The graphic shows the relative size and temperature of the newly found exoplanets. Click for a larger version. Image is from Science@NASA site linked below.

The Kepler mission has returned its first results:  it found FIVE planets around different stars.  No surprise these are very large large planets as we can see in the Kepler graphic.  The planets are named and rightly so: Kepler 4b,5b, 6b, 7b, 8b.

It is only reasonable to find larger objects first, but wow, the planets are found by watching the light from the starlight dim ever so slightly as the planet transits the face of the star!  Think of it, the light doesn’t dim very much yet it can be detected.

The orbit can be determined quite simply by watching the dimming patter over time, the size of the planets can be determined by the amount of the dip, and the temperature of the planet can be determined by knowing the orbital distance and how hot the star is (which is fairly easy because it is based on the type of star) – simple and brilliant.

Kepler is watching an astounding 150,000 stars at once.  Imagine the data they have to sift through!  Ultimately the goal is to find roughly sized planets in the habitable zone of the parent star.

From the NASA press release:

“These observations contribute to our understanding of how planetary systems form and evolve from the gas and dust disks that give rise to both the stars and their planets,” said William Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. Borucki is the mission’s science principal investigator. “The discoveries also show that our science instrument is working well. Indications are that Kepler will meet all its science goals.”

The Kepler mission team must be extremely happy, congrats to them!  Still think we’re alone?

Science@NASA has a good article on the new findings, check it out.

Much to the chagrin of a certain Wyoming Senator, the Central Intelligence Agency is poised to fight terrorism and spy on sea lions (Sen. John Barrasso once quipped the CIA should stick to the former occupation). The nation’s top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government’s intelligence assets — including spy satellites and other classified sensors — to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change. They seek insights from natural phenomena like clouds and glaciers, deserts and tropical forests [The New York Times].

The program will have little impact on the CIA’s normal intelligence gathering, say those involved, and will only release data already in hand or data gathered during satellite down time. The images will even have their sharpness decreased in order to maintain some secrecy about the satellites’ true capabilities.

60 scientists, all with security clearances, will oversee the scientific aspects of the project, like analyzing detailed images of the polar ice caps. Of course, not everyone in Washington is on board with the collaboration, and as the attempted airliner bombing on Christmas Day reminded the public of the terrorist threat, the critics are likely to get louder. However, a report from the National Academy of Sciences, which advises the federal government, calls the satellite data essential, saying “there are no other data available that show the melting and freezing processes” [Popular Science]. The program actually began under former President Clinton, but was canceled by former President Bush. Clinton’s vice president Al Gore has been lobbying to restart the program since 2008.

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Image: NASA Earth Observatory

I am not all that big on celebrity endorsements, but I do understand that they can be very beneficial in getting the word out on important topics ot people who might not otherwise hear it.

So I’m pleased to see that Jennifer Lopez did a short video about the benefits of vaccination against pertussis for a website called Sounds of Pertussis (created by the vaccine division of the pharmaceutical company Sanofi Aventis). The video calmly and rationally explains why it’s important to vaccinate for pertussis, also known as whooping cough.

Regular readers know my stance on this: pertussis can kill, as parents David and Toni McCaffery found out when their four-week-old daughter Dana died from it in 2009 — she was infected because not enough people had vaccinated their children, and the herd immunity in that area of Australia was too low. It’s important to talk to your physician about this and find out if you should vaccinate yourself and your loved ones.

The antivaxxers are loud about this issue, of course. Meryl Dorey and her Australian Vaccination Network have spread misinformation far and wide on this issue, even saying that pertussis doesn’t kill anyone… a statement that is so clearly false that it’s difficult to believe someone could honestly utter it. No doubt the antivaxxers will ooze out of the woodwork in the comments below — they always do — and make all sorts of similar false claims. And also no doubt we’ll see the attempts to poison the well by saying the JLo video was produced by a — gasp — pharmaceutical company!

Like Ben Goldacre, I am not a huge fan of a lot of the tactics used by those companies to sell drugs. But that doesn’t mean everything they do is wrong. Vaccinations, as I feel I must point out over and again, have saved hundreds of millions of lives, a number so huge it’s awe-inspiring. But so many antivaxxers seem to want to see us return to the days when children died of measles, when kids were confined to iron lungs when they couldn’t breathe due to polio, and people died by the millions from smallpox and other preventable diseases.

Antivaxxers are wrong. The data are overwhelming that their arguments are false. Vaccines save lives, countless lives. Talk to your physician. Please.

Parasite Rex has made a very special list of books to read after you get dumped. To quote from Lemondrop over at the AOL collective:

Do you need something to so totally fill you with paranoia and fear that you can’t even think about the worm that just dumped you? How about a terrifying book about worms! AGH! You’ll never walk barefoot in the street again, plus you’ll be so full of disgusting factoids that you won’t even have time to mention what’s-his-name at a party — you’ll be too busy grossing people out. FTW!

I would suggest waiting to find a new special someone until the book has cleared your system. I was still single while I was writing Parasite Rex, and the book made going out on dates very awkward.

