Closest star system found in a century

Mar. 11, 2013 ? A pair of newly discovered stars is the third-closest star system to the Sun, according to a paper that will be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. The duo is the closest star system discovered since 1916. The discovery was made by Kevin Luhman, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University and a researcher in Penn State's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds.

Both stars in the new binary system are "brown dwarfs," which are stars that are too small in mass to ever become hot enough to ignite hydrogen fusion. As a result, they are very cool and dim, resembling a giant planet like Jupiter more than a bright star like the Sun.

"The distance to this brown dwarf pair is 6.5 light years -- so close that Earth's television transmissions from 2006 are now arriving there," Luhman said. "It will be an excellent hunting ground for planets because it is very close to Earth, which makes it a lot easier to see any planets orbiting either of the brown dwarfs." Since it is the third-closest star system, in the distant future it might be one of the first destinations for manned expeditions outside our solar system, Luhman said.

The star system is named "WISE J104915.57-531906" because it was discovered in a map of the entire sky obtained by the NASA-funded Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite. It is only slightly farther away than the second-closest star, Barnard's star, which was discovered 6.0 light years from the Sun in 1916. The closest star system consists of Alpha Centauri, found to be a neighbor of the Sun in 1839 at 4.4 light years, and the fainter Proxima Centauri, discovered in 1917 at 4.2 light years.

Edward (Ned) Wright, the principal investigator for the WISE satellite, said "One major goal when proposing WISE was to find the closest stars to the Sun. WISE 1049-5319 is by far the closest star found to date using the WISE data, and the close-up views of this binary system we can get with big telescopes like Gemini and the future James Webb Space Telescope will tell us a lot about the low mass stars known as brown dwarfs." Wright is the David Saxon Presidential Chair in Physics and a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA.

Astronomers have long speculated about the possible presence of a distant, dim object orbiting the Sun, which is sometimes called Nemesis. However, Luhman has concluded, "we can rule out that the new brown dwarf system is such an object because it is moving across the sky much too fast to be in orbit around the Sun."

To discover the new star system, Luhman studied the images of the sky that the WISE satellite had obtained during a 13-month period ending in 2011. During its mission, WISE observed each point in the sky 2 to 3 times. "In these time-lapse images, I was able to tell that this system was moving very quickly across the sky -- which was a big clue that it was probably very close to our solar system," Luhman said.

After noticing its rapid motion in the WISE images, Luhman went hunting for detections of the suspected nearby star in older sky surveys. He found that it indeed was detected in images spanning from 1978 to 1999 from the Digitized Sky Survey, the Two Micron All-Sky Survey, and the Deep Near Infrared Survey of the Southern Sky. "Based on how this star system was moving in the images from the WISE survey, I was able to extrapolate back in time to predict where it should have been located in the older surveys and, sure enough, it was there," Luhman said.

By combining the detections of the star system from the various surveys, Luhman was able to measure its distance via parallax, which is the apparent shift of a star in the sky due to Earth's orbit around the Sun. He then used the Gemini South telescope on Cerro Pach?n in Chile to obtain a spectrum of it, which demonstrated that it had a very cool temperature, and hence was a brown dwarf. "As an unexpected bonus, the sharp images from Gemini also revealed that the object actually was not just one but a pair of brown dwarfs orbiting each other," Luhman said.

"It was a lot of detective work," Luhman said. "There are billions of infrared points of light across the sky, and the mystery is which one -- if any of them -- could be a star that is very close to our solar system."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Penn State. The original article was written by Barbara K. Kennedy.

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Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130311124052.htm

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Researchers: Stonehenge started as huge graveyard

FILE - People embrace by the ancient stone circle of Stonehenge, in southern England, as access to the site is given to druids, New Age followers and members of the public on the annual Winter Solstice, in this Friday, Dec. 21, 2012 file photo. British researchers have proposed a new theory for the origins of Stonehenge: It may have started as a giant burial ground for elite families around 3,000 B.C. New studies of cremated human remains excavated from the site suggest that some 500 years before the Stonehenge we know today was built, a larger stone circle was erected at the same site as a community graveyard, researchers said Saturday March 9 2013. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

FILE - People embrace by the ancient stone circle of Stonehenge, in southern England, as access to the site is given to druids, New Age followers and members of the public on the annual Winter Solstice, in this Friday, Dec. 21, 2012 file photo. British researchers have proposed a new theory for the origins of Stonehenge: It may have started as a giant burial ground for elite families around 3,000 B.C. New studies of cremated human remains excavated from the site suggest that some 500 years before the Stonehenge we know today was built, a larger stone circle was erected at the same site as a community graveyard, researchers said Saturday March 9 2013. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

LONDON (AP) ? British researchers have proposed a new theory for the origins of Stonehenge: It may have started as a giant burial ground for elite families around 3,000 B.C.

