“Like our own giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, the planet is mostly made of hydrogen and helium,” said team member Tristan Guillot of the Côte d’Azure Observatory in Nice, France. “And it may contain up to 20 Earth masses of other elements, including water and rock at high temperatures and pressures” [Space.com]. The large group of astronomers reporting the find in Nature estimate the planet’s temperature at a range between just below zero and slightly above 300 degrees Fahrenheit. It completes an orbit in 95 days, though it’s about 1,500 light years away.

The new exoplanet draws its name from the French space agency’s Corot (Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits) satellite, which first spotted it by noticing its star dim as the planet passed in front. Actually confirming a planetary cause of that dimming takes painstaking follow-up work at telescopes on the ground. Most often the researchers look for Doppler shifts in the host star’s light as the planet’s gravity regularly tugs the star nearer to and then farther from Earth [Scientific American]. Back in September, the Corot satellite also was the first to find Corot-7b, which was the first exoplanet discovered to be close to the Earth in size.

Determining Corot-9b’s distance from its star and the type of that star allowed the team, led by Hans Deeg, to hypothesize that the planet’s temperature range is close to that of Earth’s. But is it a pale blue dot like our own home world? “We don’t know the colour. It’s likely that it has high atmosphere water clouds which might make it blue but that depends on the mixture of gases which we really do not know” [BBC News], Deeg says.

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Image: Ilustration courtesy Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias

Here’s one benefit of a storm so ferocious that it rages on for centuries–scientists have plenty of time to observe it, and to wait for technology to improve so they can get an even better look.

The solar system’s biggest storm swirls on the giant gas planet Jupiter; it’s a tempest that goes by the name the Great Red Spot. Now, for the first time, scientists have constructed a detailed interior weather map of the giant storm system using thermal images from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and other powerful ground telescopes.

Peering into the Great Red Spot, scientists found that there were surprising weather and temperature variations within the spot and that the dark red area in the spot’s center is actually a warm patch in the storm. The observations are detailed in the journal Icarus, and give researchers a better understanding of circulation patterns within this Jovian storm. Says Glenn Orton, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory astronomer who led the study: “We once thought the Great Red Spot was a plain old oval without much structure, but these new results show that it is, in fact, extremely complicated” [Wired].

For centuries, astronomers have observed Jupiter’s Red Spot, which is as wide as three Earths lined up side-by-side. Orton says that if you had seen the spot in the 17th century, when it was first discovered, you would have been “tempted to call it the great red sausage,” adding that it has slowly been shrinking in size since then. It is only in recent decades that scientists have been able to understand weather patterns around the spot, and exactly what was happening inside the storm was largely mysterious until now.

The new images have revealed that the red in the Red Spot is actually a warm patch. “Warm” in this case translates to -250 degrees Fahrenheit while cold is an even frostier -256 degrees F [Wired]. This temperature difference might not seem like a lot, but it is enough to allow the storm circulation, usually counter-clockwise, to shift to a weak clockwise circulation in the very middle of the storm [ANI].This slight temperature difference also alters wind velocity and cloud formation in other belts.

Scientists are also trying to figure why the spot is red in color. Orton thinks that answer may lie in what happened with another Jovian storm–the Oval BA. The Oval BA started off as a white spot and gradually turned red as it increased in power, leading Orton to theorize that it presumably put down deeper roots in Jupiter’s atmosphere, bringing up more sulfur-bearing material from the lower levels. When that material rose to the top of the clouds and was exposed to the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, a chemical reaction could have brought out the reddish color [MSNBC].

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Image: L Fletcher/ESO/NASA/JPL/ESA

Seeking some answers to how social learning works in monkeys, van de Waal and her colleagues headed to Loskop Dam Nature Reserve. It took four months, they say, just to acclimate the wild animals to the presence of humans. Once the monkeys were comfortable having scientists around, Van de Waal gave each group a wooden box containing a slice of apple. To get to the apple, the monkeys had to either pull open the door at one end or slide aside a door at the other. Half the box was painted black to differentiate the two ends [ScienceNOW].

