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Consumer safety: you connect the dots

Here are two separate but related stories. One is about lunch boxes (h/t Melanie of Just a Bump in the Beltway fame). One is about cronyism and sucking up to business in the Bush Administration. First lunch boxes: Story #1, lunchboxes: In 2005, when government scientists tested 60 soft, vinyl lunchboxes, they found that one in five contained amounts of lead that medical experts consider unsafe -- and several had more than 10 times hazardous levels. But that's not what they told the public. Instead, the Consumer Product Safety Commission released a statement that they found "no instances of…

Cape Falwell in our future?

Sarah Silverman is a comedienne on cable's Comedy Central, and although I haven't seen her new show, I've seen the trailers while watching The Daily Show. On one of them she is talking to school children and saying something like, "If they can put a man on the moon, they can put a man with AIDS on the moon." Then there's a pause while the times for her show are hyped. When she returns she adds, "And then maybe they can put everyone with AIDS on the moon." Or something like that. It's funny. Sort of. Until you read the latest report of Congress's non-partisan investigative arm, The General…

The puzzle of the age distribution of H5N1 cases

A paper that appeared a week ago seems to have made its way to the wires. I had intended to post on it but didn't get around to it. But I guess the time has come. Two medical geographers have written a letter to CDC's journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, about what many have already observed: 90% of the WHO cases of H5N1 in humans are under the age of 40 years old. Using information on 169 of the current 271 cases, Matthew Smallman-Raynor and Andrew D. Cliff, medical geographers at the Universities of Nottingham and Cambridge in the UK find: Subject to multiple selection biases in the…

H5N1 vaccine: patch me through?

Exploration with new vaccine technologies is moving forward rapidly, although given the usual pace of the science and then necessary tests for safety and efficacy it isn't likely we will have a bird flu vaccine sooner than two or three years from now. Maybe that's enough time. Maybe it isn't. It would have been good if we'd have started earlier, but we didn't. Anyway, here's the latest entry, a skin patch vaccination (TransDermalImmunization, TDI). Naturally the news comes to us not through a scientific publication but through a press release. How else do you raise money these days? (That's a…

Ruling priorities: reigning cats and dogs

Many Americans were outraged when they learned the fur collar on their new made-in-China coat was really cat fur or dog fur. I guess the outrage at the sacrifice of what we know as a companion animal (aka pet) for clothing is understandable. If we kept mink or fox as pets it might elicit the same reaction. The fact that birds are common household pets in other parts of the world but not in North America or Europe seems to make it all right to cull them by the millions in a bird flu outbreak, but I've carried on about this sensitivity/insensitivity issue before and how it depends on whose pet…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: the atheist wars

The arguments over atheism are getting pretty raucous. It's not coming just from the religious right. It's also on the secular left (examples here and here, or here on Science blogs here and here). Apparently there is supposed to be a new kind of atheist, the fundamentalist atheist: intolerant, rigid and deliberately offensive to the many gentlefolk believers that certainly exist. The two biggest targets for this charge are Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Daniel Dennett is getting off easy and the new book (Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam ) by Michel…

Brunswick, North Carolina: Ground zero for stupidity

The Brunswick school district is still arguing about teaching creationism. As is typical, the usual clueless ideologues from the community are getting up there in front of the board and babbling. Look at this argument: The topic came up after county resident Joel Fanti told the board he thought it was unfair for evolution to be taught as fact, saying it should be taught as a theory because there's no tangible proof it's true. "I wasn't here 2 million years ago," Fanti said. "If evolution is so slow, why don't we see anything evolving now?" That statement makes no sense. The slower…

Pneumonia

Some people find posts like this tiresome. There are so many things that need doing and so little time and resources to do them. Adding to the list makes our eyes glaze over. I understand. But that doesn't make this any less of a Big Deal. Last week CDC was notified of another 22 pediatric deaths from swine flu. They didn't all occur in the same week, but the total for this flu season is now 74. At this rate hitting 200 pediatric deaths -- deaths insomeone under the age of 18 -- seems likely. Most of the flu season is still ahead of us. These swine flu deaths are pneumonia deaths. Each is a…

