Car companies are doing it, banks are doing it, and magazines may (ahem) soon be doing it—bailouts are all the rage these days. Which makes it less surprising that the biotech industry is getting in on the action. Lobbyists for the biotech industry are pushing Washington to pass a law granting biotech companies that are currently hemorrhaging money (a.k.a. nearly all of them) a chance to get cash now in exchange for not taking tax credits in the future should they become profitable.

According to the New York Times, the proposed bill:

could enable the industry to receive potentially hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, on the condition that the money would be used for research and development.

The effort comes as many smaller biotechnology companies, particularly those trying to develop drugs, are facing a severe cash shortage that is forcing them to dismiss workers, curtail research and even file for bankruptcy protection or liquidation.

In fact, it’s so bad that BIO, the main lobbyist for the industry, is saying that a quarter of the 370 publicly traded U.S. biotech companies have less than six months of cash on hand.

And, of course, creating an effective drug can take millions of dollars and years—even decades—to accomplish. Not to mention that, if clinical trials go badly, it’s back to the drawing board, making biotech one of the riskiest industries out there. And risk is not something lawmakers are loving these days.

Still, the potential health benefits of the drugs biotech has/could/will produce are massive, and we do have that whole aging population and health care crisis to contend with. So if we’re already writing $850 billion checks, we may as well throw a little biotech’s way.

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It’s been a rough few weeks for anything male. According to a study released this week, males of just about every species are being feminized—or even wiped out of existence—by the slew of unregulated chemicals in our water and environment.

And for those already locked in male adulthood, there’s more bad news: Men in New York City are reportedly losing their desire for sex because of the financial crisis. According to a (highly non-scientific, but not unbelievable) trend piece in the New York Post, many former masters of the universe are shunning coitus due to anxiety over job losses, lost wealth, and other monetary realities of 2008.

While a host of psycho-social factors are likely behind this reported mass libido-loss (assuming that it’s true), it’s possible that a growing disinterest in sex during an economic crisis is linked to physiology, and perhaps even evolution. In other words, hard economic times may translate into a built-in desire for less procreation.

We know that economic hard times and sex/birthrates are linked: fertility declines during recessions, primarily due to the fact that families know they’ll have a harder time raising children. Children born during downturns may also feel the brunt of the economy during gestation and infancy, according to recent research indicating that being born during a recession could lead to a shorter life span.

Given these factors, it’s not a stretch to think the male libido might slow down as a natural reaction to drastic economic conditions. On a physiological level, a man who loses his cave/401K/high-powered job will likely experience a drop in testosterone, one of the hormones primarily responsible for sexual functioning.

Granted, whether or not all the laid-off female bankers are feeling similarly less-than-aroused has yet to be explored.

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When the fed is spending $7.4 trillion to clean up the wreckage, you know someone’s gotta take the blame. So who should shoulder it? Scientific American thinks at least some of the fault belongs with the physics and math whizzes who built the risk models that dug our grave.

In a byline-free editorial, the magazine traces our woes back to a 2004 meeting in which the SEC agreed to lift a rule specifying debt limits and capital reserves “needed for a rainy day.” This move provided the requisite billions that banks pumped into mortgage-backed securities and derivatives. And who created the structures for these impossibly complex schemes that caused the mass bank implosion? Wall Street’s band of “lapsed physicists and mathematical virtuosos,” also known as “quants,” who “both invented these oblique securities and created software models that supposedly measured the risk a firm would incur by holding them in its portfolio.”

Given that hindsight is 20-20, we now realize that all these models are really only accurate for a limited period of time, at a very narrow confidence level—meaning that whenever those conditions aren’t fantasy-scenario optimal, the actual risk can be enough to incite a global meltdown. Good to know!

So should we be tarring and feathering the brains who built the beam we used to hang ourselves? It’s hardly that simple, a fact that Sci Am acknowledges while still laying on the heavy guilt:

The causes of this fiasco are multifold—the Federal Reserve’s easy-money policy played a big role—but the rocket scientists and geeks also bear their share of the blame. After the crash, the quants and traders they serve need to accept the necessity for a total makeover…

For its part, the quant community needs to undertake a search for better models—perhaps seeking help from behavioral economics, which studies irrationality of investors’ decision making, and from virtual market tools that use “intelligent agents” to mimic more faithfully the ups and downs of the activities of buyers and sellers.