So, what’s your next book about?

Parasites, and why they’re totally awesome. See, like, there’s this worm that crawls across your eye…

Check, please!

On the plus side, it’s a very quick test to see if your date shares your taste for the grotesque.

Here at DISCOVER, we do our best to keep you informed of all the crap scientific advice that celebrities dispense, be it Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy’s anti-vaxxer yarns, Oprah providing a platform for new-age nonsense, or soccer star Robin Van Persie’s praise of placenta massage to heal injuries. But with so many celebrities and so much bad advice, it can be hard to catch it all—TMZ might catalog the whereabouts and philandering of the rich and moderately famous, but not necessarily their quackery.

Never fear, though, because once again the British organization Sense About Science has pulled many of the year’s worst offenses together in a handy compendium. The charity’s annual review pairs celebrity claims with reality-based quotes from doctors and scientists.

Here’s one choice gem: Heather Mills, the animal rights activist and former wife to Paul McCartney, claimed that when you eat meat “[it] sits in your colon for 40 years and putrefies, and eventually gives you the illness you die of. And that is a fact.” Thanks for the info, Heather!

More from New Scientist:

Other celebs have been pulled up this year for apparently not realising that natural substances such as hormones are chemicals, and that ovulation is suppressed naturally by pregnancy and prolonged breastfeeding. Actress Suzanne Somers, for example, was quoted as saying that the contraceptive pill must be unsafe “because is it safe to take a chemical every day, and how would it be safe to take something that prevents ovulation?”

Actor Roger Moore, meanwhile, was taken to task for claiming that foie gras causes Alzheimer’s disease, and Sarah Palin for dismissing evolution.

Apparently playing James Bond not only gets you good tables at restaurants, it also makes you think you have medical expertise.

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Image: flickr / Wonker

Last month I wrote an essay about the future of evolution for Science. I paid particularly close attention to what will happen to our own species, describing some recent research and ideas from scientists. Natural selection will not stop, nor will the emergence of new, neutral mutations.

But this week, the evolutionary biologist Michael Lynch has published a provocative paper (to mark his inauguration into the National Academy of Sciences) in which he makes another kind of forecast. Our future evolution, he warns, is going to lead to a devastating decline in our health.

The idea is not new. Hermann Muller, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on mutations, first raised the specter of evolutionary decline in 1950. He pointed out that many mutations that arise in a population are harmful. They can cause various diseases, cutting lives short or making it harder for organisms to reproduce. Left to themselves, these mutations can drive down the reproductive rate of a population. But their harmful effects can be balanced by natural selection. If individuals with harmful mutations have fewer offspring than other individuals, the mutations become less common. Overall, the population can continue to reproduce at a healthy rate.

As Lynch points out, Muller’s argument depended on the actual rate of mutations and other vital statistics that no one in the 1950s could know with much precision. But in his new paper, Lynch surveys recent studies that make it possible to know the mutation rate quite well. Lynch concludes that every gamete (a sperm or egg) acquires the following:

–38 base-substitution mutations (a single “letter” of DNA changes to another one).

–3 small insertions or deletions of a stretch of DNA

–1 splicing mutation (which changes the combination of segments of a gene that cells use to build proteins)

–Plus some assorted other mutations (gene duplications, insertions of DNA copied by transposable elements, and so on).

All told, Lynch estimates a total of 50 to 100 mutations.

Compared to other species, Lynch points out, we mutate a lot. Any base in our DNA is twice as likely to mutate as a base in a fruit fly’s DNA, for example. Part of our special burden is our long life. As sperm divide rapidly during a man’s life, they pick up lots of new mutations. We are also left prone to cancer, as our skin, intestines, and other tissues continue to divide and sometimes pick up new mutations.

A lot of the new mutations in every new baby are harmless. But each baby may acquire a few harmful ones. These mutations rarely cause a swift death. Instead, in their totality, they slice off a tiny fraction of the total offspring an entire population can produce. Lynch estimates that mutations to protein-coding DNA cause the fitness of a population to decline by 1%. That’s assuming natural selection does not favor other mutations over these harmful ones.

Lynch acknowledges that natural selection is still in effect in humans, particularly in places where people never see doctors, let alone get clean drinking water. But as the world’s standard of living goes up, he argues, more and more people are being shielded from natural selection’s most intense effects–and harmful mutations are piling up.

In a matter of a few centuries, Lynch predicts, industrialized societies may experience a huge increase in harmful genes–”with significant incapacitation at the morphological, physiological, and neurobiological levels,” he writes.

Battling this decline won’t be easy, says Lynch. Rather than a few big mutations causing the trouble, the decline will be brought about by a vast number of mutations, each with a very small effect. The fantasies of selective breeding dreamed of by eugenicists aren’t just loathesome–they’re also useless. Instead, Lynch argues for something that would make the eugenicists crazy. “Ironically, the genetic future of mankind may reside predominantly in the gene pools of the least industrialized segments of society,” he writes.

Image: IU