Why I am getting both seasonal and swine flu vaccines and why you should, too

I've been asked a number of times why I am bothering to get both flu vaccines this year (the seasonal flu trivalent vaccine and the swine flu vaccine when it is my turn). I am in the older age group (last in line for swine flu vaccine) and it is my group that is hit the least hard from the swine flu virus. But there are a lot of us and we're still being hit. I don't know if I will be one of the unlucky few in my age group who draws the short straw or not, and I'd rather get vaccinated with an acceptably safe vaccine than take a chance in winding up having a machine breathe for me or not…

Why we need to launch a cyberattack on Florida

I spend a lot of time at a computer keyboard typing about biological viruses like influenza A, but computer networks are also subject to self-reproducing parasites of one kind or another and we continue to have a layperson's fascination with those organisms, too. I say "organisms" because try as I might, I can't figu®e out any criteria that distinguishes them from the carbon-based ones we mainly write about here. But that's another topic. This post is about yet another kind of harmful parasite, right wing politicians with only a couple of neurons firing, one of which they are using to…

Swine flu: planning for the bogeyman

Queens, a borough of the city of New York, seems to be a hotspot for swine flu and a New York Times reporter on the city beat, Anemona Hartocollis, has been writing very astute and perceptive pieces from there. Yesterday she had one on the problem posed by the "worried well" who are flooding Emergency Rooms in quest of reassurance. Articles about worried parents who bring relatively well kids to the Emergency Room (ER) are not uncommon. They usually include interviews with harassed and overburdened emergency room doctors and nurses dismayed at the unnecessary demand and its consequences for…

When is a pandemic not a pandemic?

Is it a pandemic or is it not a pandemic? Since the world has never had a chance to make a call like this at the outset of a pandemic, nobody is quite sure how to handle it. The usual definition -- an epidemic (an increase in cases beyond what is expected) of global dimension -- has a lot of wiggle room and WHO and everyone else is busy wiggling. One reason is not whether this meets the definition or not but what the consequences might be of calling this "a pandemic": Britain, Japan, China and other nations urged the World Health Organization on Monday to change the way it decides to declare…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: correcting your personal information

So what do you do when a big organization insists on maintaining false information about you? You'd demand they remove it, right? More than 100,000 people have recently downloaded "certificates of de-baptism" from the Internet to renounce their Christian faith. [snip] John Hunt, a 58-year-old from London and one of the first to try to be "de-baptised," held that he was too young to make any decision when he was christened at five months old. The male nurse said he approached the Church of England to ask it to remove his name. "They said they had sought legal advice and that I should place an…

The food industry gets religion

I might be an atheist but I'm glad when the food industry "gets religion." How observant they will be is another question, but for now, they are making noises to suggest they know which side their bread is peanut-buttered: The Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) issued the following statement from GMA President and CEO Pam Bailey regarding the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act cosponsored by U.S. Senators Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire. Additional cosponsors include: Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Richard Burr of North Carolina, Christopher J. Dodd of…

Children's health and tobacco

DemFromCT continues his public health series over at DailyKos, thus also continuing to make my early week blogging easier. This week is a brief look at this year's flu season, already in full swing, including what is happening in pediatric deaths from flu. He follows this with another interview, this time the American Lung Association's Director, National Advocacy, Erika Sward. Topics are timely: SCHIP (the Children's Health Insurance bill, just signed into law) and tobacco control. These topics are intimately connected. Children are harmed by second hand smoke and are the next generation of…

Talking to passengers and cell phones

I'm on the road today. I'm a member of an external advisory committee for a research program at a university about an hour by car from my own. Not bad duty. You get to listen to scientists talking about science all day (some of us actually like that) and you get asked your opinions (whether well founded or not). But it's winter, there's a storm brewing and the rush hour traffic on the interstate at 7 in the morning is very heavy, cruising along at 60 miles an hour. I'm driving my 14 year old shitbox Volvo sedan with the hood that looks like it will pop up as I drive (it won't; in fact I'm…

Bailouts, my car and pandemics

I'm sitting here reading Tuesday's Wall Street Journal -- what? Revere subscribes to the WSJ? No, but for reasons known only to Darwin, every couple of days a copy is delivered to my door, each with someone else's address on it, and never the same someone else two times in a row -- so, anyway, I'm reading the WSJ about the auto industry bailout goings on, and there's an article about how auto parts suppliers are going under, many whether there's a bailout or not, apparently because demand is so soft and credit so tight and margins so small that they can't make it (I'm reading in dead tree…