New studies of cremated human remains excavated from the site suggest that about 500 years before the Stonehenge we know today was built, a larger stone circle was erected at the same site as a community graveyard, researchers said Saturday.

"These were men, women, children, so presumably family groups," University College London professor Mike Parker Pearson, who led the team, said. "We'd thought that maybe it was a place where a dynasty of kings was buried, but this seemed to be much more of a community, a different kind of power structure."

Parker Pearson said archeologists studied the cremated bones of 63 individuals, and believed that they were buried around 3,000 B.C. The location of many of the cremated bodies was originally marked by bluestones, he said. That earlier circular enclosure, which measured around 300 feet (91 meters) across, could have been the burial ground for about 200 more people, Parker Pearson said.

The team, which included academics from more than a dozen British universities, also put forth some theories about the purpose of the second Stonehenge ? the monument still standing in the countryside in southern England today.

Various theories have been proposed about Stonehenge, including that it was a place for Druid worship, an observatory for astronomical studies, or a place of healing, built by early inhabitants of Britain who roamed around with their herds.

Parker Pearson said the latest study suggested that Stonehenge should be seen less a temple of worship than a kind of building project that served to unite people from across Britain.

Analysis of the remains of a Neolithic settlement near the monument indicated that thousands of people traveled from as far as Scotland to the site, bringing their livestock and families for huge feasts and celebrations during the winter and summer solstices.

The team studied the teeth of pigs and cattle found at the "builders' camp," and deduced that the animals were mostly slaughtered around nine months or 15 months after their spring births. That meant they were likely eaten in feasts during the midwinter and midsummer, Parker Pearson said.

"We don't think (the builders) were living there all the time. We could tell that by when they were killing the pigs ? they were there for the solstices," he said.

The researchers believe that the builders converged seasonally to build Stonehenge, but not for very long ? likely over a period of a decade or so.

The mass monument building is thought to end around the time when the "Beaker people," so called because of their distinctive pottery, arrived from continental Europe, Parker Pearson said.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-03-09-Britain-Stonehenge/id-788f464dd1ae4ab186349c8afb169f87

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Vince Neil hospitalized during Crue concert

Chris Pizzello / AP file

By Miriam Coleman, Rolling Stone

M?tley Cr?e?were forced to cut short their concert in Sydney on Sunday night when singer Vince Neil was hospitalized for a kidney stone attack.?

According to Setlist.fm, the band was nine songs into their set when Nikki Sixx announced that Neil had been in pain throughout the show and needed to be taken to the hospital. Guitarist Mick Mars later apologized for the interruption on Twitter and explained the trouble with his bandmate's kidneys.

The 25 Boldest Career Moves in Rock History: Motley Crue Fire Vince Neil

"He has been having problems for the last few days with kidney stones," the band's manager, Allen Kovac, told CNN. "He was treated at the hospital after the show. It's the middle of the night there, and we will know more later."

Kovac, who called the 52-year-old singer a "warrior," said that the band is still planning to perform as scheduled on Tuesday in Brisbane. "If there is a way to safely perform, [Neil] always does," he said. "In nearly 20 years of managing Motley Crue, I can't recall a show the band has canceled."?

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Canon Pixma MX522 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer

Basically a beefed-up version of the Canon Pixma MX452 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer that I recently reviewed, the Canon Pixma MX522 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer adds enough extras to easily justify the higher price. Most notably, it adds an Ethernet port, a duplexer (for two-sided printing), a color LCD for the front panel menu, and the ability to print from a USB memory key. The extras make it that much more attractive as either a personal printer in any size office or for the dual role of home and home-office printer.

Like the Canon MX452, the MX522 can print and fax from, as well as scan to, a PC, and it can work as a standalone copier and fax machine. For scanning, it offers the same capability as well, with a letter-size flatbed supplemented by a 30-page automatic document feeder that can handle legal size pages. It also offers the same ability to scan to a USB key, but adds printing from a USB key as well, with the ability to preview the files on its 2.5-inch color LCD.

