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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

A research model indicates that Earth-like planets orbiting at a sufficient distance from a binary star's barycenter could support liquid water and habitable conditions [nasa.gov]:

If an Earth-size planet were orbiting two suns, could it support life? It turns out, such a planet could be quite hospitable if located at the right distance from its two stars, and wouldn't necessarily even have deserts. In a particular range of distances from two sun-like host stars, a planet covered in water would remain habitable and retain its water for a long time, according to a new study in the journal Nature Communications.

"This means that double-star systems of the type studied here are excellent candidates to host habitable planets, despite the large variations in the amount of starlight hypothetical planets in such a system would receive," said Max Popp, associate research scholar at Princeton University in New Jersey, and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany.

Climate variations on Earth-like circumbinary planets [nature.com] (open, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms14957) (DX [doi.org])

In entirely unrelated news, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and MIT have created a solar-powered device that can condense up to 2.8 liters of water out of the air daily [sciencemag.org]:

The system Wang and her students designed consists of a kilogram of dust-sized MOF crystals pressed into a thin sheet of porous copper metal. That sheet is placed between a solar absorber and a condenser plate and positioned inside a chamber. At night the chamber is opened, allowing ambient air to diffuse through the porous MOF and water molecules to stick to its interior surfaces, gathering in groups of eight to form tiny cubic droplets. In the morning, the chamber is closed, and sunlight entering through a window on top of the device then heats up the MOF, which liberates the water droplets and drives them—as vapor—toward the cooler condenser. The temperature difference, as well as the high humidity inside the chamber, causes the vapor to condense as liquid water, which drips into a collector. The setup works so well that it pulls 2.8 liters of water out of the air per day [sciencemag.org] [DOI: 10.1126/science.aam8743] [DX [doi.org]] when run continuously, the Berkeley and MIT team reports today in Science.

Original Submission