| Galileo (6) |  |
| Hubble (16) | |
| Kepler (36) | |
| Ptolemy (11) | |
. and co-author of the study citing Galileo galilei and Johannes Kepler as two of the luminaries mystified by the problem.
There have been some incredible esoteric even bizarre explanations; some people believed the bees had an uncanny ability to measure angles.
During these wars Seleucid ruler Antiochus III the Great fought against Ptolemy IV Philopator the fourth ruler of the Ptolemaic Dynasty in Egypt
but Ptolemy didn't. Instead he set up outposts in what is now modern-day Eritrea to get African elephants.
Ptolemy however was able to recover due to missteps by Antiochus and eventually won the battle.
African elephants In reality Asian elephants are smaller than African elephants so some historians speculated that perhaps the Ptolemies were using African forest elephants
Satellites smash debris threatens Hubble An active communications satellite owned by Iridium Satellite of Bethesda, Maryland, slammed into a defunct Russian military communications satellite 800 kilometres above Siberia on 10 february 2009.
The collision sent hundreds of pieces of debris flying at high speed across low-Earth orbit, threatening other satellites and increasing the risk to a NASA shuttle mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope
(see'Kaputnik chaos could kill Hubble'and'Collision debris increases risk to Earth-observing satellites'.
'In the end, the Hubble mission went off without a hitch, and other satellites have yet to be influenced by the shrapnel from the collision.
The week ahead 24 april The Hubble Space Telescope was launched 20 years ago on this day.
slideshow and stories from our archive. www. nature. com/hubble 24-28 april About 13,000 scientists are expected at Experimental Biology 2010 in Anaheim, California.
Satellite sacking The chief executive of a leading German space company has been suspended as from 17 january for allegedly criticizing the European satellite navigation system Galileo,
and publicized in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, claim that Smutny said the Galileo project is a stupid idea and a waste of money.
and includes the latest results from the Kepler mission's hunt for exoplanets. aas. org/meetings/aas217 10 14 january Researchers meet in Paris to discuss the status of the Planck mission,
California. sites. agu. org/fallmeeting5-9 december The first conference on the scientific results from the Kepler exoplanet mission takes place at the NASA Ames Research Park, Moffett Field,
NASA science head John Grunsfeld, an astrophysicist and astronaut who carried out repairs on the Hubble Space Telescope
A twin Earth NASA's Kepler telescope has reached one of its major mission milestones: discovering another Earth-sized planet.
and from the Kepler mission searching for extrasolar planets, are announced at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences in Reno, Nevada. www. psi. edu/dps12
Skeletons show rickets struck the Medici familyas the wealthy rulers of Tuscany and patrons of Leonardo Da vinci and Galileo,
NASA/ESA/M. Kornmessertrue blue planet Using the Hubble Space Telescope astronomers have discovered the deep blue hue of exoplanet HD Â 189733 Â b (pictured in an artist s impression) the first planet beyond the Solar system to have its colour directly measured.
At Hubble s optical resolution, light from the planet and its star typically blend together.
NASA ponders Kepler s futurenasa just can t quit Kepler. On 15  August, the agency ann  ounced that it would stop trying to revive the failed reaction wheels that gave the planet-hunting telescope its precise pointing ability.
Kepler scientists will sort through the proposals and decide by 1 Â November which ones,
To secure funding from the space agency, the Kepler team will have to show that the studies could not be done by other telescopes.
This will be no easy task especially given that engineers are not sure how well Kepler can perform with just two of its four spinning reaction wheels,
"We re in a real quandary, says Kepler principal investigator Bill Borucki at NASA s Ames Research center in Moffett Field, California."
"We just don t know what Kepler can do. With three working wheels (a fourth was a spare),
Kepler was able to exactly counter  balance the persistent push of sunlight, locking on to targets with such precision that light from a particular star always fell on the same tiny fraction of an individual pixel.
a different telescope, says Kepler scientist William Welsh of San diego State university in California. Kepler s drift could be minimized by keeping it pointed in the same plane in which the craft orbits the Sun. But that presents a complication.
