The News Is Weird Sometimes: Part 84

What do you do when an iron mine, necessary to the well being of your town, structurally undermines (ha) the ground below, threatening to swallow the town whole? Well, if you're Kiruna, Sweden, the solution is spent a billion dollars and move the entire town a few miles. Yes, the whole town. The process won't be quick, spread out over decades, but the logistics required for moving a town, however slowly, must be daunting. I'd like to tell you more about this endeavor, but unfortunately the mayor of Kiruna, a certain Patrick Star, could not be reached for comment on the decision to take Kiruna and push it somewhere else, and reports of Alaskan Bull Worm activity in the area could not be confirmed.

A New Entry in The "Things You Never Thought Would Be Transparent" Files

Credit: Liangbing Hu

If you're a fan of Star Trek, you probably remember the scene of The Voyage Home where Scotty goes looking for transparent aluminum. You know, this scene. When you watched that, you may have thought, "Transparent aluminum? How absurd, there's no way that could possibly exist!" Or maybe you thought "How interesting that Star Trek managed to predict such an interesting technology such as transparent aluminum," because it is a material that actually exists. It's used in the military, but is too expensive to have practical, day-to-day applications in the regular world. But I bet you didn't think, "How dull, transparent aluminum. I wish they'd made a really odd material transparent. Something like wood." Well, strange hypothetical person, your request has been answered!

Yes, scientists at the University of Maryland announced that they had made transparent wood. It's not a complicated process, all you have to do is soak the wood in a fancy chemical bath to remove the lignin, which turns the wood white, and then soak it in an epoxy, which makes the wood clear. What, you may ask, is the point of transparent wood? Or maybe you didn't ask, because the answer is pretty obvious. Window replacement, namely in houses. Transparent wood is stronger than glass, and more importantly, doesn't shatter like glass does. The process hasn't been perfected yet, so you won't be replacing your window glass with wood anytime soon, but this is still really cool. Those are just two words that I never thought I'd be using together. Transparent wood.

Kepler Finds Many New Exoplanets, But No Earth Analog

The Kepler Space Telescope has been through some hard times in its life. It's discovered hundreds of exoplanets, even as not one, but two of its stabilizers has failed, forcing the team behind Kepler to modify its mission. Then, in recent weeks, it went into emergency mode, raising concerns that even the extended mission would be brought to an end before its time. Luckily, Kepler made a full recovery, and now, it's in the news again. It's even good news this time. Astronomers announced that Kepler has discovered 1,284 new exoplanets. This is a huge number, for reference, before this announcement, we had discovered around 2,000 exoplanets. Thanks to these new planetary confirmations, that number has increased by about 60 percent. Even more remarkable is that of the roughly 3,200 confirmed exoplanets, Kepler has found 2,235 of them. It's done some good work.

Of course, we all know what the crown jewel of exoplanet hunting is, and the fact remains that we haven't found a true Earth analog yet. There are a couple of planets that stand out among this latest crop, but there's something about them all that plays spoiler. One orbits a star like ours, but is much bigger than Earth, another is the right size, but orbits a red dwarf and is almost certainly tidally locked. There is another Earth out there, there are probably millions, if not billions of them. We just haven't found it yet.

New Type of Comet Discovered

Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

We all know what comets are. There may be some variation between each one, some are bigger and more pristine than others, and some put on a spectacular show as they sail past the Earth. But they're all basically "dirty snowballs". Comets are mostly ice, with some rock mixed in. As the comet falls closer to the sun, the ice begins to vaporize, forming a tail that can stretch for millions of miles behind it. They're all the same because they come from the same basic place. Sure, there may be half a light year between the Kuiper Belt and the outer Oort Cloud, but there's not a whole lot of difference in the materials in an Oort Cloud comet and a Kuiper Belt comet. They're all big interplanetary icebergs left over from the formation of the solar system. At least, they were. Not anymore.

To be honest, it's almost cheating to call Comet C/2014 S3 an actual comet. It has a 860 year long orbit, which is very comet-like, it enters the inner solar system like a comet, but it has very little ice and has a very minimal tail. An analysis of the limited dust from the comet's tail revealed that the comet is mostly made of rock. That makes it more of an asteroid than a comet. Indeed, the astronomers who discovered S3 theorize that the comet is actually from the inner Solar System, but was flung outwards early on in the formation of the solar system by some larger body. Comet S3 might be one of the most well-preserved relics of the formation of the rocky inner planets in the entire solar system. It's spent most of its time floating in the cold of the Oort Cloud, away from the harshest portion of the solar wind. Finding more objects like this comet would give clues as to how exactly the solar system was created, specifically how much material was in the early inner solar system.