Annals of McCain - Palin, XVIII: quoting Reagan

My father was an old fashioned "physician and surgeon," something we don't have today. He did everything: delivered you, took out your appendix or tonsils, treated your parents' heart disease, your childhood diseases, your broken bones, your kids' childhood diseases, the diabetes you got later in life and the heart disease that went along with it. And probably delivered your grandchildren, too. He went to the office seven days a week, made housecalls in the middle of the night, met cooks from the White Castle hamburger chain in his office at 3 am to sew up their lacerations, made his own…

Military biodefense labs try to look safe

Civilian scientists are still trying to get used to the hysterical nonsense around "biodefense" that the homeland security apparatchiks imposed as Act I. in their Security Theater, bullshit that included indicting an artist and a respected scientist for shipping a harmless bacterium (see here, here). Meanwhile the Army has claimed the only serious bioterror attack on US soil with actual biowarfare agents was done by one of their guys. Whether it was the guy they fingered or not we may never know, since he conveniently is dead, but whether he was or wasn't the claim has revealed they operate…

Tamiflu and 1984 Newspeak

So Roche Pharmaceuticals now has sufficient productive capacity to make their influenza antiviral Tamiflu (oseltamivir) meet demand. More than enough, it appears, since they now have come up with a new scheme to unload some of their inventory before its 3 year shelf life expires and to keep turning over the inventory year after year, whether or not there is a demand in any particular year: With an endorsement from US health officials, Roche, maker of the antiviral drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu), today unveiled a program to encourage more businesses to stockpile the drug to protect employees in…

Drug giant GlaxoSmithKline to its scientists: fuck off

Since we don't do much health services posting around here I sometimes forget how terrific the blog Health Care Renewal is. It's always interesting. Sometimes it brushes against things we are concerned about here and last week there was a post with some good links about GlaxoSmithKline, a Big Pharma company active in influenza antivirals (Relenza) and pandemic vaccines. The companies of Big Pharma represent some of the most profitable on earth, making so much money that normal rates of profit, like what you might get from defense contracting, are considered failure. They justify their obscene…

Opening up vaccine policy and research

I haven't posted on the vaccine/autism question for several reasons. It is quite well covered by other science bloggers, it tends to generate more heat than light, and we didn't have anything new to say. I have on several occasions discussed it with two of the world's top experts on the health effects of mercury and one of the world's top autism experts. None of the three felt there was a vaccine-mercury connection to autism. But news that the US government was going to include vaccine critics in shaping national vaccine policy made me change my mind about posting. I won't be addressing the…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Current Status of a Model System: The Gene Gp-9 and Its Association with Social Organization in Fire Ants: The Gp-9 gene in fire ants represents an important model system for studying the evolution of social organization in insects as well as a rich source of information relevant to other major evolutionary topics. An important feature of this system is that polymorphism in social organization is completely associated with allelic variation at Gp-9, such that single-queen colonies (monogyne form) include only inhabitants bearing B-like alleles while multiple-queen colonies (polygyne form)…

May I carry your bags?

As part of our jobs many of us read literature that few others see. For example, every two months I get a journal called Industrial Health, published (in English) by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health of Japan. It's been around for a long time (it is now in Volume 46) and it's pretty good. It frequently has papers that are interesting and the December 2007 issue (which just arrived in my mailbox) is an example. One article is entitled, "Biomechanical and physiological analyses of a luggage-pulling task," by Jung, Haight and Hallbeck. It's about those two-wheeled…

MRSA and agribusiness

Suppose US agribusiness food animals were being fed a poison that killed a few tens of thousands of Americans a year. Would we want them to stop? Maybe we weren't sure but had more than ample grounds for suspicion. Would we want scientists and the government to be looking into it and maybe even halting it until we had a clear answer? I would hope so. But that seems to be the situation with antibiotics and factory farming. Yesterday we posted about the discovery by Dutch scientists that methicillin resistant Stophylococcus aureus (MRSA) had a home and probably an origin in pigs and cattle in…

