NASA has planet-hunting news

NASA has scheduled a press conference for Thursday to announce "big news" about an "intriguing planetary system" located by its Kepler observatory. Kepler, launched in 2009, has identified more that 700 candidate star systems but scientists have been working to distinguish stars with planets from binary stars.

"The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life — much less intelligence — beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive, we may be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime." - Arthur C. Clarke