In vervet groups there’s a dominant male and a dominant female, so the researchers say it’s no surprise that one of those individuals stepped forward to accept the challenge of opening the box. In three groups it was the male, and in three the female took command. “The models learned by trial and error how to open the box,” explained Ms van de Waal. “Once they understood how to pull or slide the door open we let them perform 25 demonstrations” [BBC News].

The scientists saw that other monkeys paid more attention when the dominant female was solving the puzzle as opposed to the dominant male. Later, the team passed out the same kind of box to other members of the groups. If those monkeys were among the groups that had watched the male, they didn’t show a preference for which side of the box to open, which suggested they hadn’t learned much during their spectating days. In fact, van de Waal says, they didn’t even show a preference toward attempting to open the box. But, in the groups that watched their dominant female, 80 percent went for the side of the container they’d seen her open before.

So were the monkeys just sucking up to the dominant male, trying to make him feel smart? That’s not the answer at which van de Waal’s team arrived. The key, they say, is that males grow up and then run off to find another group, while females stay with their groups for life, giving them stronger bonds with the group and also a better knowledge of the resources in a particular territory. So it makes sense that other group members look to them for guidance, Van de Waal says [ScienceNOW]. If it’s true, it could also mean that vervet “culture” is hyper-local. The team writes, “Our findings imply that migration does not necessarily lead to an exchange of socially acquired information within populations, potentially causing highly localized traditions.”

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Image: Erica van de Waal

Scotland is getting ready to capitalize on something the country has plenty of: fierce, stormy waves.

About 750,000 Scottish homes expect to be powered by ocean technology by 2020, as the Scottish Government announced that 10 wave and tide power schemes capable of generating up to 1.2GW in total would be built around the Orkney islands and on the Pentland Firth on the northern coast of the Scottish mainland [Guardian]. The 10 projects will comprise the world’s first commercial-scale wave and tidal power scheme. With this project, Scotland plans to produce the same amount of clean energy as a small nuclear power station, and hopes to start on a path to becoming the “Saudi Arabia of marine energy.”

Some of the strongest tidal currents in the world race around UK shores and there’s some of the highest energy in the waves that roll in from the Atlantic. And while wave power is, to an extent, dependent on the weather, tidal power has the tremendous advantage of being totally predictable [Channel 4].

It will cost about $7.6 billion in total to install and maintain the structures used to generate power from the strong waves and tides, and to transmit the energy back to land. The bulk of the work will be done by three major power firms: E.ON, Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) Renewables, which already operates the UK’s largest hydro schemes, and Scottish Power Renewables, a heavy investor in windfarms, in joint ventures with four of the UK’s leading marine energy firms [Guardian].

Click through the photo gallery to see the wave and tidal devices that will soon get their try-outs in the cold, turbulent waters off the Scottish coast.

Image: flickr / jack_spellingbacon

If you thought you spent a lot of time tweeting and reading tweets before, that number could get even higher thanks to “@anywhere,” the site’s new feature announced at Austin’s South by Southwest festival (SXSW) this week. The platform is intended to allow third-party sites to integrate Twitter more deeply and smoothly than they currently can. The idea is to offer a more seamless experience to Twitter users navigating third party sites like the Huffington Post and the New York Times, giving them Twitter content without forcing them to jump off the page they’re currently viewing [TechCrunch].

Twitter CEO Evan Williams went fairly light on the specifics of the new system, and gave no release date, during his keynote Q&A at SXSW, but some details have come out. The way Twitter has described it, @anywhere will allow readers of articles at The New York Times and other sites to click and follow writers directly from their bylines, and—judging by what Evan Williams told Anil Dash on Twitter—will also let them click and see information about popular Twitter users who are mentioned on a participating site [BusinessWeek]. By expanding the microblogging site’s reach, @anywhere appears to be Twitter’s answer to Facebook Connect, but BusinessWeek complains that the feature—at least based on what people know about it right now—isn’t much to write home about.

