Discoveries, and rumors of discoveries

Did the Kepler satellite really find 140 Earthlike planets in the constellation Cygnus? Sadly, no. More like 140 roughly Earth-sized bodies that could, possibly, turn out to be planets. That's a mighty big devil hanging out in those details and, for Dennis Overbye, it's a perfect example of the "two-sigma blues"—when "a measurement or discovery of some kind sticks up high enough above the random noise to be interesting but not high enough to really mean anything conclusive." Two-sigma discoveries often get the gossip mill up and running, something that can lead to a lot of confusion, especially in already difficult-to-explain-to-the-public fields like astrophysics.