In theory, given that the MX522 offers both Ethernet and Wi-Fi, you can use it as a shared printer. In practice, however, its 100-sheet paper capacity limits its usefulness for sharing, except for the dual roll of home and home-office printer. Even by micro-office standards, a 100-sheet input tray is likely to empty out often enough to make refilling it a minor annoyance. Very much on the plus side, if you need to print duplex documents even occasionally, the automatic duplexer is a welcome convenience.

Other conveniences worth mention are support for printing through the cloud and support for AirPrint. You can't connect directly to the printer by Wi-Fi to use AirPrint, however. The printer and your phone or tablet will have to connect through a Wi-Fi access point on your network. One other convenience, primarily for home use, is Wireless PictBridge for printing wirelessly from a camera. However, the feature works only with select Canon cameras.

Setup, Speed, and Output Quality
For my tests, I connected the printer to a wired network and installed the drivers and software on a Windows Vista system. Setup was standard fare.

Unfortunately, print speed is not one of the MX522's strong points. When I reviewed the MX452, I pointed out that it was a little slow, but not unusually slow for the price. The MX522 isn't any faster. Given that it costs more, however, the speed is more of an issue.

On our business applications suite, I clocked the MX522 (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing) at the same 2.1 pages per minute (ppm) as I got for the MX452. In comparison, the similarly priced Editors' Choice Epson WorkForce WF-3520was more than twice as fast, at 4.4 ppm. Photo speed was also slow, averaging 2 minutes 9 seconds for a 4 by 6. The WF-3520 came in at just 1:12.

As with the Canon MX452, the MX522 does much better on output quality than on speed. It delivered better text in my tests than most inkjet MFPs, par quality for graphics, and just barely par quality for photos.

That makes both text and graphics good enough for most business needs, with the graphics output easily suitable for PowerPoint handouts and the like. Depending on your level of perfectionism, you may or may not consider the graphics quality good enough for output going to an important client or customer when you need it to look fully professional. Photo quality is roughly a match for the low end of what you would expect from drug store prints.

I'd like this printer a lot more if it offered higher paper capacity and better speed. However, it balances its shortcomings in both with its output quality for text and graphics and its full set of office-oriented MFP features, including the ADF, duplexer, standalone and PC-based faxing, and ability to scan to and print from a USB key. If you need more heavy-duty printing, be sure to look at the Epson WorkForce WF-3520. But if you don't print a lot of pages, the Canon Pixma MX522 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer can serve nicely for light-duty print needs with an emphasis on output quality.

More Multifunction Printer Reviews:
??? Canon Pixma MX452 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer
??? Canon Pixma MX522 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer
??? Dell B3465dnf Multifunction Laser Printer
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/ia0rJn_rKhE/0,2817,2416287,00.asp

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Time Warner Cable's TWC TV app is now streaming on Roku

Time Warner Cable has already brought live TV streaming to iOS, Android and PCs, and now it's finally released its TWC TV service on a device for your TV. Now available on newer Roku players (and, we presume, whatever hardware is coming next), it brings up to 300 channels to subscriber's set-top boxes via the internet. Hit the link below to add the channel to your box -- assuming you have Time Warner cable + internet and your Roku is located in the house where you have service, of course. We've seen demos of the software on Samsung and Panasonic connected TV platforms before, and the Xbox 360 features similar access from a number of providers, so take that into account when guessing which one may be next up.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

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Source: Roku blog, Roku Channel Store

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Britain's Cameron says no turning back on deficit reduction plan

LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister David Cameron will promise on Thursday to stick to his government's deficit reduction plan despite the loss of his country's top-notch AAA credit rating, saying Britain would plunge "back into the abyss" if he changed course.

Speaking ahead of a March 20 budget that will be dissected by the markets and ratings agencies alike, Cameron said there were signs his government's economic policies were beginning to work and that it was imperative to "hold firm to the path".

"The decisions we make now will set the course of our economic future for years to come," he will tell an audience in Yorkshire, northern England. "And while some would falter and plunge us back into the abyss we will stick to the course."

The state of Britain's anemic economy is linked to Cameron's own political fortunes.