We love Twitter at DISCOVER (follow us here), but it’s easy to see why not everyone would be so excited about allowing the Wild West cavalcade of information that is the Twitterverse to encroach onto their digital turf. According to ComputerWorld, branded Web sites that aren’t accustomed to reader feedback probably won’t be so keen to allow a sudden burst of it, especially if they’d seen a blast of negative publicity (like, say, Toyota).

Lastly, there’s was one particular group that wasn’t too taken with the Twitter CEO’s talk: Twitter users. Maya Baratz, a product manager at MTV, wrote: “There are hundreds of people in the room. Someone. Anyone. Kanye this keynote and ask Evan a good question.” Another Twitter user posted this report: “The guy behind us is snoring. Literally” [The New York Times]. Back on his home field, however, Williams tweeted that people could ask him tougher questions there.

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Image: Twitter

A new internal Justice Department document obtained by San Francisco-based civil liberties group, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), details how federal agencies like the IRS and the FBI are now using social media to monitor suspects’ online activities and also track down their whereabouts. The document, obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, makes clear that U.S. agents are already logging on surreptitiously to exchange messages with suspects, identify a target’s friends or relatives and browse private information such as postings, personal photographs and video clips [AP].

The investigators are also using the sites to check suspects’ alibis with details of their whereabouts posted on Facebook and Twitter. And online photos from a suspicious spending spree — people posing with jewelry, guns or fancy cars — can link suspects or their friends to robberies or burglaries [AP].

The document also describes a bank fraud case, wherein federal authorities were able to nab a suspect who had fled to Mexico based on his Facebook updates about all the fun he was having in that country. The suspect’s page was private but some of his friends’ pages weren’t–allowing easy access to information related to the man on the run.

Using online sources to catch suspects isn’t really new: In the early days of the Internet, investigating authorities used text-heavy AOL and chat rooms to gather evidence and arrest wrongdoers. But enormously popular sites like Facebook can serve as a clearinghouse for information. While the changing nature of online activities has served the feds well, the Justice Department document (which was part of a presentation given in August by top cybercrime officials) doesn’t detail how to prevent abuse of available content. While most social networking sites expressly prohibit people from creating profiles under false identities the feds have ignored that rule and created profiles to monitor suspects. “This new situation presents a need for careful oversight so that law enforcement does not use social networking to intrude on some of our most personal relationships,” said [Marc] Zwillinger, whose firm does legal work for Yahoo and MySpace [AP].

While the document portrayed Facebook primarily as a useful tool, the government did note a few ways in which social media could interfere with legal proceedings. The Justice Department document warned prosecutors to advise their witness not to reveal details of their ongoing cases on their public posts. It also cautioned federal law enforcement officials to think prudently before adding judges or defense counsel as “friends” on these services. “Social networking and the courtroom can be a dangerous combination,” the government said [AP].

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Image: iStockphoto

However, worries over the consequences of tinkering with the ocean ecosystem have held up plans to attempt this. And now, in a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers claim that such a plan could risk putting a neurotoxin into the food chain.

Iron seeders have targeted the large swaths of ocean surface with high levels of nitrate and low chlorophyll, where an injection of iron could potentially turn a dearth of plankton into a bloom. But too many phytoplankton can be a bad thing, especially when it comes to members of the genus Pseudonitzschia. This alga produces domoic acid, which it spews into the surrounding seawater to help it ingest iron [ScienceNOW]. Sea lions off California have gotten sick from the toxin. In Canada, three people died in the 1980s from eating shellfish that themselves had eaten Pseudonitzschia.

