And the Hello, welcome to the naked scientist with me, Chris Smith and with Kate Lamble.

Hello and this week we track down potentially habitable planets, investigate nanosuits for insects

and find out why your hearing gets quieter after a concert.

Plus we report from the British Society for Gene and Cell Therapy's conference at Royal Holloway University in Surrey.

If you'd like to get in touch with us here at the Naked Scientist, email studio at the Naked Scientist.com, tweet at naked scientists or find us on

Facebook the naked scientists podcast is powered by UKfast dot code okk UK UK. with an update of this week's science news.

This week I am joined by Dan Cleary from Science magazine, Philip Broadwith from Chemistry

World and Peter Rogers from E-Life for a look at what's been making science headlines.

Dan, what have you got for us?

Well the story I've got this week is about exoplanets, planets around other stars.

There's an announcement this week that the Kepler satellite has discovered the best

candidate so far for a habitable planet around a distant sun-like star so So it could have oceans, it could have land, it could be

habitable by some sort of creature, but we don't know that much about it, only

that it's the right size, it's the right distance from its sun, and you know it looks a little bit like Earth.

So what are we looking for when we're looking for habitable planets rather than just

any old lump of rock or gas? What's the indicators?

Well all they can tell with this particular method that Kepler uses. Because planets are so small and so

dim compared to the star they're orbiting around, you can't see them directly, or's very very hard to see them directly so you

have to detect them by other methods. Kepler uses the method of transit so

it essentially looks at a star measures how bright it is, and keeps watching it, and if occasionally it

gets a very, very tiny bit dimmer, that means that a planet has passed in front of it. So the only information you get are about its orbit, so how long

it takes to orbit the star, and the size of the planet. so you can tell its radius.

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