Dinky Pluto loses its status as planet

冥王星失去行星的地位

导读：我们从小熟记太阳系九大行星：水星、金星、地球、火星、木星、土星、天王星、海王星和冥王星。可是就在上周四（8月24日）国际天文学联合会投票决定，不再将传统九大行星之一的冥王星视为行星，而将其列入“矮行星”。原来的行星怎么一下子就变成了“矮行星”？是前人的判断错误还是后人的重新定义？……

PRAGUE, Czech Republic - Pluto, beloved by some as a cosmic underdog but scorned by astronomers who considered it too dinky and distant, was unceremoniously stripped of its status as a planet Thursday.

The International Astronomical（天文学的） Union, dramatically reversing course just a week after floating the idea of reaffirming Pluto's planethood and adding three new planets to Earth's neighborhood, downgraded the ninth rock from the sun in historic new galactic（银河的） guidelines.

The shift will have the world's teachers scrambling to alter lesson plans just as schools open for the fall term.

"It will all take some explanation, but it is really just a reclassification and I can't see that it will cause any problems," said Neil Crumpton, who teaches science at a high school north of London. "Science is an evolving subject and always will be."

Powerful new telescopes, experts said, are changing the way they size up the mysteries of the solar system and beyond. But the scientists at the conference showed a soft side, waving plush toys of the Walt Disney character Pluto the dog and insisting that Pluto's spirit will live on in the exciting discoveries yet to come.

"The word 'planet' and the idea of planets can be emotional because they're something we learn as children," said Richard Binzel, a professor of planetary science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who helped hammer out the new definition.

"This is really all about science, which is all about getting new facts," he said. "Science has marched on. ... Many more Plutos wait to be discovered."

Pluto, a planet since 1930, got the boot（解雇） because it didn't meet the new rules, which say a planet not only must orbit（环绕……的轨道飞行） the sun and be large enough to assume a nearly round shape, but must "clear the neighborhood around its orbit." That disqualifies Pluto, whose oblong（椭圆形的） orbit overlaps Neptune's, downsizing the solar system to eight planets from the traditional nine.

Astronomers have labored without a universal definition of a planet since well before the time of Copernicus, who proved that the Earth revolves around the sun, and the experts gathered in Prague burst into applause when the guidelines were passed.

Predictably, Pluto's demotion provoked plenty of wistful（留恋的） nostalgia（怀旧之情）.

"It's disappointing in a way, and confusing," said Patricia Tombaugh, the 93-year-old widow of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh.

"I don't know just how you handle it. It kind of sounds like I just lost my job," she said from Las Cruces, N.M. "But I understand science is not something that just sits there. It goes on. Clyde finally said before he died, 'It's there. Whatever it is. It is there.'"

The decision by the IAU, the official arbiter of heavenly objects, restricts membership in the elite cosmic club to the eight classical planets: Mercury（水星）, Venus（金星）, Earth（地球）, Mars（火星）, Jupiter（木星）, Saturn（土星）, Uranus（天王星） and Neptune（海王星）.

Pluto and objects like it will be known as "dwarf planets（矮行星）," which raised some thorny（引起争议的） questions about semantics（语义学）: If a raincoat is still a coat, and a cell phone is still a phone, why isn't a dwarf planet still a planet?

NASA said Pluto's downgrade would not affect its $700 million New Horizons spacecraft mission, which this year began a 9 1/2-year journey to the oddball object to unearth（发掘） more of its secrets.

But mission head Alan Stern said he was "embarrassed" by Pluto's undoing and predicted that Thursday's vote would not end the debate. Although 2,500 astronomers from 75 nations attended the conference, only about 300 showed up to vote.

"It's a sloppy（草率的） definition. It's bad science," he said. "It ain't over."

Under the new rules, two of the three objects that came tantalizingly close to planethood will join Pluto as dwarfs: the asteroid（小行星） Ceres（谷神星）, which was a planet in the 1800s before it got demoted, and 2003 UB313, an icy object slightly larger than Pluto whose discoverer, Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology, has nicknamed "Xena." The third object, Pluto's largest moon, Charon, isn't in line for any special designation.

Brown, whose Xena find rekindled calls for Pluto's demise because it showed it isn't nearly as unique as it once seemed, waxed philosophical.

"Eight is enough," he said, jokingly adding: "I may go down in history as the guy who killed Pluto."

Demoting the icy orb named for the Roman god of the underworld isn't personal - it's just business, said Jack Horkheimer, director of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium and host of the PBS show "Star Gazer."

"It's like an amicable divorce," he said. "The legal status has changed but the person really hasn't. It's just single again."

(source: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn)

If you knew Emmys like we knew Emmys

如果你像我一样了解艾美奖

导读：在这个炙热的八月底，一场电视盛事又上演了——艾美奖颁奖典礼！艾美奖（Emmy Awards）是美国乃至世界范围影响非常大的一个关于电视节目和制作人员的奖项。在美国，艾美奖被誉为电视界的“奥斯卡奖”，是与格莱美音乐奖(Grammy)、 电影奥斯卡奖(Oscar)以及百老汇的东尼奖(Tony's Awards)并称的美国艺术四大奖项之一。想了解更多有关艾美奖的故事，那就赶快看下面的文章吧！

For those who can't get enough of television's Emmy Awards, we're offering an insider's guide to the history of the ceremony -- from the first Emmy ever handed out, to the reason why they're called Emmys, to memorable moments by some of TV's legendary（传奇的） performers.