In other words, maybe we should start calculating risk using models that take into account actual human behavior, as opposed to some nebulous dreamland where markets don’t freeze solid and eras don’t go down in a haze of napalm.

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Not only are doctors becoming increasingly, frighteningly scarce, but they’re also hating life. A recent survey of 11,950 primary care docs and specialists done by the Physicians’ Foundation found that 60 percent would not recommend medicine as a career, while 42 percent said professional morale is either “poor” or “very low.”

The reasons for all this depression can be boiled down to insurance companies and policy headaches:

“The reported reasons for the widespread frustration among physicians include increased time dealing with non-clinical paperwork, difficulty receiving reimbursement and burdensome government regulations. Physicians say these issues keep them from the most satisfying aspect of their job: patient relationships.”

Food for thought, Obama? As for all those Medicare cut proposals being thrown around, 82 percent said their practices would be “unsustainable” if pay cuts were made. A whopping 94 percent reported that the time they spend on non-clinical paperwork has gone up in the past three years, with 63 percent saying the paperwork leads to less time spent on each patient.

And of course, there’s the shortage, which is already alive and well: 78 percent of the physicians surveyed believe there’s an existing dearth of primary care doctors, while 49 percent say they plan to reduce the number of patients they see, or even stop practicing over the next three years. Yikes.

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If you’ve picked up a newspaper, watched a TV, or checked your 401K in the past few months, there’s a near-perfect chance that you’ve experienced the full miasma of fear, anxiety, and helplessness that accompany loss of control. We hate that feeling—it’s a trait embedded in the human condition. And we’ll go to any lengths—including “developing” the ability to talk with the dead, see invisible patterns, and read the stars—in order to avoid it.

Sharon Begley at Newsweek writes that a whopping 90 percent of Americans either think they’ve experienced a paranormal event, or believe that they can happen. And when occurrences—like oh, say, worldwide financial crises—remind us just how futile our desire for order and control really are, our “ability” to see the future in tea leaves by no coincidence begins to rise. As Begley puts it:

Historically, such times have been marked by a surge in belief in astrology, ESP and other paranormal phenomena, spurred in part by a desperate yearning to feel a sense of control in a world spinning out of control.

There’s also the study in this month’s issue of Science finding that lack of control directly increases our “invisible pattern-seeing” ability (or perception of one). People primed with a sense of powerlessness saw more images in static, found more conspiracies in written stories, and imagined more patterns in financial markets than those who were left alone.

Granted, all of this is great fodder for scientists looking to study how the brain responds to the unknown. The truth, of course, is that the mind creates “supernatural abilities” and patterns to cope with the fear of random events, and the brain “fills in blanks” when things happen that don’t gel with our desire for a controlled order. This gap-filling might even have a beneficial purpose, providing answers (who cares if they’re wrong?) in times of crisis so the mind can focus on the tasks of survival.

Still, even knowing all this, it’s hard to resist the instinct to heed the occasional omen.

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The American health care rule for prescription drugs is generally: Ask (or just go online) and ye shall receive.

But with an economic meltdown comes serious resource reallocation, and lost jobs and slashed earnings/net worths mean less money to pay for all those Trazodone and Ativan refills. Consequently, as the New York Times reports, consumers are cutting back on prescription drug use in an effort to curb spending. And the effects are already hitting drug companies: Pfizer says that sales of Lipitor, the world’s largest-selling prescription med, has seen sales drop 13 percent in the third quarter, and Merck just announced it’s slashing 7,200 jobs.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons why this is bad:

We have an aging population with more health problems requiring medication, letting those people drop their meds may lead to an increase in preventable medical emergencies. Our health care costs—already skyrocketing—could go up even more, and our standard of living could go down (though given the events of the last few months, that’s somewhat inevitable).

Still, it’s hard not to argue that there could be a silver lining—specifically, that an already over-medicated population might rethink the question of just how necessary all those anxiety and restless leg syndrome pills really are. As the Times notes, the number of filled prescriptions has increased 72 percent in the last decade, to 3.8 billion. It’s worth asking—particularly in the wake of umpteen scandals involving doctors and drug companies—whether eliminating some, or many of these prescriptions might leave us better off in the long run.