Seeding experiments—about a dozen have taken place so far—had not shown the production of domoic acid. But oceanographer Charles Trick was not convinced, because those previous tests had harvested the plankton in the ocean but not tested them until the researchers returned to shore. So, for their study, the researchers examined water samples taken from open-ocean tracts in the sub-Arctic North Pacific Ocean where iron-fertilization experiments were conducted [AFP]. The results were not encouraging.

Pseudonitzschia collected in midocean and subjected to shipboard experiments produced plenty of domoic acid. “We found there is a lot of toxin out there,” he said. “If we were to seed with iron, the amount of toxin would go up” [The New York Times]. In fact, Trick says, the concentration of Pseudonitzschia doubled, which increased how much domoic acid was in the water. In turn, the preponderance of the acid allows more Pseudonitzschia to grow, in a sort of feedback circle.

Trick says he doesn’t think the acid would make it all the way up the food chain to people, though birds might ingest it. But, he says, this is another sign that tinkering on the planetary scale can be fraught with unintended consequences.

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Image: NASA SeaWiFS Project (the 12 seeding experiments thus far)

Each person, they say, is a teeming petri dish of bacteria, but the composition varies from person to person. Every place a person goes and each thing he touches is smudged with his unique “microbial fingerprint.” The bacterial mixes are so specific to individuals that researchers found that they could pair up individual computer keyboards with their owners–just by matching the bacteria found on the keyboard to the bacteria found on the person’s fingertips. Describing their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists write that that if this bacterial fingerprint technique is refined, it could one day help in forensic investigations.

The Human Microbiome Project has already found that different body parts harbor different kinds of microbes. Study coauthors Noah Fierer and Rob Knight note that these colonies don’t change much over time. No amount of hand-washing will change a person’s microbial make-up, they say.

For their experiment with computer keyboards, scientists extracted bacterial DNA from three different keyboards and sequenced more than 1,400 copies of bacterial ribosomal gene from each sample to identify the individual species of bacteria each sample contained [Technology Review]. With this information in hand, the scientists were able to pair each keyboard with its user.

In another test, scientists took samples from nine computer mice and were also able to determine their users based on the similarities between hand bacteria and the colonies on each mouse. The scientists also found that there was a very clear difference between bacterial samples taken from the mouse users and 270 samples from a database. Hand bacteria, they found, can survive at room temperatures for up to two weeks and the bugs could be identified even when fingerprints were smudged, or there was not enough DNA to obtain a profile [BBC]. The researchers also note that identical twins, who share the same DNA, have different bacterial compositions living and growing on their hands.

However, scientists warn that while the “microbial fingerprinting” technique seems largely accurate so far, it’s too early to say if it will ever be used in courtrooms. Forensics expert David Foran argues that it’s “utility in a forensic context is doubtful”. It’s unlikely to ever meet the high standards of certainty needed for a criminal investigation, although that probably won’t stop it from appearing in a future episode of CSI [Not Exactly Rocket Science].

Other experts, like microbiologist David Relman, says the idea of this “signature” is not entirely new. For decades, researchers have wondered whether it may be possible to identify individuals based on, say, the unique strains of Escherichia coli harbored in their gut. Until recently, though, “all the ideas that were floating around couldn’t really be explored in a really detailed and methodical way,” Relman says [Technology Review].

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Image: flickr / Andrew*

“We were operating on the presumption that nothing’s there,” said NASA ice scientist Robert Bindschadler, who will be presenting the initial findings and a video at an American Geophysical Union meeting Wednesday. “It was a shrimp you’d enjoy having on your plate” [AP]. Indeed, researchers previously believed that nothing more complex than microbes could live in such a hostile place, beneath an ice sheet in total darkness. While complex organisms have shown up before in retreating glaciers, this seems to be the first time any have been found 600 feet down below an intact sheet of ice.

