Two high school students have identified four new planets in distant space about 200-light-years from Earth, making them "the youngest astronomers" to make such a discovery.

Kartik Pingle, 16, and Jasmine Wright, 18, who both attend schools in Massachusetts, participating in the Student Research Mentoring Program (SRMP). Along with the help of Tansu Daylan, an MIT doctor for Astrophysics and Space Research, the students studied and analyzed data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Together they focused on Tess Object of Interest (TOI) 1233, a nearby, bright sun-like star and here they found four planets rotating (旋转) around the star. "We were looking to see changes in light over time," Pingle explained. "The idea is that if the planet transits the star, or passes in front of it, it would periodically cover up the star and decrease its brightness. "

While studying 1233, Pinglé and Wright had at least hoped to find one planet, but were overwhelmed with joy when a total of four were spotted. "I was very excited and very shocked. " Wright said. "We knew this was the goal of Daylan's research, but to actually find a multiplanetary system, and be part of the discovering team, was really cool. "

Three of the newly discovered planets are considered as "sub-Neptunes", which are gaseous (气态的), but smaller to the Neptune that lives in our solar system. While observing the planets, the team determined each one completes their orbit around 1233 every six to 19. 5 days. However, the fourth planet is labeled a "super-Earth" for its large size and rockiness-this one orbits around the star in just under four days.

"We have long been studying planets beyond our solar system and with multi-planetary systems, the two young students are kind of hitting the jackpot. They are really blessed." Daylan said. "The planets originated from the same disk of matter around the same star, but they ended up being different planets with different atmospheres and different climates due to their different orbits. So, we would like to understand the fundamental processes of planet formation and evolution using this planetary system. "

Daylan added that it was a "win-win" to work with Pinglé and Wright on the study. "As a researcher, I really enjoy interacting with young brains that are open to experimentation and learning and have minimal bias." he said. "I also think it is very beneficial to high school students, since they get exposure to cutting-edge research and this prepares them quickly for a research career."

There are few spectacles more unpleasant than a television presenter trying to hang on to a job. When one of the presenters of the BBC program Crimewatch resigned recently, rather than suffer the inevitable indignity of being unfinished and replaced by a younger version, he made the usual hurt noises about his masters' overemphasis on youth. People in the media listened sympathetically before he slid from view to join the ranks of television's has-beens.

The presenter's argument, that the views don't care how old you are so long as you can "do the job," unfortunately is not backed up by the evidence. When you're on TV, viewers are always thinking about whether you're losing your hair or your figure and, lately, whether you've had cosmetic work done. This is what they're actually doing when you think they're listening to the wise things you say. Viewers actually don't understand much of what the job involves, they just see you sitting there looking the part. Like the ability to pet one's head while rubbing one's stomach, TV presenting is just one of those sills. Some of those who possess this skill can hit the big name, inevitably as they become more attached to the lifestyle this brings, however, the more likely they are to overstate the skill.

In reality, if somebody is paying you a lot of money to do a job, it's often on the tacit (心照不宣的) understanding that you may be fired suddenly-it's part of the deal. Unlike football managers, TV presenters pretend not to understand this. If they've had many years being paid silly sums to read a script from an autocue (自动题词机)，it's difficult for them to accept that they've been the beneficiary of good fortune rather than anything else; even harder to face the fact that an editor could all too easily send them to the shopping channels.

Something similar eventually awaits all the people who are currently making fortunes that would have been unimaginable to earlier generations of presenters. One day we'll decide that their face no longer fits and they'll be dragged away complaining about the same ageist policy from which they no doubt previously profited. Show business is a brutal (残忍的) business. The one thing it reliably punishes is age, particularly among women. That's why, at the age of fifty, female TV presenters become female radio presenters and why girl bands planning to re-form need to get it done before they're forty, after which it will get too hard for everyone to suspend their collective disbelief.

Different parts of a health care system have different focuses. A hospital's stroke(中风) unit monitors blood flow in the brain. The cardiac(心脏的) unit is interested in that same flow, but through and from the heart. Each collection of equipment and data is effective in its own field. Thus, like the story of blind men feeling an elephant, modern health care offers many separate pictures of a patient, but rarely a useful united one.

On top of all this, the instruments that doctors use to monitor health are often expensive, as is the training required to use them. That combined cost is too high for the medical system to scan the body regularly for early signs of illness, so patients are at risk of heart disease or a stroke.

An unusual research project called AlzEye, run by Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, in cooperation with University College London (UCL), may change this. It is attempting to use the eye as a window through which signals about the health of other organs could be discovered. The doctors in charge of it, Siegfried Wagner and Pearse Keane, are studying Moorfields' database of eye scans, which offers a detailed picture of the health of the retina(视网膜).

The project will go a step further: with the information about other aspects of patients' health collected from other hospitals around England, doctors will be able to look for more accurate signs of disease through eye scans.

The Moorfields' data set has lots of linked cases to work with—far more than any similar project. For instance, the U. K. Biobank, one of the world's leading databases of medical data about individual people, contains 631 cases of a "major cardiac adverse event". The Moorfields' data contain about 12,000 such cases. The Biobank has data on about 1,500 stroke patients. Moorfields has 11,900. For the disease, dementia(老年痴呆), on which the Moorfields' project will focus to start with, the data set holds 15,100 cases. The only comparable study has 86.

Wagner and Keane are searching for patterns in the eye that show the emergence of disease elsewhere in the body. If such patterns could be recognized reliably, the potential impact would be huge.