This has nothing to do with medicine, but it was perhaps the most engaging speech I heard this weekend at AAAS: "How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming," by Cal Tech astronomer Michael E. Brown.
(The title was officially "Planets, Dwarf Planets and Other Ice Balls at the Edge of the Solar System," but Brown spiced things up by using the more amusing title in his presentation.)
Here are a few tidbits I learned:
• Pluto is about half the size of the moon, ""considerably smaller than anything else that had been called a planet."
When it was first discovered back in the 1930s, some folks tried hard to come up with theories about how it may actually be a lot bigger. Perhaps the best (or worst): its core was surrounded by lots of liquid oxygen, which was invisible, meaning we couldn't see that Pluto was actually pretty hefty.
• Uranus is apparently pronounced "you're-uh-nus", with the last syllable rhyming with "bus." The pronunciation doesn't include the full name of any body part. Well, that's no fun.
• "Dwarf planets" like Pluto aren't actually planets, but astronomers couldn't come up with a more logical way to describe them.
