Health & Science

Is the nest half-empty or half full?

By Rivki Jungreis

Special to Bay Currents

Many women, after their children have become young adults and fled home to follow lives of their own, experience a sense of purposelessness and a feeling of melancholy. They no longer have anyone dependent on them daily.

Others feel energized by their new sense of freedom, and excited at the thought of embarking on a new job or being able, for the first time, to pursue hobbies or other interests.

It's In The Stars

A new, powerful NASA telescope has spotted two new objects in deep space that remain mysterious. They are circling around stars, but at 26,000 degrees Fahrenheit, they’re simply too hot to be mature planets.

The heavenly bodies, viewed by the Kepler telescope launched in March, are even hotter than the stars they orbit. They have much higher temperatures and are larger than any planets in our Solar System, NASA says.

"The universe keeps making strange things stranger than we can think (of) in our imagination," Jon Morse, head of astrophysics for NASA, told the Associated Press.

NASA researcher Jason Rowe -- who discovered the objects through the telescope named for the 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler -- calls them "hot companions."