His advisers are banking that an economic recovery will be underway by the time of the next general election in 2015, allowing Cameron to whittle away the opposition Labour party's lead in the opinion polls and win.

But for now the economy appears stuck in a rut and could already be in its third recession since 2008, while public debt is set to carry on rising for another three years despite some public spending cuts.

"LONG HARD ROAD"

However, Cameron will tell his audience he has cut the country's deficit by a quarter, interest rates are at a record low, exports are reviving, the number of people on welfare has fallen, and there are more people in work "than ever before in our history".

"Of course, these signs of progress are just the beginning of a long hard road to a better Britain," he will say.

"But the very moment when we're just getting some signs that we can turn our economy round and make out country a success ... is the very moment to hold firm to the path we have set."

Labour often accuses him of inflicting pain on millions of families across the country with his austerity-drive, but Cameron will say his policies are necessary to give people better living standards in the long-term.

Britain suffered its first-ever sovereign ratings downgrade from a major agency last month, after Moody's stripped the country of its triple-A rating, blaming weak prospects for the economy, and Cameron is under mounting pressure to show he can deliver growth.

The Labour party says Cameron's determination to stick to austerity is killing off any chances of that happening, while some members of his junior coalition partner - the Liberal Democrats - have publicly questioned his focus on cutting debt.

Cameron's speech, which he is expected to deliver at around 1200 GMT, coincides with an announcement from telecoms provider BT that it is creating 1,000 new jobs.

(Editing by Sophie Hares)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/britains-cameron-says-no-turning-back-deficit-reduction-001656109--business.html

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20 years on, Valiant's Dr. Mirage reborn, remade

This comic book image released by Valiant Comics shows Dr. Shan Fong of "Shadowman" No. 5, out Wednesday, March 6. Fong plays Dr. Mirage, a dedicated and detailed investigator who talks to spirits in a bid to solve human crimes. (AP Photo/Valiant Comics)

This comic book image released by Valiant Comics shows Dr. Shan Fong of "Shadowman" No. 5, out Wednesday, March 6. Fong plays Dr. Mirage, a dedicated and detailed investigator who talks to spirits in a bid to solve human crimes. (AP Photo/Valiant Comics)

This comic book cover released by Valiant Comics shows the cover of "Shadowman" No. 5, out Wednesday, March 6. (AP Photo/Valiant Comics)

It's no hallucination: Dr. Mirage has returned to Valiant Entertainment though the paranormal detective is decidedly different.

Appearing in "Shadowman" No. 5 ? out Wednesday? the popular character who debuted in 1993 is presented anew as Dr. Shan Fong, a dedicated and detailed investigator who talks to spirits in a bid to solve human crimes.

"The low key intro is about readers getting to know her," said "Shadowman" designer and artist Patrick Zircher of Fong's first appearance. "Hopefully they like what they see and there'll be plenty of adventures to come."

Valiant said Tuesday that the contemporary Dr. Mirage is similar to the previous incarnation, a man named Hwen Mirage, whose exploits with wife Carmen Ruiz ran for 18 issues in "Second Life of Doctor Mirage" ? but, added Zircher, her powers are more steeped in Asian mysticism.

"Dr. Mirage's return is part of Valiant's ongoing plan to expand its universe of characters and she's a natural fit for the supernatural and mystic stories taking place in 'Shadowman,'" he said of the new issue. It was written by Justin Jordan with art by Zircher, Lee Garbett, Stefano Gaudiano and Roberto Delatorre, and sees Shadowman take on the Lord of Cemeteries.

While she doesn't have a big appearance in the book, yet, Zircher said it's just the beginning.

Dinesh Shamdasani, Valiant's chief creative officer, said Mirage's reintroduction is part of a larger story that involves the entire Valiant universe.

"Since the Summer of Valiant, we've been slowly building towards several key events. You can see the first of these events this April in Harbinger Wars, where Bloodshot and Harbinger collide," he said. "The return of Dr. Mirage is part of that plan ? part of the setting the stage. Dr. Mirage is a key piece in the future of the Valiant Universe and the timing of the return, as well as the manner, is no accident."

___

Moore reported from Philadelphia. Follow him at www.twitter.com/mattmooreap.

___

Online:

http://www.valiantentertainment.com

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-03-05-Remaking%20Dr%20Mirage/id-5b65927c49114730943a5540f99787d5

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