Source: http://the-gadgeteer.com/2011/12/30/deal-of-the-day-samsung-galaxy-nexus-for-verizon/
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Source: http://the-gadgeteer.com/2011/12/30/deal-of-the-day-samsung-galaxy-nexus-for-verizon/
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WASHINGTON ? Military officials have not ruled out disciplinary action as a result of the cross-border attack that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, but no one has been punished to date, the Pentagon said Tuesday.
An investigation into the incident concluded that a persistent lack of trust between the U.S. and Pakistan, and a series of communications and coordination errors on both sides, led to the attacks.
Navy Capt. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, said military leaders will use the final report on the investigation to determine if anyone should be punished. Those decisions, he said, would be made by officers in the chain of command, depending on whether they found that mistakes were made by U.S. or NATO personnel.
As a result of the probe, the top U.S. general for the Middle East issued a list of improvements Monday he said must be made to keep similar mistakes from happening.
U.S. Marine Gen. James N. Mattis, commander of U.S. Central Command, ordered commanders in Afghanistan to improve coordination of operations along the Afghan-Pakistan border with Pakistani military, and ensure that all border stations are listed correctly on maps.
Mattis also ordered commanders to confirm border post locations before beginning operations along the border. And he ordered commanders to share military practices and procedures with the Pakistanis so they can better understand U.S. operations.
It's not certain the new orders will solve the problems, because Pakistan refused to participate in the investigation. It still is unclear why Pakistani troops initially fired on U.S. soldiers who had landed by helicopter near a village close to the border as part of a mission to go after insurgents.
The U.S. investigation found that the Pakistani forces fired first and that U.S. troops acted in self-defense. But U.S. efforts to determine if there were Pakistani forces in the area were foiled by bad maps, poor coordination and Islamabad's failure to provide the locations of its border posts.
The investigation, headed by Brig. Gen. Stephen Clark, an Air Force special operations officer, found that U.S. forces relying on erroneous maps and poor communications, determined that there were no Pakistani forces or border posts in the area. So they concluded that they were being fired on by insurgents.
U.S. forces also believed that since they had landed in distinctive, noisy Chinook helicopters and fired off warning flares, any friendly forces would have realized that they were shooting at American or NATO troops.
The report also revealed that a U.S. C-130 gunship briefly flew about two miles into Pakistan airspace during the assault.
Pakistani army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas has rejected the U.S. report and insisted that Pakistani forces retaliated only after coalition helicopters "started engagement." And he denied that Pakistan failed to notify NATO of the location of the two border posts that were attacked.
Pakistani officials have said the report is unlikely to repair the severely damaged relationship between the two countries.
In response to the incident, Pakistan shut down key border supply routes for the Afghanistan war and threw the U.S. out of its Shamsi air base in southwestern Baluchistan province. The base was used to maintain drones deployed in strikes against insurgents hiding in safe havens in Pakistan's lawless border region.
Pakistan has closed the border on at least two other occasions after disputes with the U.S. but reopened the supply routes after less than two weeks. American officials have acknowledged the closures are likely to last longer this time.
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BEIJING (Reuters) ? Police in China's restive far-western Xinjiang region killed seven "kidnappers in a hostage rescue", official media reported on Thursday, calling the suspects members of a "terror gang".
The kidnappers took two people hostage late on Wednesday in Pishan County in the southern part of Xinjiang, said the region's official news website (www.tianshannet.com).
When police responded "the assailants resisted arrest and launched assaults, killing one police officer and injuring another", said the report.
Seven of the suspects were shot dead and four were wounded and caught, said the report. The two abductees were freed.
The reports did not say explicitly whether the alleged kidnapping was related to ethnic tensions in the region, where many members of the largely Muslim Uighur minority resent the presence of Han Chinese and the controls of the central government.
"Pishan, an oasis county near the Taklamakan Desert, is located in the ethnic Uighur-dominated area of Xinjiang that is no stranger to violence," Xinhua news agency said in a report.
Calls to the Xinjiang government by Reuters were not answered.
In July 2009, Uighurs rioted against Han Chinese residents in Urumqi, the regional capital of Xinjiang, killing at least 197 people, mostly Han, according to official estimates.