The lung cancer mystery

We dwell a lot on the many unknowns about the bird flu H5N1 virus. What could make it easily transmissible between people? What determines what host it infects? What makes it so virulent? With the threat of a pandemic looming it can sometimes seem the virus is an especially, maybe even uniquely, wily foe. Every move we make it changes to outsmart us. We remain helpless. But the same is true of so many other deadly threats, including one that killed over 160,000 people in the US last year: lung cancer. What makes lung cancer so deadly? Why are some lung cancers so aggressive? What makes it…

Hard to reach but still contagious

I'm not sure which is worse. Pandemic flu preparation which puts most of its eggs (pathogen-free, of course) in the vaccine basket or the one that plans to distribute the non-existent vaccine in a way that it misses the most needy and vulnerable. I guess it's obvious that if the first is bad, the second is very bad so it's worse, but it also a warning that other kinds of preparation may also be seriously flawed from the equity point of view. I know many of you don't care about these folks -- undocumented immigrants, substance users, the homeless, homebound elderly, and minorities. Many…

So, dolphins are dumb and manatees are smart?

Yesterday, we were putting down media reports on a study that purports that dolphins are not intelligent despite behavioral studies and big brains. Today, NYTimes has a much better article arguing that manatees, despite their small brains, are more intelligent than previously thought. It is a longish article but well worth reading. The idea is that manatees don't have too small brains, but overlarge bodies, and, since they are herbivores with no prey or predators, they do not need to reserve vast portions of their brains for tackling hunting and defense. Brain size has been linked by some…

Why hibernating animals occasionally wake up?

One of the several hypotheses floating around over the past several years to explain the phenomenon of repeated wake-up events in hibernating animals although such events are very energy-draining, is the notion that the immune system needs to be rewarmed in order to fend off any potential bacterial invasions that may have occured while the animal was hibernating: Now, a group of researchers provided a mathematical model that supports this hypothesis: "A habit in some animals to periodically wake up while hibernating may be an evolutionary mechanism to fight bacterial infection, according to…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Why Are Lions Not As Big As Elephants?: Carnivores are some of the widest ranging terrestrial mammals for their size, and this affects their energy intake and needs. This difference is also played out in the different hunting strategies of small and large carnivores. Smaller species less than 15-20 kg in weight specialize on very small vertebrates and invertebrates, which weigh a small fraction of their own weight, whereas larger species (>15-20 kg) specialize on large vertebrate prey near their own mass. While carnivores around the size of a lynx or larger can obtain higher net energy…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Mouse Lemur Species Not Determined By Coat Color: A team of researchers has found that nocturnal lemurs thought to belong to different species because of their strikingly different coat colors are not only genetically alike, but belong to the same species. The team, which includes Laurie R. Godfrey, professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and UMass graduate student Emilienne Rasoazanabary, has just published its findings in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology. -------------------- The lemurs they tested had three different coat colors and lived in…

New York City trip - Part V: Central Park

Friday, May 26th. Morning After such an exciting and exhausting first day, we gave ourselves the luxury of sleeping late on Friday. After grabbing some bagels and pretzels from street vendors, we took the kids on their first ever ride on the Underground. They were excited. Of course, we got on a wrong train which took us to Brooklyn. After we realized we have crossed a bridge, kids got nervous, but we just got out, crossed to the other side of the tracks and got on the same line in the other direction and back to Manhattan in minutes. Interestingly, I did not find the NYC underground very…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: Supreme Court nominee rumor

Got this in my email. For all I know the whole country got it. That's how these campaigns go these days. I'm not sure its origin [Source, author Rick Chertof in Tikkun; thanks to reader LeeH], but I suspect it's a fake. No one with this guy's reputation could be confirmed, even if he walks on water. He'd get crucified in the nomiation process: President Barack Obama is expected to nominate Jesus Christ, an immigrant originally born to a virgin mother in Bethlehem, to fill the new vacancy on the Supreme Court. Although Mr. Christ is over 2,000 years old, He is immortal, so Democrats and…

Making data available to others

Yesterday we posted on our strong support for open access publishing of tax payer supported research. We are taxpayer supported scientists (at least our NIH grants are) and we consider our work to be the property of the public, who paid for it. Whenever possible (which is most of the time) we do publish in freely accessible journals. Making data freely accessible is more controversial, but we also support this, perhaps with a reasonable grace period to allow scientists to have priority for data they expended effort to collect and with reasonable safeguards for confidentiality and privacy when…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: when quackery doesn't kill (but science does)

