Hubble telescope sees new type of planet
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Feb. 21 (UPI) -- The Hubble Space Telescope has found a new type of planet outside our solar system, a water world covered by a thick, steamy atmosphere, U.S. astronomers say.
A team of astronomers led by Zachory Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics made the observations of the planet GJ 1214b, about 2.7 times Earth's diameter and weighing almost seven times as much.
It orbits a red-dwarf star every 38 hours at a distance of 1.2 million miles, giving it an estimated temperature of 446 degrees Fahrenheit, a release from the center reported Tuesday.
"GJ1214b is like no planet we know of," Berta said. "A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water."
The planet's density is only slighter greater than that of water, and much less than Earth's, astronomers said.
This suggests GJ 1214b has much more water than Earth does, and much less rock, they said.
The internal structure of GJ 1214b would be extraordinarily different from that of our world as a result, Berta said.
"The high temperatures and high pressures would form exotic materials like 'hot ice' or 'superfluid water,' substances that are completely alien to our everyday experience," he said.
GJ 1214b is located in the constellation of Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer, just 40 light-years from Earth.
Brain chooses cellphone-listening ear
DETROIT, Feb. 21 (UPI) -- There is a strong correlation between left/right brain dominance and the ear people choose to listen to a cellphone with, a U.S. study found.
In the study conducted by the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, more than 70 percent of participants held their cellphones up to the ear on the same side as their dominant hand.
Left brain dominant people -- those whose speech and language center is on the left side of the brain -- are more likely to use their right hand for writing and other everyday tasks, including holding a cellphone, the study found.
This practice, researchers said, appears illogical since it is challenging to listen on the phone with the right ear and take notes with the right hand.
Similarly, right brain dominant people are more likely to use the left hand to hold the phone, the researchers found.
"Our findings have several implications, especially for mapping the language center of the brain," Michael Seidman, director of the division of otologic and neurotologic surgery at Henry Ford, said.
The study also may offer additional evidence that cell phone use and brain, and head and neck tumors may not be linked, he said.
If there was a strong connection, Seidman said, there would be a far more people diagnosed with cancer on the right side of their brain, head and neck -- the dominate side for cell phone use -- but no correlation has been found.
Among those in the study who were right handed, 68 percent reported they hold the phone to their right ear, while 25 percent used the left ear and 7 percent used both right and left ears
For those who were left handed, 72 percent said they used their left ear for cellphone conversations, while 23 percent used their right ear and 5 percent had no preference.
The study concerned just cellphones and no attempt was made to compare or contrast with preferences when using landline handsets, the researchers said.
Ancient forest preserved in volcanic ash
WUDA, China, Feb. 21 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers say a 300 million-year-old tropical forest was preserved in ash, Pompeii-like, when a volcano erupted in what is today northern China.
University of Pennsylvania paleobotanist Hermann Pfefferkorn says the site, located near Wuda, China, is a snapshot of a moment in time when volcanic ash covered a large expanse of forest, preserving the plants as they fell, in many cases in the exact locations where they grew.
"It's marvelously preserved," Pfefferkorn said in a Penn release Monday. "We can stand there and find a branch with the leaves attached, and then we find the next branch and the next branch and the next branch. And then we find the stump from the same tree. That's really exciting."
Pfefferkorn, working with Chinese colleagues, has been able to date the ash layer to approximately 298 million years ago, when Earth's continental plates were still moving toward each other to form the supercontinent Pangea.
China existed then as two smaller continents near the equator, and thus had a tropical climate encouraging forest growth, researchers said.
The volcanic ash has captured a moment in Earth's history, Pfefferkorn said.
"It's like Pompeii: Pompeii gives us deep insight into Roman culture, but it doesn't say anything about Roman history in and of itself.
"But on the other hand, it elucidates the time before and the time after. This finding is similar. It's a time capsule and therefore it allows us now to interpret what happened before or after much better."
Wireless users face 'spectrum crunch'
WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 (UPI) -- The U.S. mobile phone industry is running out of space on the airwaves necessary to provide voice, text and data to its customers, experts say.
The situation, dubbed "spectrum crunch," could lead to more dropped calls, slower data speeds and higher prices to consumers for cellphone service.
While the United States still has enough spectrum to go around, that could change as early as next year, the Federal Communications Commission estimates.
"Network traffic is increasing, driving up demand for mobile broadband," an official at the FCC's wireless bureau told CNN.
"Carriers are doing things to offset the increase in demand. They can manage it for the next couple years, but demand is inevitably going to exceed the available spectrum."
Consumption of wireless Internet services is skyrocketing as smartphone and tablet sales soar, but wireless spectrum -- the bands of frequencies over which all wireless transmissions travel -- is a finite resource.
"We got into this principally because technology and demand exploded at a rate that nobody had anticipated," Rory Altman, director of technology consultancy Altman & Vilandrie said.
Cellphone carriers have responded, attempting to limit customers' data usage by putting caps in place, throttling speeds and raising prices.
And things are likely to get worse for cellphone users before they get better.
"For a while we won't notice the quality of service changes, but over time as devices get better and use more data, we'll start to take notice," Altman said. "Consumers will notice it, and the burden will fall on the carriers to fix it."