Xinjiang sits astride south and central Asia, and China sees it as a bulwark in this volatile part of the world, making it all the more jumpy about unrest.
In September, courts in Xinjiang sentenced four people to death for violence in two cities over the summer that left 32 people dead.
The government blamed the incidents in Kashgar and Hotan -- both in the majority Uighur southern part of Xinjiang -- on religious extremists and separatists who want to establish an independent state called East Turkestan for their people who speak a Turkic language.
(Reporting by Chris Buckley; Editing by Ron Popeski)
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Ace Metrix scores ads based on perceived effectiveness by a selection of randomly selected viewers, which it says are ?representative of the U.S. TV viewing audience.?...
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Tom Gores might succeed. He might fail.
But at least he's engaged in every detail of making the entire Pistons product a more enjoyable customer experience. The early reviews are favorable. There are cosmetic changes at the Palace. Platinum Equity put almost $10 million into facility upgrades. There will be changes in the game-day presentation. It appears they've finally - and thankfully - abandoned the blast fires and annoying sonic booms during the player introductions.
It's a different kind of "Goin' To Work," the long time Pistons marketing mantra that was in dire need of a face-lift.
"Work In Progress" would be a more appropriate slogan.
It'll take time getting the Pistons back to where they were four years ago, when the Palace stayed packed on most nights. The public was turned off by an aging playoff contender and a disastrous ownership transition that left the Pistons in limbo. When anger subsided, it was replaced with something even more dangerous - apathy.
This was the worst possible year for an NBA lockout as far as the Pistons were concerned. Not many people missed them - not with the Tigers just missing the World Series, the Lions clinching their first playoff appearance of the millennium, Michigan State and Michigan enjoying comparable success in both football and basketball and, of course, the Red Wings being . . . the Red Wings.
"The biggest story for us for this year was getting a new owner," Ben Gordon said. "That might not excite a lot of people because you might not immediately see the results on the floor like you wanted. But we keep talking about having a clean slate and starting fresh. That's what getting new ownership and seeing how excited he is about getting started is like. It's a fresh start."
At some point blaming the overmatched head coach is no longer an acceptable excuse for poor execution on the floor and equally poor attitude off it. The Pistons are there now.
Charlie Villaneuva told reporters recently that former head coach John Kuester either didn't know how to or didn't care to use him properly, strictly using the 6-foot-11 forward as a perimeter three-point launcher.
Gordon rendered his first two years here an unbearable nightmare from which he's finally - and happily - awakened, adding that he didn't think anybody was used to his respective strengths the last two years.
That's not inaccurate, but if they're serious about a "fresh start," they must start holding themselves more accountable for performance struggles rather than simply dumping on Kuester's head coaching legacy here.
This isn't Lawrence Frank's first NBA head coaching circus. He isn't a novice like his two immediate predecessors: Kuester and Michael Curry. He enjoyed success in New Jersey. And though everybody's already had more than their fill of Piston player lip service the last four years - and three previous head coaches - there does appear more genuine appreciation for Frank's knowledge and his ability to best communicate that knowledge.
Players aren't stupid. They knew that Kuester was hired two summers ago because then-owner Karen Davidson didn't want to invest big money in an experienced head coach with the franchise on the selling block. That instability only made a poisonous environment even more toxic .
A new owner won't immediately translate into more victories, but at least the Pistons can now move forward.
Source: http://www.islandpacket.com/2011/12/25/1907307/new-owner-plus-new-coach-means.html
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DUBLIN: Facebook agreed to overhaul privacy protection for more than half a billion users outside North America, after a three-month investigation found that its privacy policies were overly complex and lacked transparency.
The probe by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) at the US group?s international headquarters in Dublin said users were at risk of unknowingly publicizing personal details.
For example, users might not be aware that uploading their photos made them publicly searchable until they change the setting on their Facebook page. Facebook?s Ireland office handles all of its users outside of the United States and Canada.
The group operates the world?s largest social networking website with 800 million users, the majority of them outside of North America.
?This was a challenging engagement both for my office and for Facebook Ireland,? Irish Data Protection Commissioner Billy Hawkes said. ?Arising from the audit, FB-I (Facebook Ireland) has agreed to a wide range of ?best practice? improvements to be implemented over the next six months.?
