Luchtime Reads: 4/19/13 Habitable Planets and Saving the Manta and Mobula Rays

 Relative sizes of Kepler habitable zone planets compared to
Earth as shown in this artist's rendition [Reuters]

Here are two good articles about earth and the environment from Al Jazeera. The first is pretty cool as the Kepler space telescope and : Astronomers find most Earth-like planets yet

Scientists using NASA's Kepler space telescope have found the best candidates yet for habitable worlds, including a pair of potentially life-friendly planets orbiting the same star, officials have said. Two of the five planets orbiting a sun-like star called Kepler-62 are squarely in what astronomers call the habitable zone, researchers said in the journal Science as was reported on Thursday. The habitable zone refers to planets that are are neither too hot nor too cold, and could possibly contain water. "These two are our best candidates that might be habitable," said William Borucki, Kepler science principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Centre. Continue Reading

And the second one is about the : Diminishing ray of hope concerning the manta and mobula rays:

Marine biologist Daniel Fernando has been surveying Sri Lanka’s fishing industry for over two years. Today, he is in the western coastal town of Negombo, at one of the country’s busiest fish markets. He is passionate about saving manta and mobula rays from extinction. Fernando carefully examines a pile of rays on the pier, collecting DNA samples for population studies. Researchers estimate that fisheries the world over net more than 100,000 such rays a year, mostly in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and India. Many catches remain undocumented. Until recent years, most fishermen avoided them. Their meat is cheap and they damage fishing nets when entangled.Connect with 101 East But that has changed. The burgeoning demand for their gill plates in Chinese medicine – said to cleanse human blood of toxins – has increased fishing pressure worldwide, turning subsistence fishery into a commercial export industry.Continue Reading