NASA said its Kepler spacecraft has spotted ''Earth's bigger, older cousin'': the first nearly Earth-size planet to be found in the habitable zone of a star similar to our own.

Though NASA can’t say for sure whether the planet is rocky like ours or has water and air, it's the closest match yet found.

The planet, Kepler-452b, is about 60% bigger than Earth, NASA says, and is located in its star's habitable zone, where life-sustaining liquid water is possible on the surface of a planet.

A visitor there would experience gravity about twice that of Earth's, and scientists say the possibility of it having a rocky surface are ''better than ever''. While it's a bit farther from its star than Earth is from the sun, its star is brighter, so the planet receives about the same amount of energy from its star as Earth does from the sun.

Kepler researcher Jeff Jenkins said, ''The planet almost certainly has an atmosphere, although scientists can't say what it's made of. But if the assumptions are correct, kepler-452b's atmosphere may be thicker than Earth's. ''

It takes 385 days for the planet to orbit its star. ''Because it has spent so long orbiting in this zone—6 billion years—it's had plenty of time to brew life,'' Jenkins said.

''That's an opportunity for life to arise, if all the necessary ingredients and conditions for life exist on this planet, '' he said in a statement.

Kepler-452b is too far away for humans to visit. But the discovery of this new Earth-like planet can tell us a lot about what’s possible for the future of space travel. ''The next step in the process is to do follow-up missions to find planets similar to kepler-452b, but much closer to Earth, '' said Peter Coughlin, a Kepler research scientist. ''We could do a lot more research into those planets, and even start to think about visiting one day. ''

The Dead Sea is an amazing wonder of the world:the lowest exposed spot on Earth,where the water is so full of salt that bathers float right to the top.

But today the Dead Sea is drying up, and its banks are collapsing. The water level is dropping close to 4 feet every year. The main part of the lake is now around 950 feet deep—about 15%shallower, and a third of the surface area, compared to its shape half a century ago.

“You’ve seen a living disaster in front of your eyes,“ says Jake Ben Zaken, an Israeli who says he operates the only passenger boats on the Dead Sea.

As the lake recedes, it changes the landscape around it in both beautiful and harmful ways. Beautiful salt formations are revealed where the water dries up. But there are also terrible scenes of beaches and parking lots swallowed up by sinkholes along the shore.

Solutions have been proposed to replenish(填满)the Dead Sea, but no significant action has been taken to prevent its further destruction. Climate change makes recovery of the lake seem even further out of reach.

The Dead Sea is a landlocked lake that’s partly in Jordan, Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The lake—named the Dead Sea because it contains too much salt and is not suitable for aquatic(水生的)life—has been drying up for decades.

”It’s a human-made problem," say environmental researchers and officials. In a region where water is rare, Israel, Jordan and Syria in the last several decades have diverted(改道)the freshwater sources that feed the Dead Sea, for drinking water and irrigation. Plus, Israeli and Jordanian companies evaporate(蒸发)Dead Sea water to harvest its rich minerals for export. The part of the lake with Israeli hotels, a popular spot for tourists to float in Dead Sea water, is actually an artificial evaporation pool in the lake’s southern basin.