The improvements include giving users more information about how Facebook and third party apps handle their personal information, deleting certain details more promptly and giving users a clear warning that it uses facial-recognition technology that automatically tags them in photographs.
Another formal review will take place in July.
Facebook said making the changes would require intense work. ?The DPC?s review of our existing operations highlighted several opportunities to strengthen our existing practices,? said Richard Allan, the director of public policy at Facebook EMEA.
Last month, Facebook?s founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said the group had made ?a bunch of mistakes? in how it handled personal data. It reached a settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission in November over a privacy complaint.
Irish officials had received 22 complaints about Facebook from privacy campaign group Europe V Facebook and three from the Norwegian Consumer Council.
Source: http://arabnews.com/lifestyle/offbeat/article553027.ece
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By IANS, Sunday, 25 December 2011, 18:30 Hrs
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Beijing: China will allow commercial use of its next-generation internet system by 2015 after putting it on trial in 2013, a media report said.The new system expands the capability of the Internet Protocol address and improves the speed of the internet. It is also expected to create employment, the Chinese cabinet said in a statement Friday.
The new technology, called IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6), is an upgrade of the current IPv4 whose IP addresses are about to be all used up, People's Daily reported.
The new IPv6 technology opens up a pool of internet addresses that are a billion to trillion times larger than the total pool of IPv4 addresses and are virtually inexhaustible for the foreseeable future, experts said.
The IPv4 was developed in the early 1980s and has a capacity of just over 4 billion IP addresses.
The new IPv6 network bandwidth can reach 2.5-10 gigabytes per second, 100 times faster than the current speed.
The government will try out the system on a small scale by the end of 2013 before expanding it in 2014 and 2015.
China is the world's biggest internet market with about 500 million online users.
Chinese companies are also encouraged to develop new technologies on the new IPv6 network, such as cloud computing, Internet of Things -- uniquely identifiable objects (things) and their virtual representations in an Internet-like structure -- and Three Network Convergence -- an initiative that hopes to integrate telecommunications, TV and radio, and the Internet in the world's most populous country.
Since 2004, the IPv6 networks have been built in some research organizations in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou for testing.
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Posted at: 12/25/2011 7:45 AM
Updated at: 12/25/2011 6:22 PM
By: WNYT Staff
Print Story? Email to a Friend
ALBANY - Police confirm several light displays at the Hannaford Capital Holiday Lights display in Washington Park were hit by vandals this weekend.
According to Albany Police, graffiti was spray painted on several displays.
Others had their electrical lines cut.
Early estimates put damage in the $25,000 range
Source: http://wnyt.com/article/stories/s2427831.shtml?cat=300
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AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) ? A light dusting of snow in north Texas delivered a rare white Christmas to this drought-stricken state, but the majority of the nation was seeing mild weather on Sunday.
Snow showers glazed parts of the Northeast as well, with snowy road conditions cited as a factor in a two-vehicle traffic collision that left four men dead in the town of Palermo, Maine, on Sunday.
But weather forecasters said 99 percent of Americans would see more green and brown for their Yuletide celebrations -- along with plenty of rain, according to Accuweather.com.
Other extreme weather included freeze warnings posted in the farm-rich Central Valley of California, gale warnings near the Great Lakes, and high winds that claimed the life of a young girl and left thousands of homes without power in and around Seattle.
Tobiah Leonard, 9, was killed when part of a fallen tree crushed the roof of the sport utility vehicle she was riding in with her family en route to a holiday gathering on Whidbey Island, about 40 miles northwest of Seattle, said Keith Leary, a spokesman for the Washington State Patrol.
Her father, also a passenger in the SUV, was flown to a Seattle hospital with injuries to his back and neck from the freak accident but was expected to survive, Leary said.
The wet Christmas in the Texas panhandle and Permian Basin brought some cheer for drought-weary Texans, who were seeing snow in Lubbock and Amarillo on Christmas morning and rain in the eastern part of the state.
The worst drought on record in Texas this year stoked devastating wildfires, killed as many as half a billion trees, and prompted the most serious urban water-use restrictions ever in the state.
