[BLOG] Some science links

[rfmcdonald]

This will be the first of four posts sharing some of the links I've collected over the past few months, on my sabbatical.

• Anders Sandberg in November posted detailed analysis of what a super-Earth planet--a planet massing twice as much as the Earth--would be like. Using two examples, one of a rocky planet twice the mass of the Earth and one of a watery planet of the same mass, Sandberg did a detailed analysis of what the oceans and atmospheres and geologies and biospheres of these worlds would be like.


• Anthropology.net's Kambiz Kamrani posted about recent evidence suggesting that a fourth hominid species, perhaps homo erectus, had interbred with the Denisovans. Our bushy family tree.


• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling shared images of Titan's methane lakes.


• Centauri Dreams had quite a few posts of note, including a Charles Quarra guest post on the prospect of using beamed power for interstellar travel, and multiple posts by Paul Gilster covering multiple subjects. Very close-orbiting planets like Kepler-78b, ways to search for Von Neumann probes, the origins of Pluto's moons, more on beamed power for interstellar travel, planetary systems like Kepler-56 with planets with wildly tilted orbits, lifeless deserts on carbon-rich planets, the discovery of ancient brown dwarfs, the possible discovery of a gas giant in the Luhman 16 brown dwarf binary, and the cometary clouds of the large and complex Fomalhaut trinary were all high points.


• Writing at The Dragon's Tales, Will Baird linked to a wide variety of stories on human evolution and space science. The potential discovery of the first exomoon, the presence of long-period planets in systems with hot Jupiters, the determination of the inner boundary of a solar-type star's life zone, ways to distinguish between super-Earths and mini-Neptunes, the imaging of the clouds of gas giants and brown dwarfs, models of oxygen dynamics on Europa, Kepler's search for planets in Trojan orbits, imagining what a planet with a single tectonic plate would be like and what tectonics on a lifeless planet would be like, as well as apparent planetary formation in the life zone of a young bright star--all of these are things I've learned there.


• Plus, I've found news at The Dragon's Tales speculations that Denisovans might have crossed the Wallace Line to Australasia, as well as Siberian skeletal evidence hinting at paleo-European ancestry among Siberians (and hence Native Americans).


• The Planetary Society's blogs had plenty of good stuff, including Bruce Betts' post on the search for planets at Alpha Centauri, Emily Lakdawalla's glowing review of the book LEGO Space, artist Adolf Schalfer's description of how he imagined and painted a complex ecology in the atmosphere of Jupiter for Carl Sagan's show Cosmos, and Sarah Hörst's explanation of the complex research into the dynamics of Titan's atmosphere.