Strange New World Discovered: The "Mega Earth"

astroengine (1577233) writes "Meet 'mega-Earth' a souped-up, all-solid planet that, according to theory, should not exist. First spotted by NASA's Kepler space telescope, the planet is about 2.3 times larger than Earth. Computer models show planets that big would be more like Neptune or the other gas planets of the outer solar system since they would have the gravitational heft to collect vast amounts of hydrogen and helium from their primordial cradles. But follow-up observations of the planet, designated as Kepler-10c, show it has 17 times as much mass as Earth, meaning it must be filled with rock and other materials much heavier than hydrogen and helium. 'Kepler-10c is a big problem for the theory,' astronomer Dimitar Sasselov, director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, told Discovery News. 'It's nice that we have a solid piece of evidence and measurements for it because that gives motivations to the theorists to improve the theory,' he said."

Comments

Re:Science Writers: Stop Causing Us Intellectual P

[Arker]

"Unlike for example the German language, where you can practically always tell how to spell a word by how it is written."

I assume you mean by how it is pronounced, not by how it is written (if you see how it is written you also see how it is spelled.)

That said, we should remember that languages that manage to stay close to phonemic (like German, Spanish, etc.) have done that, not by magically being immune to language change, but by enforcing and regularly updating a centralized definition and excluding a lot of their own diversity, whether geographic, socioeconomic, or temporal. Even German has quite a bit of variation as you go from the alps to the Danish border - English is spoken from England to New Zealand by way of India, and by way of New England on the return trip!

And I think a very real part of what makes English attractive IS the fact that it was already too big for any 'national academy' to control and dictate.

Also think about how much you would actually lose by any attempt to make the spelling phonemic. For example homophones are currently only confusing in speech, they would become ambiguous even in writing. To, too, two? Nope, just one word, tu. What about other words where one dialect may preserve a distinction but another does not? Which one will we reflect in writing? And which one is going to get stuck with significantly depressed scores in school as a result?

Peepel tat lrn tu rajt foneemik Eenglish wil av trubel reeding ol buks tu. Tink bowt tat.