In the news - a new earth and and an old book?

In my ongoing quest for knowledge, I often overlook the news as being full of celebrity gossip, political rumourmongering and bad news about killings, wars etc. From time to time there are some real gems. There were two that stood out this week.

The first concerned the news that scientists may have discovered a new earthlike planet. It orbits a star called Gliese 581 (they've got to come up with a better name, surely) and its radius is 1.5 times bigger than Earth. According to scientists models, it is likely to have an average temperature of between 0 and 40 degrees celsius, so assuming there is water it would be in liquid form, and they think the planet is either going to be rocky or full of oceans. It's 20.5 light years away so we are not likely to be able to visit anytime soon alas. It fills me with such a sense of awe to think that there might be life out there, so close (cosmically speak) and yet so out of reach. One day, it is highly likely that our descendants will visit this earth-like world... Of course there's no pictures yet - we don't have telescopes big enough to see it, but we can detect indirect signs of a planets existence such as the gravitational 'wobble'. In the next couple of decades however, scientists are hoping to have telescopes that can identify other clues as to what a plent is like such as the gases in its atmosphere. Exciting times could be ahead...

The other piece of news was about an old book. It was actually prayer book written in the 13th century by a scribe called John Myronas. Instead of using new parchment, the scribe used pages from 5 existing books and scrubs the writing from it before writing on the newly blank parchment. This is what is known as palimpsest. Anyway it was discovered in 2002 that one of the books that had been wiped clean was a unique work by Archimedes. Modern imaging techniques allow people to read the text underneath that had been wiped all those centuries ago. More recently, another of the books was identified as the only known manuscript by Hyperides, a Green politician of the 4th century BC. Now, a third book has been identified: an early commentary on Aristotle. What is so amazing is that if 3 works of such importance can be found in the same prayer book, what other texts lie hidden, waiting to be discovered?

Read more about the Archimedes Palimpsest here.