Exoplanets aplenty, Kepler says, and some may be Earthlike. That female sex drug moves neither the Earth nor the FDA. BP's oil spill, mental health, and Congress.
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REACH FOR THE PLANETS. Hundreds of new planets. How can anything be more significant this week than the data from the Kepler space observatory? Significant in the long run, anyway. Kepler has so far counted hundreds of new planets out there among the stars (and five star systems that appear to contain more than one).
Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel at Starts with a Bang produces a calculation that made a pretty big bang in my day. Siegel says the Kepler data, which come from only the 100,000 or so stars the observatory is observing, imply that there are a minimum 1.4 billion planets just in our own galaxy. And that's really a minimum, because Kepler, which NASA launched on its planet-finding mission in 2009, is only seeing planets that orbit edge-on to their stars.
Yes, most of those planets will be hostile to life-as-we-know-it, and even to life-as-we-don't-know-it-yet. But surely it's plausible that a few of those 1.4 billion worlds could be home to what Carl Sagan called Beings.
And that's just a minimum. And just our galaxy, one of many billion.
[pause here for breath-catching and contemplation]
At Nobel Intent earlier this week, John Timmer forecast, correctly, that Kepler news reports would focus on the data withheld on 400 candidate planets that are smaller — that is, more nearly Earthlike — than the ones announced. Up to now, most reported exoplanets were giants, for the simple reason that bigger distant objects are easier to detect than smaller ones. But, Timmer says, "for at least those planets close to their host stars, there seem to be a lot more Earth analogs than super-Jupiters."
The decision to withhold those data was made months ago, according to Timmer. The delay was partly to grant publishing priority to the scientists involved, and to NASA. (Can you imagine the acclaim, and the riches, that will accrue to the scientist(s) who find the first Earthlike planet — not to mention the government-funded fairy dust that could fall on the poverty-stricken agency that backed them?) And, oh yeah, the delay is also because they need the extra time to weed out false positives.
Kepler isn't the only planet hunter out there. At Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait describes the robotic TRAPPIST, the TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope, situated in the Chilean high desert by the European Southern Observatory. A peculiar name choice, since the last thing we want from TRAPPIST is silence. The telescope can also take smashing snaps like the dazzling swirl of the Tarantula nebula published with this post.
SEX, LIES, AND WHAT WOMEN WANT. Here on Earth, the Earth-shaking news from Kepler drew significantly less attention than the apparent failure of Boehringer Ingelheim's female sex drug, flibanserin, to make the earth shake for women.
I expect that simply reflects population expertise. Few of us know much about exoplanets or even telescopes, but everybody's an expert on female sexuality.
And of course in the News You Can Use department, unreachable sexual satisfaction handily beats unreachable planets even when both are conjectural.
Heidi Ledford says at The Great Beyond that a report prepared for a US Food and Drug Administration advisory committee meeting today (Friday) "concludes that although women taking the drug reported more sexually satisfying experiences, they showed no statistically significant increase in sexual desire." (This conclusion strikes me as confusing, or maybe I mean confused. It rates sexual desire more highly than sexual satisfaction. I doubt everyone — male or female — would agree. But the drug seems to present problems for a number of other reasons, so never mind.)
Gary Schwitzer has written a number of posts at his HealthNewsReview blog about journalists' uncritical embrace of the unsubstantiated claim that 40% of women suffer from female sexual dysfunction. This week he took both NBC and CNN.com to task for that, and for their friendly reports on flibanserin, even though it's likely to be voted down by the FDA. At the WSJ Health Blog, Katherine Hobson describes the FDA report and also briefly explores that still-unanswered (and possibly unanswerable) question: what is female sexual dysfunction?
One of the things female sexual dysfunction is is potentially quite lucrative. The Pharmaletter says industry sources estimate the annual market for female libido drugs at $2 billion. Don't be too dazzled, though. The market for male drugs like Viagra alone is more than twice that. A figure that doesn't take account of all those male enhancement products whose joys are enhanced in my Inbox daily.
MORE OIL ON TROUBLED WATERS. Along with those heartrending oiled birds, much of the oil spill story has focused on economic losses, especially to those who fish the Gulf of Mexico. But there are other kinds of losses.
Liz Borkowski reminds us of one of them at the Pump Handle, a blog on public health matters. She hopes that the big compensation package BP has just agreed to will do something to ease the human victims' pain, especially if claims are paid faster than those following the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Borkowski spends much of her post on the mental suffering the spill has wrought, not least because, unlike Exxon Valdez, the much bigger Gulf oil spill happened in a place that not so long before had been torn apart by Hurricane Katrina.
Borkowski tries to pull Deepwater Horizon lessons from mental health studies done after Exxon Valdez. One research group, she reports, has speculated that technological disasters like the BP oil spill may have longer-term consequences than natural disasters like Katrina because human agents are directly responsible and compensation may therefore take much longer to negotiate. These technological disasters can lead to a particularly savage kind of social deterioration.
She concludes:
BP's $20 billion won't be able to make up for the harm this disaster is doing to people's mental health. If the establishment of an independent fund can reduce the amount of years-long litigation that residents have to endure, though, it might at least avoid exacerbating the problem.
At Columbia Journalism Review's Observatory, Curtis Brainard rounds up tales of how journalists have been thwarted in covering the BP spill and some steps that have attempted to improve access. But it's not clear that even publicity given the thwarting is having much impact. BP and other officials may believe that the public is not much concerned about the barriers journalists are facing in covering this thing — and, given that the public's contempt for journalists may match their contempt for oil barons, the oil barons may be right.
At Green, John Collins Rudolf considers Wednesday's House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on the BP oil spill and notes that the four non-BP oil companies that testified joined together in "throwing BP under the bus." Executives from Chevron, Shell, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips all claimed "that it was negligence by BP — not the inherent risks of drilling in ultra-deep waters, or lax regulation of the industry — that led to the uncontrolled blowout." Their own deepwater operations, they assured Congress comfortingly, were safe.
At SciAm Observations, Larry Greenemeier recounts the follow-on hearing Thursday, which starred BP CEO Tony Hayward. Hayward didn't respond directly to the slurs of his peers, but he frustrated lawmakers by refusing to play scoundrel,
.....telling them several times that he would draw no conclusions or admit BP's culpability in the disaster until the company's internal investigation has been completed (although he provided no timeline for that to happen). The investigation covers seven different areas of the Deepwater operation, including cementing, casing, integrity pressure management, well control procedures and blowout preventers. "When the investigation is complete we will draw all the right conclusions," he said.
In his Green post, Rudolf describes one of the non-BP deep well operations, at an oil field discovered by Chevron a decade ago, which is down nearly as far as the Deepwater Horizon's 35,000 feet. The Chevron well goes more than 5 miles down, buried under 7,000 feet of water and more than 20,000 feet of rock and sand. It's about 20 miles west of the Deepwater Horizon.
Rudolf recounts that "60 Minutes" correspondent Peter Klein says that a Chevron manager has assured him that robots could handle any leak at the wellhead.
The well's name, believe it or not, is Blind Faith.
