stars beyond our solar system. It is the smallest and the best positioned to have liquid water on its surface — among the ingredients necessary for life on Earth. It orbits a star like the Sun 600 light years — that’s nearly 4,000 BILLION MILES — away in the constellation Cygnus. On a side note, a light year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km).

“We are homing in on the true Earth-sized, habitable planets,” said San Jose State University astronomer Natalie Batalha, deputy science team lead for NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope that discovered the star.

The telescope, which was launched three years ago, is staring at about 150,000 stars in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, looking for faint and periodic dimming as any circling planets pass by, relative to Kepler’s line of sight.

Results will be extrapolated to determine the percentage of stars in the Milky Way galaxy that harbor potentially habitable, Earth-size planets.

This is the first detection of a potentially habitable world orbiting a Sun-like star, scientists reported in findings to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

If that isn’t amazing news, I don’t know what is. I’ve added a video below with a short interview made by Sky News.

Click here to view the embedded video.

No words needed. Just sit back and enjoy this one!

All I can say is WOW! The HTC innovation team has done it again. If you haven’t had a qwerty phone before and you’re really thinking about getting one, HTC Desire Z is your baby. I can’t remember the last time I was so excited about an upcoming phone.

I’ve been looking for a qwerty phone running Android for almost a year now, and like many times before HTC has come to the rescue. Lets take a closer look what this high tech smartphone has under the hood.

Some of you may remember the goold old Qtek (Old HTC name) 9100 or i-mate JAM, which was a really good phone back in the days. That was my first ever qwerty phone and I loved it to death. Seeing this new HTC Desire Z brings back a lot of good memories from the early days of  HTC and I know the HTC Desire Z will be the same quality plus so much more.

There are so many great features, I don’t even know where to start. If you juggle more than one email account, you’ll love how you can now see all your accounts in a single inbox that automatically color codes each email by account. And don’t worry about clutter – handy email filters sort them by groups, importance, or content.

If you’ve got your family over for a visit and want to show your latest photos, videos or music on the bigscreen TV – no problem. Stream your pics, videos and music from your phone to your home theater system via DLNA. Gather the family around. It’s show time!

You’ll also get a 5.0 megapixel camera ( not exactly stunning, but I don’t care if it’s a 5 or 8 MP camera) with a built in flash and HD video recording, Android 2.2, direct keyboard shortcuts and a ton of new other features – this phone is PACKED! Use “Locations” to find the closest shopping mall, the closest coffee shop or pub. Locations will get you there no matter what. Use “Quick Lookup” virtually anywhere on your phone to lookup highlighted text in the google dictionary or wikipedia. Last but not least there is HTC Sense which also can be found at HTCSense.com. HTC Sense makes it the perfect phone for online and offline experiences.

I don’t want to waste your time because ALL the most important new features are put together in a great video below, made by HTC. Once you’re done watching the video and you still don’t understand the greatness of this phone (depending on your needs ofcourse) we’ve got a problem at hand. Have fun watching, and don’t let your jaws drop too far under the table :)

Pinch and tap – sooo quietly brilliant!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Oh, and please leave the iphone out of this :)

At one point in time you’ve probably asked yourself (like most people) if we’re all alone in the dark and cold cosmos. It’s hard to comprehend how big the universe is because there are so many galaxies and so many stars in each galaxy.

To give you an idea and a good explanation of how large the universe is I’ve added this little video from the national geographic channel.

Click here to view the embedded video.

But wait, there is so much more to come. Here are a few numbers for you to play with…For the Universe, the galaxies are our small representative volumes, and there are something like 10¹¹ to 10¹² stars in our galaxy, and there are perhaps something like 10¹¹ or 10¹² galaxies. With this simple calculation you get something like 10²² to 10²⁴ stars in the Universe. This is only a rough number, as obviously not all galaxies are the same, but that equals to about 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 stars.

Now, do you think we’re alone? I’ll let you ponder for a while :) Meanwhile,  here are some other interesting facts about the universe (compiled by universetoday.com).

1. It was hot when it was young

The most widely accepted cosmological model is that of the Big Bang. This was proven since the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation or CMBR. Although, strictly speaking, no one knows exactly what ‘banged’, we know from extrapolation that the Universe was infinitely hot at birth, cooling down as it expanded.

In fact, even only within minutes of expansion, scientists predict its temperature to have been about a billion Kelvin. Moving backward to 1 second, it is said to have been at 10 billion Kelvin. For comparison, today’s universe is found to have an average temperature of only 2.725 Kelvin.

2. It will be cold when it grows old

Observations made especially on galaxies farthest from us show that the Universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. This, and data that show that the Universe is cooling allows us to believe that the most probable ending for our universe is that of a Big Freeze.

That is, it will be devoid of any usable heat (energy). It is due to this prediction that the Big Freeze is also known as the Heat Death.Accurate measurements made by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) on the current geometry and density of the Universe favor such an ending.

3. The Universe spans a diameter of over 150 billion light years

Current estimates as with regards to the size of the Universe pegs it at a width of 150 billion light years. Although it may seem peculiarly inconsistent with the age of the Universe, which you’ll read about next, this value is easily understood once you consider the fact that the Universe is expanding at an accelerated rate.

4. The Universe is 13.7 billion years old

If you think that is amazing, perhaps equally remarkable is the fact that we know this to better than 1% precision. Credit goes to the WMAP team for gathering all the information needed to come up with this number. The information is based on measurements made on the CMBR.

Older methods which have contributed to confirming this value include measurements of the abundances of certain radioactive nuclei. Observations made on globular clusters, which contain the oldest stars, have also pointed to values close to this.