By mid-afternoon on Sunday, at least 4 inches of snow had fallen in Amarillo, making it the second snowiest Christmas in that city's history, National Weather Service forecaster Stephen Bilodeau said.
And with winter weather advisories in effect until 6 a.m. on Monday, there was a chance that Amarillo's record for snow accumulation might be broken before midnight.
Bilodeau said he would have preferred that the snow quit early and left the afternoon safer for Christmas Day travel.
"It's a little bit too much," he said. "The white Christmas through the beginning of the day was good, but now these poor people are getting out into this stuff. There have been a few accidents, and it's ruining a few people's day today."
Not so for native Texan and conservationist Don Alexander, 55, who was spending the holiday with his wife's family in Midland, and enjoying his very first white Christmas.
"The snow is a nifty bonus," Alexander said, as his college-aged daughter posted snow pictures on her Facebook page. "The snow will certainly make this particular Christmas memorable. Winter isn't very scenic in West Texas, so the layer of snow is a nice effect. The bad part is having to wipe down the dog's paws every time he goes outside and then back in."
Far to the north, public safety officials in Maine said four men were killed in a head-on crash between an SUV and another vehicle on a road made slippery by light snowfall in Palermo, about 60 miles northeast of Portland. Police said the collision ranks as Maine's deadliest traffic wreck this year.
Very little fresh snow was expected to fall elsewhere throughout the day on Sunday, according to Accuweather.com. But a storm in southern Ontario was forecast to move into Quebec on Sunday night and drop snow near the Great Lakes, with some accumulation likely overnight.
Residents from Watertown, New York, to Bangor, Maine -- many of whom are off work on Monday in observance of the Christmas holiday -- could wake up to an inch of snow on the ground Monday as that storm moves East.
The Weather Service posted a wind advisory for western Washington state on Sunday, warning of gusts reaching 50 miles per hour through mid-afternoon.
Utility companies reported some 32,000 homes and businesses without electricity in Seattle and the greater Puget Sound region during the day, mostly from tree limbs blown into power lines.
Most of the Pacific Northwest was experiencing mild weather on Christmas Day, while states like Colorado and New Mexico had lingering snow leftover from a pre-Christmas storm.
(Additional reporting by Zach Howard and Laura L. Myers. Editing by Tim Gaynor and Steve Gorman)
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With tablets?finding their way into more and more households, there is a sensible need for a child-friendly solution. For most, giving your child free rein over an expensive device like the iPad 2?($499-$829, 4.5 stars) may not be the best idea. Not only are parents afraid of damage to their precious pads, but they should also be concerned about exposure to inappropriate content. That's where Fuhu's Nabi Kids Tablet ($199.99, sold exclusively at Toys R Us) steps in. The 7-inch? tablet features two distinct Android environments; one sheltered interface catering to kids and one nearly full featured, traditional Android interface. The Nabi is not a toy, but it is also not quite a tablet either. Its collection of pre-loaded apps and content, a customizable child-safe interface, in a tablet that comes with a thick rubber bumper. And some problems with functionality and responsiveness hold the Nabi tablet back.??
Design and Display
The first thing you will notice about the Nabi is its striking red, oversized rubber bumper. This thing is really solid and looks like it could withstand most anything a child might throw at it (or throw it at). But the bumper isn't integrated into the tablet; it's just a peel-off gel case. It's too easily removable and doesn't make the tablet waterproof. It does offer solid drop protection, but it also makes the Power and Volume buttons difficult to press.
Under the rubber bumper is an unassuming white plastic slab. Together with the bumper, the Nabi measures 10.6 by 7.7 by 3.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 1.2 pounds; bigger and heavier than the Kindle Fire?($199, 4 stars) at 7.5 by 4.7 by .45 inches (HWD) and 14.6 ounces, but far better equipped for the rigors of playtime. The Nabi sports a 7-inch, 800-by-480-pixel TFT display, a low resolution you're more likely to find on a phone than a tablet. It's an upgrade over child-oriented tablets like the LeapFrog LeapPad Explorer's ($99, 4.5 stars) 480-by-272-pixel display, but not as nice as the 1,024-by-600 screens on high-quality 7-inch tablets like the the Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet?($249, 4 stars). The screen is bright, and viewing angles are pretty narrow. The biggest problem with the Nabi's display is unresponsiveness. In my tests, it often took multiple touches to get the desired response. This was while navigating through the tablet's interface, and playing games like Cut the Rope.