The sheer unlikeliness of the find (what would these creatures eat, after all?) cast doubt in the minds of some scientists that this is the organisms’ true habitat. The site is connected to the open sea, says Cynan Ellis-Evans of the British Antarctic Survey. But given the distance to that open sea—12 miles–study coauthor Stacy Kim says it’s highly unlikely such small creatures made such a journey under an ice sheet. In addition, the hole NASA drilled measured only eight inches across. That means it’s unlikely that that two critters swam from great distances and were captured randomly in that small of an area, she said [AP].

If crustaceans really can tough it out buried beneath the ice, perhaps complex organisms can live in more places than we give them credit for. Astrobiology enthusiasts are probably already thinking of the ice-covered moons in our solar system, like the Jovian moon Europa and the Saturnian moon Enceladus, and wondering whether extraterrestrial critters could be lurking beneath those frozen surfaces. First, though, there’s a lot left to sort out about this intriguing puzzle.

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Image: NASA

The bluefin tuna ban was proposed by Monaco, and the vote will probably come up next week. Japan has already dispatched a delegation to Doha with the message that Japan won’t comply with a total ban, and would instead prefer a fishing quota. But quotas have failed to help the depleted bluefin tuna stocks thus far. Japan last year pledged to help meet an accord to slash the total catch in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean by 40 percent, although environmental groups charge that such quotas are routinely exceeded [AFP].

The European Union and the United States have come out in support of a total ban, since decades of overfishing has caused the number of bluefin in the Atlantic and Mediterranean to crash by more than two-thirds. Japan, meanwhile, hopes to fend off the ban by enlisting the support of developing nations in Africa and Latin America. Tokyo said that even if a ban is implemented, it could use a treaty technicality to opt out of the agreement by expressing “reservations,” and would then continue to import from other countries.

Meanwhile, at the world’s largest fishing market in Tokyo’s Tsukiji district, bluefish tuna fishermen began collecting signatures to oppose the ban. They said measures to prevent overfishing of the tuna should be implemented instead [The Asahi Shimbun]. Traders also fear a steep price hike for the bluefin, known as “kuro maguro” or black tuna in Japan. A piece of “otoro” or fatty underbelly now costs 2,000 yen (22 dollars) at high-end Tokyo restaurants [AFP].

The other bitter battle being played out at the CITES meeting is Zambia’s and Tanzania’s proposal for a one-time sale of ivory, so that they may clean out their stockpiles of ivory–collected, they say, from elephants who died natural deaths. So far, the proposal has been resisted by countries like Kenya that argue that such sales give cover to poachers who engage in “ivory-laundering,” and would increase poaching in the region.

Zambia and Tanzania both insist that they will funnel the $18.5 million they expect to earn from the sale into conservation efforts, but that claim has been met with skepticism. A recent report in the journal Science revealed a sharp increase in poaching in recent years–with much of the ivory trafficking running through Zambia and Tanzania.

Kenya and its allies have proposed supporting a bluefin tuna ban in exchange for greater protection for the elephants. However, this horse trading is viewed as controversial: Conservationists argue that every proposal should rise or fall on the basic of scientific evidence detailing the possible extinction of individual species, not as part of a political deal [The New York Times].

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Image: Wikimedia

The European Space Agency has released the latest pictures of the Martian moon Phobos, taken by the European Mars Express (MEX) probe during its recent flybys. On one flyby, MEX skimmed just 42 miles above the surface of Phobos, which is the closest any manmade object has ever gotten to the little Martian moon.

The image above is from a flyby that brought MEX within 63 miles of the surface; its High Resolution Stereo Camera took photographs that have a resolution of 14 feet per pixel. The images are being scrutinized by the Russian space agency as it tries to settle on a landing site for its ambitious Phobos-Grunt mission next year–the two potential landing sites are marked by red dots in the picture above. The Phobos-Grunt mission aims to collect a soil sample from Phobos, and then to return the sample to Earth for analysis.