Orac at Respectful Insolence hates "woo" (for some reason I dislike that term; I prefer to call it quackery). He's a surgeon and has seen cases where that kind of stuff killed people through delay or refusal of treatment. Fair enough. But I am fascinated by this example where it didn't kill someone: When a famous tantric guru boasted on television that he could kill another man using only his mystical powers, most viewers either gasped in awe or merely nodded unquestioningly. Sanal Edamaruku’s response was different. “Go on then — kill me,” he said. Mr Edamaruku had been invited to the same…

The copyright mafia makes me scream (again)

If I screamed every time I wanted to scream after reading something on the internet, I'd be so hoarse I wouldn't be able to scream about something I hadn't read on the internet. Like the Obama administration's loser mentality or the Republican Party as just plain losers with no mentality at all. So maybe I won't scream about what I read about on The Guardian today (hat tip Boingboing), but I'd like to scream. LIKE THIS. But why should you listen to me? I'm an Enemy of the State. I know this because the US-based International Intellectual Property Alliance has made it clear what kind of person…

Advice from Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn is gone, now, but he left us plenty. Here is a short piece he wrote a little over ten years ago in Z Magazine (hat tip, SR). It's typical of his style: inspiring, humble, practical, especially in these times: On Getting Along Howard Zinn, March, 07 1999 You ask how I manage to stay involved and remain seemingly happy and adjusted to this awful world where the efforts of caring people pale in comparison to those who have power? It's easy. First, don't let "those who have power" intimidate you. No matter how much power they have they cannot prevent you from living your life,…

Work and home

An interesting sounding paper just appeared in the December 2009 issue of the journal American Sociological Review but we don't have time to read it. So I'll just tell you what the press release says: As many as 50 per cent of people bring their work home with them regularly, according to new research out of the University of Toronto that describes the stress associated with work-life balance and the factors that predict it. Researchers measured the extent to which work was interfering with personal time using data from a national survey of 1,800 American workers. Sociology professor Scott…

Workers Memorial Week: Mourning the dead, fighting for the living

Monday, April 28, is Worker Memorial Day, and groups around the US – and around the world – are holding events and issuing reports this week to remember workers killed on the job and push for stronger workplace protections. For Workers Memorial Week 2014, National Council for Occupational safety and Health (National COSH) has released the 2014 edition of its report Preventable Deaths: The Tragedy of Workplace Fatalities. The report focuses special attention on occupational illnesses, citing silica exposures and high-risk populations, including Hispanic and contract workers. In addition to an…

Obama's regulatory czar, Yoda and black lung disease

[Updated: 3 hours after I posted it. See below] Black lung----now referred to by experts as coal mine dust lung disease (CMDLD)--- was back in the news last week courtesy of the Pulitzer Prize. The Center for Public Integrity’s Chris Hamby received the prestigious recognition for his reporting on the steep hurdles faced by coal miners who seek black lung disability compensation. Hamby's piece focused on the back end of the problem. On the front end is preventing CMDLD in the first place. Coal miners wouldn’t have to maneuver the legal obstacle course for disability benefits if CMDLD became a…

CDC agency chastises USDA for mischaracterizing a report on poultry workers

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) is one of those federal agencies that lies quietly in the background. It’s not one for making waves. It's more like bench scientist who minds her own business in the laboratory. But this week, NIOSH blew its top and created some waves.  In a pointed letter to the head of the USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS), NIOSH director John Howard, MD, said that FSIS was misinterpreting a NIOSH report released last month. The report presents the findings of a NIOSH Health Hazard Evaluation (HHE) performed at a Pilgrim’s Pride…

Pictures say a thousand words: OSHA Silica Hearings week #3

The photos rolled across the screen. Photos of  construction workers tuck-pointing the cement grout on a building, sawing brick, jack hammering a sidewalk, sanding drywall. Each photo, showing workers in clouds of dust, illustrated the multitude of ways they are exposed, and why they are at risk of silica-related diseases.   The scrolling photo exhibit was the backdrop for testimony provided by representatives of the Laborers’ Health and Safety Fund of North America (LHSFNA) on the final day of OSHA’s public hearing on its proposed silica regulation. The LHSFNA is a joint labor-management…