5. The Earth is not flat – but the Universe is

Based on Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, there are three possible shapes that the Universe may take: open, closed, and flat. Once again, measurements by WMAP on the CMBR have revealed a monumental confirmation – the Universe is flat.

Combining this geometry and the idea of an invisible entity known as dark energy coincides with the widely accepted ultimate fate of our universe, which as stated earlier, is a Big Freeze.

6. Large Scale Structures of the Universe

Considering only the largest structures, the Universe is made up of filaments, voids, superclusters, and galaxy groups and clusters. By combining galaxy groups and clusters, we come up with superclusters. Some superclusters in turn form part of walls, which are also parts of filaments.

The vast empty spaces are known as voids. That the Universe is clumped together in certain parts and empty in others is consistent with measurements of the CMBR that show slight variations in temperature during its earliest stages of development.

7. A huge chunk of it is made up of things we can’t see

Different wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum such as those of radio waves, infrared, x-rays, and visible light have allowed us to peer into the cosmos and ’see’ huge portions of it. Unfortunately, an even larger portion cannot be seen by any of these frequencies.

And yet, certain phenomena such as gravitational lensing, temperature distributions, orbital velocities and rotational speeds of galaxies, and all others that are evidence of a missing mass justify their probable existence. Specifically, these observations show that dark matter exists. Another invisible entity known as dark energy, is believed to be the reason why galaxies are speeding away at an accelerated rate.

8. There is no such thing as the Universe’s center

Nope. The earth is not the center of the Universe. It’s not even the center of the galaxy. And no again, our galaxy is not the entire universe, neither is it the center. Don’t hold your breath but the Universe has no center. Every galaxy is expanding away from one another.

9. Its members are in a hurry to be as far away from each other as possible

The members that we are talking about are the galaxies. As mentioned earlier, they are rushing away from each other at increasing rates. In fact, prior to the findings of most recently gathered data, it was believed that the Universe might end in a Big Rip. That is, everything, down to the atoms, would be ripped apart.

This idea stemmed from this observed accelerated rate of expansion. Scientists who supported this radically catastrophic ending believed that this kind of expansion would go on forever, and thus would force everything to be ripped apart.

10. To gain a deeper understanding of it, we need to study structures smaller than the atom

Ever since cosmologists started to trace events backward in time based on the Big Bang model, their views, which focused only on the very large, got smaller and smaller. They knew, that by extrapolating backward, they would be led into a universe that was very hot, very dense, very tiny, and governed by extremely high energies.

These conditions were definitely within the realm of particle physics, or the study of the very small. Hence, the most recent studies of both cosmology and particle physics saw an inevitable marriage between the two.

Over the last couple of weeks the history channel has been running a promo for their new History HD channel. The promo features a lot of different clips from various programs and shows they’re running. It is a really great promo that inspires not only me but probably a lot of people to sit down and watch the world of science in HD.

If you’re a fan of the discovery channel, national geographic or the history channel, this definitely blows in your direction. Oh, and did I mention the music? The music is pretty awesome too ;)

Check out the video below in full HD resolution.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I don’t know if this is a good picture of life on the fab side, but it definitely stunned me when I read the article. Swarms of giant asian hornets renowned for their vicious stings and skill at massacring honeybees have settled in France. I have to admit that I first heard about the asian hornet, also known as vespa velutina, many years ago but I didn’t think much of it back then.

Today I found this article in the news about this hornet spreading hysteria in France. The first question I asked myself was how on earth the hornet made its way to France in the first place. I didn’t have to read far to find the answer. Vespa velutina is thought to have arrived in France from the Far East in a consignment of Chinese pottery in late 2004. Once again we can only blame ourselves and face the consequences.They first settled in the forests of Aquitaine, but quickly fanned out to surrounding areas, thriving on rising temperatures linked to global warming and the lack of indigenous predators. The giant hornet is a lot bigger than the regular bees we’re used to in Europe or the US. The asian hornet can grow up to 3cm in length and it can take out entire bee colonies in a matter of hours.

Denis Thiery, an Asian hornet specialist at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, said there was nothing to halt their spread. “From one nest discovered in 2004, there were 2,000 in the Bordeaux area in 2007. Today there are probably several thousand in surrounding departments,” he said.

“According to our studies, they are able to settle in 50 per cent of the country. The European hornet is no match for them, with only a few hundred individuals per nest compared to several thousand for the yellow-footed hornets. They do sometimes fight, but it’s a losing battle,” he told the newspaper Le Parisien.

National Geographic called it the hornet from hell in one of their programs.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Local authorities in the tourist region of Lot-et-Garonne have issued a statement urging people with bee allergies to be “extremely cautious”. “Never attempt to destroy an Asian hornet nest yourself but call on specialist organisations, as this species charges in a group as soon as it feels its nest is threatened.”

Besides the risk to humans, the hornets have decimated France’s already dwindling bee population. Squadrons of the insects hover over hives and pick off hapless honeybees in mid-air. A handful can destroy a nest of 30,000 bees in just a couple of hours.

In Asia, honeybees form a ball of workers around the intruder and kill it by heatstroke. But in France, the technique appears to have no effect. Beekeepers suspect that the creatures are also massacring other indigenous insect species. “Nobody can say what damage the Asian hornet has done outside of our hives. What is certain is that last autumn there were less insects than before,” said Richard Legrand, a keeper in Bergerac.

Looks like Europe may be facing a serious problem in the years to come. The temps are rising and the hornets are thriving. Lets hope this problem can be dealt with before it all gets completely out of hand.