Take one Sun-like star, two scant Saturns, one maybe-Earth, and combine over high heat, and you've got Kepler-9, the latest addition to our growing catalog of planetary systems and the first sample of 400 elite planet-candidates that the Kepler Space Telescope team has been keeping under wraps.

Scientists analyzing data from Kepler, NASA's flagship planet-hunter, announced earlier this week that they have confirmed two Saturn-sized planets in tight orbits around Kepler-9, one of more than 100,000 stars in Kepler's field of view. These gas giants create mini-eclipses each time they pass in front of their parent star--that's how Kepler spotted them. Now, follow-up observations from the Keck telescope in Hawaii have verified that these periodic blips really are planets. Just a bit smaller and less massive than Saturn, the planets orbit closer to their star than Mercury does to the Sun. Because their orbits bring them so close to each other, they exert a measurable gravitational tug on each other: The inner Saturn is speeding up and the outer one slowing down by a few minutes every go-round.

But what about that maybe-Earth I promised? Until its mass is confirmed by follow-up observations, it's just an "Object of Interest," but here's what we do know: It orbits every 1.6 days or so and is about 50% larger than Earth. It's not the smallest exoplanet discovered so far--earlier this month, a European team announced that a planet candidate with as little as 1.4 Earth masses could be the record-breaking seventh member of a planetary system only 127 light-years away--and it would be scorchingly hot. So while it might be "Earth-sized," it is definitely not "Earth-like." We'll have to wait a while for truly Earth-like planets to start appearing in Kepler data.

For more on the hunt for Earth-like planets, check out NOVA scienceNOW's Hunt for Alien Earths.

Whether you slap on whatever's handy or put together a well-coordinated ensemble, your outfit makes some sort of fashion statement. But imagine wearing clothes that could, literally, speak for themselves.

A lab at MIT has designed special fibers that can detect and emit sound. The team described exactly how they accomplished this in a paper in Nature Materials.

MIT scientists have designed smart fibers thin enough to be woven together.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Yoel Fink, MIT.

Hi all -- Today I'm posting for guest blogger Rhitu Chatterjee, Science Reporter for PRI's The World radio program. With Rhitu's help, The World is starting a special partnership with NOVA to share science content, so you'll be hearing much more from her in the future. In the meantime, you can listen to her work on The World's science podcast.

From Rhitu:

On August 12, Science reported the discovery of a new pulsar in deep space. The find is exciting, but how it was found is arguably just as compelling.

First, the discovery. I won't bore you with the pulsar's name -- it's dry, numerical, and hard to remember. Suffice it to say it's a rare kind of pulsar that is located some 17,000 light-years from our planet. Pulsars are a kind of neutron star, formed when the core of a giant star collapses after a supernova. They are dense and emit pulses of radio waves, sort of like a lighthouse beacon in space.


Evidence for the pulsar lay hidden in data collected by the Arecibo radio observatory in Puerto Rico.
Image credit: Courtesy of the NAIC - Arecibo Observatory, a facility of the NSF

"Pulsars are some of the coolest objects in astronomy," says study leader Bruce Allen, who directs the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover, Germany. Allen was more than happy to talk about the discovery, but he was equally animated talking about how it came about.

We know scientists can manipulate the most basic units of life in the lab. Now they've made plastic copies of our body's natural defenders, antibodies.

Courtesy of Hoang Xuan Pham, University of California, Irvine

UC Irvine chemistry professor Dr. Kenneth Shea recently reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society that this plastic antibody rescued mice that had been exposed to lethal doses of melittin, the toxic component in bee venom.

How did scientists manage to make more of these biological bodyguards without using any living organisms?

NASA may not be an agency known for its commitment to aesthetic filmmaking, but they've managed to produce one of the most beautiful clips of footage I've watched in years.

The film below is a space shuttle launch from the perspective of a solid rocket booster, one of the giant white rockets attached to the belly of the shuttle during its ascent. Thanks to a tiny camera and contact microphone attached its frame, you can ride along with it as it sends the shuttle into orbit, then free falls back to earth. There's not much going on visually until the boosters separate at about the two-minute mark--but after that, it's a film even Stanley Kubrick would be proud of.



This clip was shot during STS-124, a mission flown by the shuttle Discovery to deliver a new Japanese module to the International Space Station.

Got a favorite science-related video? Send it our way! Just comment with a link below.

Pop quiz: How many stylists did Lindsay Lohan have on call when she was released from jail earlier this month? Got it? Now, how many Energy Innovation Hubs will the Department of Energy pick to receive more than $300 million of funding over the next half-decade?The answer to Question #2, by the way, is three. Three is five less than eight, which is the number of Energy Innovation Hubs the DOE laid out in its 2010 budget request. Congress declined to fund the remaining five would-be hubs--more on that later. First, let's talk about the hubs they did fund.

Remember Donald Rumsfeld's chestnut about the "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns?" Neuroscientists can add one more category to that list: unknown knowns, things we know without even realizing that we know them.

Or, things we see without realizing that we see them. Patients with a rare condition called blindsight are blind due to damage to the primary visual cortex, the part of the brain that consciously processes information from the retina. But when scientists probe deeper, it turns out that these patients do have access to some visual information after all--they just aren't conscious of it.

So far on this blog, you've read about the various scientists and events we've visited in our year-long quest to report the most exciting, mind-blowing advances in materials science. This, of course, is all in the name of creating our four-part NOVA miniseries, "Making Stuff."

As the host of the show, I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that it's been the experience(s) of a lifetime. I've been hang gliding. I had an MRI. I spent a weekend on a Navy nuclear aircraft carrier. I rode in a demolition derby (in a 1970's car with no seatbelts). I swam with--and actually got to pet--nine-foot reef sharks in the Bahamas. This should be a VERY entertaining show, provided I survive.

But you can't spend 110 days with a film crew and producers without racking up a few items for the blooper reel, and we've had our share. Here are a few that you probably won't see in the finished show.

Attack of the Fedex Crow
In April, we visited a huge Fedex sorting facility in Oakland, CA. Behind this Fedex depot's parking lot were seven modestly sized metal sheds, filled with thousands of stacked fuel cells, each the size of a CD case. These Bloom boxes, as they're called, permit a company (and, someday, a home) to live completely off the electrical grid. The Bloom boxes convert natural gas into Fedex's own private electricity feed.

Anyway, I was doing a "standup" (talking to the camera) at the Fedex facility's front door, when I received the ultimate disapproval rating--from a crow standing directly overhead at the edge of the roof. Let's just say there's a reason I didn't turn my back to the camera for the rest of that sequence.