Occupational Health News Roundup

February 7th marked two grim anniversaries of explosions that demonstrate the toll of unsafe workplaces. On February 7, 2008, an explosion and fire at the Imperial Sugar refinery in Port Wentworth, Georgia, killed 14 workers and injured 28 others. On February 7, 2010, an explosion at the Kleen Energy facility in Middletown, Connecticut, six workers were killed and at least 50 others injured. The US Chemical Safety Board investigated both explosions. It determined that the Imperial Sugar explosion was fueled by a massive accumulation of combustible sugar dust, and that the Kleen Energy…

Study: Overall injury risk increases with multiple jobs

People who hold down more than one job not only experience an increased risk of injury at work, but while they’re not at work as well, according to a new study. Published in the January issue of the American Journal of Public Health, the study found that multiple job holders had a “significantly” higher injury rate per 100 workers for work- and nonwork-related injuries when compared to single job holders. The study, which was based on 1997-2011 data from the National Health Interview Survey, examined nearly 7,500 injury episodes reported during the 15-year study period, of which 802 were…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved immigration legislation that would overhaul US immigration laws. Alan Gomez reports in USA Today: The bill was produced by a bipartisan group of senators known as the Gang of Eight. With four of those members on the committee, the bill survived 212 amendments over five lengthy hearings. Left intact was the core of the bill, which will allow the nation's 11 million unauthorized immigrants to apply for U.S. citizenship, add significant investments in border security and fundamentally alter the legal immigration system of the future. The…

Gene Logsdon on No-Till Agriculture

"No Till" is a confusing term. For most people who know nothing about agriculture, the word "till" isn't particularly revealing - it sounds like there's no cash register. Given that level of knowledge, when you are reassured that no tillage means less erosion, you aren't going to crticize. Those with home gardens often know something about a different kind of "no till" than "no till agriculture" - they may envision gardens with permanent mulch in formal beds, and assume that field-scale no-till looks something like that. I'm pleased that Gene Logsdon then points out what I've also…

They are Pirates...and They Sing!

My children are pirates right now. There's a fallen tree in the woods that makes a superb pirate ship, and my children have boarded and captured it. And they are singing pirate songs. Loudly. It is a very good thing that we live so far from other human habitation - if we lived in the 'burbs the neighbors would kill us. So appropos to nothing, I'm sharing a collection of pirate songs, in the hopes that you won't notice that I haven't written much of anything this week. If I gotta listen to them, you gotta listen to them. It may, of course, be our fault for teaching the boys pirate songs…

My Fellow Science Bloggers Meditate on the Depletion of Nearly Everything

I came back to my computer to find that many of my fellow Sciblings have recently taken up issues of resource depletion from various interesting perspectives - doing my work for me, I guess ;-). It isn't exactly news to most of us that we've been using just about every resource on the planet far too casually, but it is interesting to see them tied together. At Starts With a Bang, Ethan Siegel takes up issues raised by Helium's scarcity and the fact that our use of it to make children's toys may seriously imperil future research capacities. At Dr. Isis's blog, she builds on this by exploring…

Plumbing My Pantry: Food Preservation Pays Off

For four days this week, 10 women are coming to my house to play apprentice. We're going to milk goats, make sauerkraut, knit socks, talk about depletion and climate change, make teas and syrups, cook on a woodstove and figure out where to go from here and basically have a four day slumber party ;-). This is going to be exciting and fun, I think. It is also pushing the limits of my pantry. You see, I knew that there would be 11 of us eating at my place for four days, but what I didn't know was that we had a brake fluid leak. Our car went into the shop for snow tires (yeah, I know, we…

All Your Planets Are Belong to Us

Planets, planets everywhere and on some there will be drops to drink. An interesting confluence of research occurred over the last few months, leading to: "A revised estimate of the occurrence rate of terrestrial planets in the habitable zones around Kepler M-dwarfs" by Ravi kumar Kopparapu PSU (arXiv), ApJLetters in press Bottom line: about half of low mass stars in the Solar neighbourhood are estimated to have earth size planets in their habitable zone! The implications are that habitable planets may be very common and the closest one within a few light years. We'll know for sure very…