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There’s a lot of talk about “green jobs” in this election. But for all the questions raised by the phrase—just how many jobs will be generated, where will they come from, how fast will they get here—so far we’ve had few definite answers.

Which is why it’s helpful to have at least one state paving the way as an example of how to incorporate energy efficiency and “greening” into the economic scheme, and save money and create jobs in the process. The state in question is California, and according to a new study out of U.C. Berkeley, its planned investments in fighting global warming and improving energy efficiency will create as many as 403,000 jobs and jack up household incomes by $48 billion in the next 12 years. These results are a big jump even from the state’s own estimates, which were around 100,000 new jobs and $14 billion in personal income.

The key to the mystical “green job,” according to the Berkeley study, is reallocation: When people use less energy, they spend less on energy bills, and thus have more cash to spend on other things, like consumer products. Cue economic growth and job creation.

So by “green jobs,” under this definition, we’re talking not only about jobs created by boosting the state’s renewable power and alternative fuel companies, but also jobs in other sectors that spring forth because of increased wealth created by lower energy use.

The effects of lower energy consumption will be so great, study author David Roland-Holst argues, that they’ll happen even if California’s planned cap and trade system (a system that’s also supported by both presidential candidates) causes electricity prices to rise.

Of course, this is all prediction: How things actually go down remains to be seen. But in the midst of all the economic gloom and doom for the green tech sector, it’s nice to have a little good news once in a while.

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Image: iStockPhoto

Famed paleoanthropologist and conservationist Richard Leakey is already on the offensive, telling reporters during a speech the University of Arkansas at Little Rock that the economic crisis would be “just devastating” to scientific research. He fears that as the philanthropists, foundations, corporations, and governments that fund scientific research watch their coffers empty, money for grants, endowments, and other research efforts will fizzle. Starting in 2009, donations for research and exploration will be “hugely hit,” he predicts.

Environmental researchers and activists are already worried that climate work could be tossed aside in favor of more immediate (but not necessarily less worrisome) concerns. It’s not a stretch to predict that other scientific fields will be hit as well—and that the halting or delaying of research could be as big an aggregate loss as the mortgage crisis and Dow immolation combined.

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So we’ve been driving a lot less, which is good. We’ve also been shifting attitudes about oil as a resource and adjusting our lives to consume less of it, which is even better. And we’ve been lavishing more time and attention (and money) on alternative energy, which is best of all.

But now oil prices are plummeting as fast as they rose, and analysts are worried that all those silver linings will be ripped out and tossed aside. As the economy grinds to a halt and the government doles out $700 billion checks, Time’s Bryan Walsh wonders if alternative fuel initiatives—and, for that matter, any climate change legislation—might be shoved to the back of the line behind our bubbling economic woes.

Even if the gas price dip is temporary and/or U.S. consumption habits remain changed, the credit and spending slashes that are already underway could put the kibosh on funding for many alt-energy projects, as Walsh points out. Plus there’s the matter of gas prices as a source of political leverage: The Warner-Lieberman bill, Congress’ first real attempt to pass cap-and-trade legislation, was defeated when Republicans throttled it with the charge that carbon caps would lead to even higher oil prices.

Granted, when world markets are bouncing up and down like bungee jumpers and phrases like “global economic meltdown” are standard fare in the headlines, there’s no guarantee that the price of oil (or the price of anything) will stay where it is. And it’s too soon to write off Americans as “entitled saps” who’ll toss the Prius they bought when prices hit $4 a gallon and buy a Hummer as soon as the number is back down to $2.50. But as with just about everything in the modern world, we really have no clue how the oil mess is going to pan out. So we may as well do the best we can—and “greening the bailout” is as good a place as any to start.

You may recall that nerves were jangled this summer over the appearance of a recent Hindenburg Omen—the mathematical formula that measures the probability of a stock market crash, and has reportedly predicted every crash since 1985. Granted, the appearance of an omen didn’t necessarily mean a crash was incoming—though a “confirmed” omen, such as the one in June, substantially upped the chances of the market tanking.