Phobos is an odd little moon: it’s a potato-shaped rock measuring only 12 miles by 17 miles. Scientists believe the moon is relatively porous, but say its origin is still open to debate. Researchers suspect the moon is simply a collection of planetary rubble that coalesced around the Red Planet sometime after its formation. Another explanation is that it is a captured asteroid [BBC News]. Scientists believe that Phobos is being slowly pulled towards Mars, and tidal forces are expected to tear it apart one day.

The moon has drawn more attention lately, because it’s increasingly seen as a steppingstone for Mars-bound astronauts. Last month, NASA shifted its focus from sending humans back to the moon to a “flexible path” that includes the moons of Mars as potential destinations. The idea is that low-gravity locales such as Phobos (and Mars’ other moon, Deimos) should be easier to get to because they’re more accommodating for landing and ascent [MSNBC].

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Image: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

North Texas sits atop the Barnett Shale, one of the several giant layers of shale in the United States believed to hold a truly massive amount of natural gas. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas may reside in shales nationwide [USA Today]. The reason these giant deposits have remained largely untapped, however, is that shale isn’t particularly porous, and so extracting it requires drillers to fracture the rock in multiple places.

However, according to seismologist Brian Stump, it’s not the actual fracturing that may be to blame in this earthquake case. Rather, he points to “injection wells,” which are a way to get rid of the waste water that this gas exploration creates. Each natural gas well produces millions of gallons of wastewater that can be contaminated with salt, chemicals and crude oil. Injection wells dispose of the waste by forcing it deep into the ground under high pressure [Houston Chronicle]. Stump’s team used records of 11 of the tiny earthquakes (which at a magnitude of about 3.0 were too small to cause damage on ground level) to narrow the search for the quakes’ source. Those records pointed them to an area near the Dallas-Fort Worth airport where an injection well sits.

Because that well is close to an old fault, Stump’s team says the heat or pressure that the massive discharge of waste water creates is a plausible explanation for Texas’ quakes. However, they are careful to note that this is simply a plausible answer, and that the link hasn’t been proven. Understandably, Chesapeake Energy, which owns the well, was quick to reiterate that latter point, though the company closed the well last year as a precaution. “A direct, causal relationship between saltwater disposal wells and seismic activity in the DFW area has not been scientifically proven,” spokesman Brian Murnahan wrote in a statement. He declined to elaborate [Houston Chronicle].

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Image: Energy Information Administration (map of major shale gas deposits)

Both of the genes produced enzymes that helped to convert precursor chemicals. One, thebaine 6-O-demethylase (T60DM), had a role in the production of codeine. The other, codeine O-demethylase (CODM) transformed codeine into morphine [Press Association]. Lead author Jillian Hegel, Facchini’s grad student, studied four different poppy relatives and sifted through a library of 23,000 genes to find these two. She put these genes into E. coli bacteria that sat overnight in a flask with a chemical called thebaine that’s present in poppy seeds to see if the bacteria would synthesize the painkillers. “When she came back the next morning, the thebaine was all gone,” says Facchini. “That’s when her eyes got big…. Finding it all had been turned into morphine — that gives a grad student a great sense of power, when they can make morphine” [Science News].

There are several upshots to Hegel and Facchini’s find. First, they say, finding both the enzymes and the genes responsible for them means that scientists are much closer to the possibility of creating these painkillers without the poppy plant, perhaps skirting the social and political morass of agricultural poppy production, the source of heroin [Science News]. Getting vats of microbes to produce the drugs could also be cheaper and more efficient than cultivating vast poppy fields.

In addition, the finding may someday sweep away the inefficient current method of making codeine. The poppy produces it naturally, but in smaller quantity than morphine, so drug-makers usually synthesize codeine from morphine. However, Facchini says, “With this discovery, we can potentially create plants that will stop production at codeine [and so not produce morphine]. We are also working towards the synthesis of codeine and other opiate drugs more efficiently and economically in controlled bioprocessing facilities” [The Independent].