Some of the best science is expected to come from follow-up observations of the field of about 150,000 stars that Kepler has been focused on,
and that star field does not lie in the plane. In one proposal offered up by Welsh and his colleagues,
when they pass in front of their parent star they produce a dip in light that can be detected by Kepler even in its compromised state.
which Kepler has recorded only a few transits those that take more than a year to orbit their star.
but Welsh suggests that it might also be possible for Kepler to add statistical significance to Earth-sized candidates for
Kepler s drift could be used to map out the different light responses of the pixels. That calibration,
if detailed enough, could be enough for Kepler to resume its hunt for Earth analogues,
We just don t know what Kepler can do. Daniel Fabrycky, an astronomer at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has an alternative follow-up study in mind.
Like Welsh, Fabrycky wants Kepler to zero in on planetary systems with long orbits, for which the full cycle of these transit-timing variations has not yet been seen.
putting Kepler to work not as a planet hunter, but as a sentinel for near-Earth objects, including asteroids several hundred metres in diameter that might be on a collision course with Earth.
A survey of space rocks would take advantage of Kepler s large field of view. And at least part of the study could be completed with Kepler looking for targets within its orbital plane,
so as to optimize its pointing. Gould has proposed another scheme, in which Kepler would survey stars towards the Milky way s central bulge for signs of planets,
using a technique known as microlensing. Microlensing relies on a prediction of Einstein s theory of general relativity:
By observing microlens planets using Kepler and ground-based telescopes at the same time, differences in transit duration and brightness emerge that can yield the planets mass.
If any of the proposals recommended by the Kepler team seems worthwhile to NASA, they will be examined early next year by a review panel of external scientists.
At that stage, a repurposed Kepler would face its biggest hurdle a competition for the limited pot of funds against nine other astrophysics missions,
including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. On receiving recommendations from the review panel
Not everyone is rooting for Kepler. Doug Finkbeiner, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wants NASA to support missions that are still healthy.
I hope we let Kepler die, he says
Forest management plans in a tanglein the middle of metropolitan San francisco stands an army and many Bay Area residents want it to stay garrisoned there.
The images from NASA s Hubble Space Telescope are part of the Frontier Fields programme which harnesses the phenomenon of gravitational lensing (see Nature 497,554-556;
Satnav success Europe s fledgling satellite navigation system, Galileo, is working well, the European space agency announced on 10 Â February.
#Hubble Catches The Comet ISON Hurtling Toward The Sunfourth of July is the perfect time to watch fiery masses streak across the sky.
This five-second loop of video is a compression of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope over a period of 43 minutes in May during
when Edward Hubble discoverd that the universe was in fact expanding due to some mysterious energy that can't be seen.
Bean has received a 60-orbit allocation on the Hubble Space Telescope to continue his observations on GJ 1214b a sign of the work s importance.
One major push along that front was the $600-million Kepler mission launched in 2009.
#A Kepler research veteran Fabrycky began his UCHICAGO faculty appointment last October. Fabrycky precisely measures the timing of transits the mini eclipses that planets cause as they pass in front of their stars.
So far Kepler has confirmed 105 planet discoveries to its credit and has identified 2740 planet candidates.
As a postdoctoral scientist at the University of California Santa cruz two years ago Fabrycky was a member of a team that discovered six planets orbiting a single star called Kepler-11.#
Bean and his colleagues have made the best observations of planetary atmospheres so far using the Hubble Telescope the Spitzer Space Telescope and in Chile the Very Large Telescope array and the twin Magellan Telescopes.
Since Galileo's time Givnish says people have wondered what determines maximum tree height:''Where are the tallest trees
The Battle took place in 217 B c. between Ptolemy IV the King of Egypt and Antiochus III the Great the King of the Seleucid kingdom that reached from modern-day Turkey to Pakistan.
According to historical records Antiochus's ancestor traded vast areas of land for 500 Asian elephants whereas Ptolemy established trading posts for war elephants in what is now Eritrea a country with the northernmost population of elephants
In the Battle of Raphia Ptolemy had 73 African war elephants and Antiochus had 102 Asian war elephants according to Polybius a Greek historian who described the battle at least 70 years later.
A few of Ptolemy's elephants ventured too close with those of the enemy and now the men in the towers on the back of these beasts made a gallant fight of it striking with their pikes at close quarters
Ptolemy's elephants however declined the combat as is the habit of African elephants; for unable to stand the smell
In 1948 Sir William Gowers reasoned that Ptolemy must have fought with forest elephants that fled from larger Asian elephants as Polybius described.
Did Ptolemy employ African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) or African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) in the Battle or Raphia?
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