Well, it looks like the numbers didn’t lie.

• Ticked off about the bailout? Luckily there’s Offsetthebailout.com, a social network for angst-filled consumers to post their anti-bailout rants.

• Continuing the presidential technology lovefest, the Obama campaign launches an iPhone application.

• Schwarzenegger cracks the whip on California’s urban—and gas-guzzling—sprawl.

• Jenny McCarthy for president? America’s favorite anti-vaxer hits the political scene.

• And in other anti-vax news, the Florida Institute of Technology publishes the first national survey of attitudes towards autism and vaccines—and it ain’t pretty.

• The BBC reveals its version of the Stanford Prison Experiment (hint: They got the same results).

• And where oh where can we turn for informed and accurate advice about the economy? MIT’s a pretty good start.

EcoGeek’s Hank Green notes that while nothing could touch the 500 mph freefall of bank stocks last week, the stocks that took a surprising second-worst hit were solar. Green’s reasoning for this, which we agree with, is that the solar industry was a victim of seriously bad timing: Just as renewable energy tax credits—which have been floundering in political quicksand for months—were finally passed in the Senate, a host of mega-banks decombusted, leaving the House with the small task of saving the American economy from collapse.

With elections coming up, the session nearing a close, and words like “Great Depression” in the daily headlines, members of Congress were suddenly far less likely to turn their attention to a bill that won’t lower gas prices or save the markets from implosion.

Still, there’s good news in every disaster: In a flash of redemption, yesterday the Senate added the renewable energy credits to the latest incarnation of the bailout, which passed in the Senate last night and will “almost certainly” pass in the House, as Clusterstock’s John Carney told DISCOVER. So maybe it’s not wise to unload those solar stocks (or any other stocks, for that matter) just yet.

Charles Courtemanche, an economics professor at the University of North Carolina, certainly thinks so. According to his latest research, a permanent one-dollar rise in gas prices is associated with a seven percent drop in overweight Americans and a nine percent drop in obesity rates—the equivalent of about four to five pounds (1.8 to 2.3 kilograms) in lost weight across the entire U.S. population. His analysis was based on gasoline prices in several states from 1984 to 2004, which he compared with each state’s average body weight and obesity rate.

Granted, these results seem to fly in the face of the obesity epidemic’s steady rise, which also began around twenty years ago—if gas prices were so steadily increasing and leading to weight loss, why were obesity levels simultaneously skyrocketing? Still, maybe some further data could bolster Courtemanche’s theory. While his paper was originally published in May of 2007 (when gas was at a “record high” of $3.22 a gallon), it was revised this summer—with gas prices already $1 a gallon higher. Perhaps incorporating the last four (crucial, unstable) years of data into his model could shed some light on whether his four-pounds-a-person theory is accurate. If so, we’re all going out for a burger.

Image: iStockPhoto 

The five criteria for a full-fledged omen—called a “confirmed” Hindenburg Omen—are as follows:

[T]he daily number of NYSE New 52 Week Highs and the Daily number of New 52 Week Lows must both be so high as to have the lesser of the two be greater than 2.2 percent of total NYSE issues traded that day…The traditional definition had two more filters: That the NYSE 10 Week Moving Average is also Rising, which we consider met if it is higher than the level 10 weeks earlier (condition # 2), and that the McClellan Oscillator is negative on that same day (condition # 3)…

Condition # 4 requires that New 52 Week NYSE Highs cannot be more than twice New 52 Week Lows, however it is okay for New 52 Week Lows to be more than double New 52 Week Highs…

The fifth condition…is that for a confirmed Hindenburg Omen…there must be more than one signal within a 36 day period, i.e., there must be a cluster of Hindenburg Omens (defined as two or more) to substantially increase the probability of a coming stock market plunge

Sure enough, June brought not only a 20-month low in the stock market but also a bona fide Hindenburg Omen. So what does it mean? According to John Nyaradi, “the bottom line here would indicate a 92 percent chance of at least a small decline on the Dow, a more than 75 percent chance of a greater than 5 percent decline, and a 65 percent chance of a panic selloff or crash.” Omens or no, we’d say there’s enough chance of that happening to convince even the biggest skeptic.