Lastly, there’s the reality that about 10 times as much opium is made for the illegal heroin trade as for the legitimate manufacture of morphine and codeine [The Independent]. Theoretically, scientists could use engineered viruses to shut down the opiate-producing genes in the poppies of say, Afghanistan, to crush the illegal drug trade. But beyond the sheer difficulty of executing such a thing, the political consequences of such hubris could be unpredictable, Charles S. Helling of the State Department’s narcotics division tells Science News.

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Image: flickr / Visualdensity

Saturday’s 3.5-second ’static’ firing of the Falcon’s nine kerosene and liquid oxygen-burning motors took place on a refurbished oceanside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida [ABC News]. Success came on the second try for SpaceX. The company’s first attempt came last Tuesday, but launch technicians aborted with two seconds to go. Now the company has passed the hot fire test, and it says the real Falcon 9 launch could happen as early as April 12. However, the accomplishment won’t come easy: SpaceX’s previous rocket, the Falcon 1, took four attempts before it achieved complete success.

Lots of people are already counting on Falcon 9. The 154-foot-tall rocket is the cornerstone of SpaceX’s efforts to design, build and launch new vehicles to carry pressurized cargo, and perhaps astronauts, to the International Space Station [MSNBC]. SpaceX already holds more than $1 billion in NASA contracts to execute Falcon 9 flights, and Musk’s firm is one of the leading candidates to fulfill President Barack Obama’s plan to have private companies carry NASA astronauts to low Earth orbit and perhaps beyond. Also today, SpaceX announced it entered into an agreement with Space Systems/Loral to put satellites into orbit as early as 2012.

Musk is as confident as ever: With its FAA license to launch granted last week, SpaceX is just awaiting clearance from the Air Force for Falcon 9’s emergency abort system, which would be used to terminate the launch if the rocket strayed from its projected fight path and threatened populated areas. “As soon as the tests are complete and (Air Force) has signed off, we will launch,” said Musk [ABC News].

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A quick note on dark flow: The reason Kashlinsky noticed it is thanks to the cosmic microwave background, a signature left over from 380,000 years after the Big Bang that permeates the universe. “The hot X-ray-emitting gas within a galaxy cluster scatters photons from the cosmic microwave background (CMB),” the NASA press release says. “Because galaxy clusters don’t precisely follow the expansion of space, the wavelengths of scattered photons change in a way that reflects each cluster’s individual motion.” Using data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which mapped the microwave background, the team managed to find this tiny effect when they looked at huge clusters of galaxies, and found something totally unexpected.

What the 2008 find showed was that these galaxies were moving in a way that the distribution of matter in our visible universe couldn’t explain, traveling a million miles per hour in a particular direction. Says Kashlinsky: “This is not something we set out to find, but we cannot make it go away” [US News & World Report]. The new study confirms this weird effect, and finds that it extends farther out, to at least 2.5 billion light years away. Where Kashlinsky’s first study relied upon three years of WMAP data and 700 galactic clusters, the new study grows those numbers to five years of data and double the number galactic clusters. The clusters appear to be zooming along on one particular line aimed at Hydra, Kashlinsky said, but “right now our data cannot state as strongly as we’d like whether the clusters are coming or going,” to or from Earth [USA Today].

While the universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding in all of the directions it can whiz, no one direction should be preferred, which is why the dark flow is so damned interesting. According to our best understanding of how the matter in the Universe was distributed, there’s no way of accounting for this flow. The obvious alternate explanation is a little unnerving: something outside of our visible universe is pulling on the matter that we can see [Ars Technica].

For another explanation of dark flow, check out Phil Plait’s at Bad Astronomy, written after the initial 2008 study.

Related Content:
80beats: Mysterious “Dark Flow” Is Tugging Galaxies Beyond the Universe’s Horizon
Bad Astronomy: Trans-Cosmic Flow Broadens Our Horizon

Image: NASA, the Coma Galaxy Cluster