• more about #thealgebraist
    B: Wait, Red Sun orbiting "Super Earth?" It's Krypton! more »
    FrankenPC: FINALLY! A place to dump all of our garbage. more »
    Bill-Lee: Super Earth? Isn't that the planet from Darkwing Duck where everyone has powers and Darkwing is "Ordinary Guy"? more »
    AZTriGuy: So, here's my question . . . it's taken us this long to figure out that the Moon right next door has water on it, but we can tell that a planet 13 par... more »
    savegaius: you could make so much Ramen Noodles more »
    tipsymongoose: The water world is always the hardest level. Even harder than ice world, lava world, and everything-is-freakishly-larger-than-normal world. more »
    ackthbbft: Entirely made up of boiling water, with a hydrogen-helium atmosphere. Exactly how is this planet like Earth, again? Seriously, just because a planet ... more »
    hamshank: "a giant boiling ball of water" - I sense an export industry that can't fail: cups of tea. more »
    LittleDragon: I say we suit up a black hole ship and head over for a look see. I volunteer. more »
    SJ_Edwards: Ixnay on the life, eh! Boiled, poached or nicely moisturised, will make no difference. At this temperature and pressure, good old H2O is a supersolv... more »
    nagash001: I doubt it's water. So close to the star, it's some kind of perky liquid plasma more »
    TemporalSword: 13 parsecs? That's just over Han's Kessel run! more »
    ThePat: I wonder how quickly the water is boiling off into outer space, because with a thin hydrogen-helium atmosphere (article says .05% of total mass), the ... more »
    joejava: Wow. A sinus-free planet. And their pores. Their pores! more »
    BrendCh06: Hm... so a planet full of boiling water, how does it sustain itself? Wouldn't it just evaporate? Is it just a perpetual rain cycle? It's all very intr... more »
    braak: You are, as usual, completely correct.: I propose we name it Krypton. more »
    Yournamehere!: Scene of the new Kevin Costner movie, "Waterworld: Back To The Hot Tub" more »
    reddingofish: It's stuff like this that will make long space flights much more feasible. more »
    EdificeComplex: So basically the planet is one giant hot tub. I think we've just discovered the Cancun of the galaxy. more »
    ManchuCandidate: Home of the Al dente spaghetti monster? more »
  • #spaceporn

    "Super Earth" Discovered Orbiting A Red Dwarf Star

    Just 13 parsecs away, a planet astronomers are calling a "super Earth" is orbiting a dwarf star. Its radius is over twice that of Earth, and there's something very surprising in its core. More »
  • #horrorhead

    Do We Need Graphic Torture in Our Dystopias?

    Welcome back to Horrorhead, a column all about the connections between horror and scifi. On Battlestar Galactica, there's an ongoing theme of torture: humans gang-rape an imprisoned Cylon; the Cylons beat a man so badly he loses his eye (not to mention all the humans they kill outright); and there's even a little human-on-Cylon washboarding early in the series. These are not scenes that take place entirely offscreen. We see beatings; we see the bloody, freaked-out face of Six the Cylon after she's been raped so many times she can't stand up and has lost the will to eat. The question is, do we need to see these scenes? Would this series be as powerful without them? And by extension, would any torture-laced scifi flick like The Hills Have Eyes or Cube be as enticing if it lost the mutilations or the razor net that falls from the ceiling and reduces living humans to little cubes of flesh? (Spoilers ahead.) More »