Posts Tagged ‘Carot-7b’

One course I loved in college but nearly failed was astronomy. Once a week for an entire semester, I and 149 other Hoosiers jammed into a humid Swain West lecture hall to be mesmerized for three hours by slideshows, videos and a monotone professor who never left his stool for anything.

I never cut class. I was never late and never left early. I paid attention. I took great notes and even taped many of the lectures to review later. But none of that made a difference. At the end of every lecture was a quiz that I routinely failed. I did lousy on the mid-term exam and squeaked by on the final to earn a D in the end. It was my worst grade in college and still today, I don’t get why because I’m still facinated by space — all the stories, photos and video grab my attention every day as I comb through news and information sites online, like today’s story from the BBC about how astronomers have discovered a rocky, Earth-like planet they’ve named dubbed Corot-7b outside our solar system that is as close to something like Earth anyone’s found so far.

The planet discovery is cool. The story was a good read. But how I found the story was the best.  I used Google’s new Fast Flip to thumb through online news sites, which is supposed to mirror old-school thumbing through a newspaper.