Washington, Dec 16 : NASA has outlined its top ten science, exploration and discovery stories of 2008, the year in which the agency celebrated its 50th birthday.

The top ten accomplishments are:

London, Dec 16 : A team of astronomers have reported that a new camera is giving them the sensitivity they need to spot habitable extrasolar planets, which are nearly as small as Earth.

According to a report in Nature News, the team observed a planet - WASP-10b, which is around three times the mass of Jupiter orbiting the star WASP-10.

The team determined that the star is about 300 light years from Earth, and measured precisely how much the star dimmed as the planet passed in front of it.

Washington, Dec 16 : Researchers from Tel Aviv University suggest that older fathers are likely to have boys with poor social abilities.

The study revealed that older dads are more likely to have boys with autism and lower IQs.

"There is a growing body of data showing that an advanced age of parents puts their kids at risk for various illnesses," said lead researcher Dr. Mark Weiser from TAU's Sackler School of Medicine.

"Some illnesses, such as schizophrenia, appear to be more common the older parents get. Doctors and psychologists are fascinated by this, but don't really understand it. We want to know how it works," he added.

Washington, Dec 16 : A new model has revealed that one-third of all solar systems may contain super-Earths, which indicates that life may be abundant in the Universe.

Cold "Super-Earths", which are giant, "snowball" planets that astronomers have spied on the outskirts of faraway solar systems, could potentially support some kind of life, they have found.

"We know there are a lot of super-Earths out there, and the next generation of telescopes will be even better at spotting them," said Scott Gaudi, assistant professor of astronomy at Ohio State University.

Washington, Dec 16 : The boundary between the Earth''s upper atmosphere and space has moved to extraordinarily low altitudes, observations made by NASA instruments onboard an Air Force satellite have shown.

The observations were made by the Coupled Ion Neutral Dynamics Investigation (CINDI) instrument suite, which was launched aboard the U. S. Air Force''s Communication/Navigation Outage Forecast System (C/NOFS) satellite on April 16, 2008.

Washington, Dec 12 : Physicists at the MIT have built a calibration tool that will aid in the search for dark matter, by revealing when hypothetical particles are detected.

Several research projects are underway to try to detect particles that may make up the mysterious “dark matter”, believed to dominate the universe’s mass.

But the existing detectors have a problem.

They also pick up particles of ordinary matter - hurtling neutrons that masquerade as the elusive dark-matter particles the instruments are designed to find.