So if you're holding or attending an Emmy party, commit the following facts to memory and impress your friends with your knowledge of television's most prestigious（有名望的） night.

Memorable moments

The first six Emmys were awarded January 25, 1949, and the very first went to 20-year-old Shirley Dinsdale, a Los Angeles ventriloquist（腹语表演者）, for being the Most Outstanding Television Personality.

During the 1980 actors' strike, Powers Booth was the only winner who showed up to receive his Emmy. Said he: "This is either the most courageous（勇敢的） moment of my career, or the stupidest."

In 1964, Shelley Winters thanked "the whole motion picture academy."

One month after he refused to accept his Oscar for "Patton" in 1971, George C. Scott accepted his Emmy for his role in Arthur Miller's "The Price" on "Hallmark Hall of Fame."

After winning an Emmy in 1974, Lily Tomlin said: "This is not the greatest moment in my life because on Friday I had a really great baked potato at Niblick's on Wilshire."

Dan Rowan and Dick Martin thanked "Laurel and Hardy and all the others we've stolen things from."

"Saturday Night Live" producer Lorne Michaels thanked New York City "for providing the rejection and alienation that keeps the comedy（喜剧） spirit alive."

In 1951, Red Skelton accepted the Best Comedian（喜剧演员） award by saying, "I think this should have gone to Lucille Ball."

In 1950, when Groucho Marx accepted the honor of TV's Most Outstanding Personality, he picked up Miss Emmy, the former Miss America Rosemary LaPlanche, and carried her off the stage, leaving his statue behind.

No kidding?

The original Academy of Television Arts and Sciences was founded in 1946 by Syd Cassyd, a reporter for a TV trade magazine in Los Angeles and a grip on Paramount's back lot.

The Emmys originally were to be called "Ikes," a short form for the television iconoscrope（光电摄像管） tube, but there was concern they would be linked to Dwight D. Eisenhower. So instead, Harry Lubcke of the Society of Television Engineers came up with "a feminization" of "Immy," a term used for the early image orthicon camera tube（图像正析摄像管）.

Dorothy McManus was the model for her husband, Louis McManus, as he designed the winged "golden girl" holding up the universal symbol of the electron, which would become the Emmy Award statue. He received a plaque（徽章） from the Academy at the first awards ceremony.

When the Emmys were first broadcast in 1949, there were 1 million TV sets in the United States. By the national broadcast of 1955, there were 25 million.

AT&T was nominated for an engineering Emmy -- but lost in 1951 -- for the transcontinental microwave relay system that made possible live coast-to-coast television broadcasts.

The Emmys have been televised every year except 1954, but they were shown for the first time on a national broadcast in 1955. And the January 16, 1957, Emmy awards ceremony was the first to be telecast in color.

TV rift

Ed Sullivan and New York's TV elite（精英） forced the establishment of a separate bicoastal group, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 1957.

From 1955 to 1971, the Emmys were "simulcast" from both New York and Los Angeles to quell jealousies between rival cities, frequently resulting in screens going blank for up to a minute. It was a costly arrangement; NBC paid $110,000 for the first transcontinental hookup.

In 1977, after suits and countersuits, the bi-coastal academies finally agreed to work together. The NATAS, based in New York, manages daytime, sports, news and documentary, international and local awards. The newer Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, located in California, bestows prime-time prizes.

The number of categories for Emmys has fluctuated wildly over the years, from six the first year to more than 40 in many seasons. Even the wording changes, fluctuating from "best" to "outstanding." Once there was a separate category for Westerns, but those "Gunsmoke"-"Maverick" days are gone -- at least for now.

Cable TV programming was not allowed to participate in the prime-time competition until 1987.

Emmy miscellany

Jackie Gleason never won an Emmy, but his pal Art Carney won five for "The Honeymooners."

Deadpanner Ed Sullivan, who caused the bicoastal split in the academy in June 1955, smiled when his show received the Best Variety Series award that year. He never won a personal Emmy in voter competition, but was given a Trustees Award in 1971.

Rod Serling won his third successive writing award in 1957 for "The Comedian," about the struggles of a burlesque king adjusting to TV. The award for the story, obviously based on Milton Berle's life, was presented by Berle.

Robert Young received two awards for best acting for "Father Knows Best" in the 1950s and a third in 1970 for "Marcus Welby, M.D."

The Emmys ceremony for the 1958-59 season is remembered for the notorious "Astaire Affair," when the dancer's first television special, "An Evening with Fred Astaire," won all nine of the awards for which it was nominated, thus establishing an Emmy record. Ed Sullivan asked that the ballots be impounded.

"Huckleberry Hound" was the first syndicated program and the first cartoon series to take home an Emmy, which it did in the 1959-60 season.

Hallmark Hall of Fame's "Macbeth," a $750,000 production filmed on location in Scotland and broadcast as a two-hour color presentation, is considered by many television historians to be the first made-for-TV movie. It received five Emmys at the 1961 ceremony, including one in the rare category, Program of the Year.

(source: http://www.cnn.com)