The tablet is equipped with a mini HDMI port, so you can connect it to an HDTV for playback, and a front-facing camera. For connectivity, there's 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
OS, Apps, Performance
The real draw of the Nabi Kids Tablet is the kids-only interface it lays on top of the now-obsolete Android 2.2. Kidz Mode is a child-safe, stripped-down environment that basically consists of oversized app icons, as well as shortcuts to Nabi's child-friendly Web and multimedia content. Any parent worried about what kind of trouble their kids can get into will appreciate the walled-off nature of Kidz Mode.
Parents can customize what apps appear in Kidz Mode, deciding for themselves what is or is not appropriate for their child. The tablet comes preloaded with games, educational apps, and childrens' books and videos. You get Angry Birds and Cut the Rope, 30 preloaded childrens' books with audio tracks for reading along, and Fooz Kids University, which is math training software for elementary schoolers. Kidz Mode also features a section of kid-safe Web shortcuts to third-party sites like Cartoon Network.
Though the browser supports Flash, which is used heavily in the third-party websites, the games and content didn't work very well on the Nabi in my tests. The sites were clearly meant to be enjoyed on a real computer, with little mobile, let alone tablet, optimization. For instance, one Cartoon Network link leads to a Flash-based game, which loads properly, but requires keyboard and mouse controls to work, which the Nabi lacks.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/x3r4SDvt9vo/0,2817,2397906,00.asp
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home > Finance > Fiscal and Tax Policy Research on Automotive Manufacturing Industry of Independent Innovation
?Abstract? With the economic globalization accelerates, competition from all walks of life intensified increasingly, while independent innovation is the main routing selection to achieve an important competitive predominance, auto manufacturing is no exception. Automobile manufacturers is an important carrier of its independent innovation, and also is the most intensive and active region. In the process of independent innovation in the automobile manufacturing industry, the Government played the role of the boosters, supporting the manufacturing of automotive innovation activities through a series of fiscal and taxation policiesIn recent years, the automotive manufacturing industry is growing to be an important engine of China?s economy and will become a pillar industry of China?s national economy. China?s current financial and taxation policies have already yielded some progress to encourage independent innovation in the automotive industry, but there are still some places needing to be Improved. Therefore, in order to continue to encourage China?s automobile manufacturing industry for independent innovation, it is necessary to combine the automotive industry innovation to improve the characteristics of the fiscal and taxation policies to support and boost the further development of the automobile manufacturing industry.In this paper, to improve the capability of independent innovation of automobile manufacturers is the starting point and focus, and the taxation and finance policy of automotive industry is the research center, many analysis methods are adopted, such as theory expatiation, anatomy of the status quo and reference from foreign experience, respectively explored three parts of the independent innovation of automobile manufacturers, they are: models, enterprises and the basis for fiscal and taxation policies to support the independent innovation of automotive manufacturers.On this basis, the active role of the current fiscal and taxation policies on automotive manufacturing was objectively evaluated from a realistic point of view, while institutional defects of the current fiscal and taxation policies were point ed from several different aspects, such as: the Government failed to effectively share the risk of independent innovation of automobile industry, out the to support the an in independent innovation, and from has, tax rebate policy of export lacks of flexibility, expenses deduction in R&D is unreasonable, and lack of financial and taxation policies in Guiding consumption of automobiles; From then on, to make analysis on preferential policies, which is made by the Government of United States, Germany, Japan, South Korea and other countries to support the independent innovation of automobile manufacturers, from the types and the ways. Then point out that their fiscal and taxation policies focus on to promote research Union, to guide investment in research and development, to expand the scope of financial subsidies and to optimize the taxation policy and so on.Finally, in allusion to our present and future objectives and development strategic to propel independent innovation of vehicle manufacturing, we proposed China?s finance and taxation support policy be on the basis of maintaining the current stability and continuity of China?s fiscal and taxation policy, to take political research Union, improve the policy of deducting the research expanses, effectively use tax leverage, allow to set up special funds for automobile research and development, and to further expand the scope of financial subsidies and related measures, Thus further improving the finance and taxation policies on independent innovation of China?s automotive manufacturing industry .
