Rare blue diamond sells for $48.5M

Rare blue diamond sells for $48.5M

GENEVA

An exceptionally large blue diamond sold Wednesday for $48.5 million – a new record price for any jewel at auction, Sotheby’s said, culminating two Geneva auctions in which a private Hong Kong collector on both times bought a rare colored diamond to honor someone named Josephine.

The 12.03-carat “Blue Moon” diamond, set in a ring, was said to be among the largest known fancy vivid blue diamonds and was the showpiece gem at the Sotheby’s jewelry auction.

The Blue Moon — so-called in reference to its rarity, playing off the expression “once in a blue moon” — topped the previous record of $46.2 million set five years ago by the Graff Pink, Sotheby’s said.

No empty nest: Young women living at home

Young women are living with their parents or relatives at a rate not seen since 1940 as more millennial women put off marriage, attend college and face high living expenses.

A Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data found that 36.4 percent of women between the age 18 and 34 lived with parents or relatives in 2014, the most since at least 1940, when 36.2 percent lived with family.

It is a very different world for women now, though, despite the “return to the past, statistically speaking,” says Richard Fry, a senior economist at Pew.

Fry says young women are staying home now because they are half as likely to be married as they were in 1940 and much more likely to be college-educated. Economic forces such as increasing student debt, higher living costs and economic uncertainty, are also playing a role.

Is planet Venus’ twin?

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA.

There’s a new rocky Earth-size planet on our galactic block, and it’s a sizzler.

Astrophysicists on Wednesday revealed the newfound world, GJ 1132b, named after the small nearby star that it orbits.

Even though the mercury can hit 450 degrees at this planet, it’s cool enough to have a thick Venus-like atmosphere. Planet GJ 1132b is just 39 light-years away, or 239 trillion miles away, within the atmospheric study range of the Hubble Space Telescope.

A team led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Zachory Berta-Thompson discovered the planet in May, using telescopes in Chile.

Obesity rates still rising in US adults

NEW YORK

Obesity still is rising among American adults, despite more than a decade of public-awareness campaigns and other efforts to get people to watch their weight, and women have now overtaken men in the obese category, new government research shows.

For the past several years, experts thought the nation’s alarming, decades-long rise in obesity had leveled off. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report today that the obesity rate has climbed to nearly 38 percent of adults, up from 32 percent about a decade earlier. Experts said they had no explanation for why the obesity rate appears to be rising.

Oldest stars found

SYDNEY

Australian astronomers said today they have discovered the oldest stars ever seen, formed just 300 million years after the birth of the universe. The stars lie at the heart of the Milky Way but were formed long before the galaxy grew around them.

“These pristine stars are among the oldest surviving stars in the universe and certainly the oldest stars we have ever seen,” said Louise Howes from the Australian National University in Canberra.

Combined dispatches