Title: Fiscal and Tax Policy Research on Automotive Manufacturing Industry of Independent Innovationr. kelly x factor finale andy cohen andy cohen ron paul pro bowl voting blake griffin
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Country star Mindy McCready?s estranged mother has issued a plea to Arkansas authorities to reunite her with her grandson in time for Christmas, three weeks after he was taken into foster care. Th?
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Researchers, scientists, and astronomers -- both amateur and professional -- have added hundreds of planets to the rolls of confirmed worlds orbiting other stars in the past few years, and the number is accelerating due to interest and thousands of sighted possible planets revealed by the various telescopes scanning the heavens.
But of all the hundreds of confirmed extra-solar planets thus far, not one of them had been found to be of Earth's size or smaller. This week, scientists announced in Nature that two such planets had been found, one of Earth's relative size and one somewhat smaller, and that those two Earth-sized planets were orbiting a Sun-like star as well.
Dr. Francois Fressin, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, led the study that found the two worlds. Noting that the discovery touched off a "new era" in extra-solar planet exploration, according to BBC News , Fressin noted that the worlds were found circling Keppler-20, a star that had previously been found to be the center of a planetary cluster of three planets.
The two planets, Keppler-20e and -20f, are believed to be rocky entities, much like the inner planets of our own Solar System. The outer world, -20f, is believed to perhaps once have had an atmosphere. Both were once further from their star and have gradually been drawn inward, the scientists believe.
"We know that these two planets may have migrated closer to their Sun," Fressin told BBC News. "(The larger of the two) might have been an Earth twin in the past. It has the same size as Earth and in the past it could have had the same temperature."
Keppler-20e is smaller than Earth, measuring at 0.87 of Earth's radius. The larger exoplanet is nearly the same size as earth and measures 1.03 of Earth's radius, making it just a bit bigger than Earth. Both lie outside the habitable zone -- and too close to their parent star -- that scientists believe is the most conducive to sustaining life as it is generally understood to exist.
What makes the Fressin, et. al., significant is that it marks the first discoveries of near-Earth-size planets. All other planets detected prior to the study had been fairly larger than Earth. In fact, according to the study, before the detection of Keppler-20e and -20f, the smallest extrasolar planet found had measured 1.42 times the size of Earth.
The search for Earth-like and Earth-sized planets has been ongoing from the start. But the detection of such small worlds is not as simple as it might seem. Although planets are found by studying the gravitational "wobble" of the parent star (a "wobble" generally means that something of mass is affecting the star's orbit and/or rotation), they are often confirmed via their transit shadow on their parent star. Relative size is determined in this manner as well.
Fressin was part of the team that announced in early December that they had found an Earth twin. The BBC reported that, although the planet, Keppler-22b, was 2.4 times the size of our own planet, it was found within the "Goldilocks" or habitable zone. Keppler 22b is about 15 percent closer to its sun than our planet and has a higher average temperature (22 Celsius as opposed to the 14-15 Celsius enjoyed by Earth).
The announcement was accompanied by news at the first Keppler Conference that the Keppler telescope had identified another 2,300 candidate planets. Of those, 207 were believed to be near Earth's size.
Fressin noted that the new discovery is possibly more important than that of Keppler-22b.
"With every new discovery we're getting closer to the 'holy grail' of an Earth-like planet around a Sun-like star," he said. That "holy grail" would be a planet that was similar in size, had a like composition, had a similar atmosphere, and orbited at the relative same distance from the sun -- a true Earth twin.
Prior to the Keppler-22b discovery, scientists had announced the finding of several super-Earths. The first, Gliese-581d, was announced in May. Then HD 85512 b was revealed in August.
Thus far, over 700 planets have been confirmed to exist, according to MSNBC. Of that number, only a small fraction have been found to be in the Goldilocks Zone of habitability. And now, two, one Earth-size and one smaller, can be added to the growing number of detected worlds, although not as candidates of supporting life conditions that are Earth-like.
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