This has been a lighter month in terms of cool science news with only two articles but both are really cool ones.
The first one discusses how rice seeds are are able to sense rainfall. Experiments proved that dormant seeds are stimulated to germinate when they detect the vibrations of raindrops hitting a puddle or the ground. Mechanically, this is achieved by the vibrations dislodging gravity-sensing organelles called statoliths in some of their cells, sending a signal to the seeds to sprout. The biological advantages of this mechanism is obvious and could be exploited to get seeds to grow faster under the right conditions. We’ve always known that plants are not passive living organisms as they have senses that respond to the environment around them, but it’s always amazing to learn just how responsive they are.
These days I’m always happy to report any news that isn’t in the life sciences and this archaelogical discovery certain qualifies, even if it arrives suspiciously close to this year’s release of The Odyssey film. Researchers have found a papyrus fragment of Homer’s Iliad in the gut of an ancient Egyptian mummy. The mummy in question was buried in a Roman-era tomb around 1,600 years ago. Though papyri have often been found incorporated as part of the mummification process, this is the first time that it involved a Greek literary text.
This has been a fairly explosive month in terms of science news because one particularly talked about paper. But that’s not the only thing we have this month.
That paper presents a massive study of ancient DNA from nearly 16,000 people across more than 10,000 years with a view towards identifying instances of directional selection. That is, a type of natural selection in which a gene confers a trait strongly enough that it makes a difference in survival and reproduction. The obvious example given is lactose intolerance after infancy. The dataset and the methods they developed are itself scientifically valuable but commentators have focused on the results so far. Many have assumed that natural selection has more or less stopped in the modern era as our technology and mastery of the environment has improved. This paper shows that natural selection has accelerated after the introduction of farming. Some seem logical such as immunity to HIV infection. Others seem counterintuitive, such as gluten intolerance spiking after wheat farming became widespread. This is just a starting point as this dataset only covers West Eurasia but it’s understandable why this one paper has led to so such heated discussion and debate.
A more depressing and yet completely predictable finding is the paper claiming that perhaps half of all results published even in reputable journals in the social sciences can’t be replicated by independent analysis. It’s another nail in the coffin of the reproducibility crisis. What’s even more depressing is that they’re not actually redoing entire experiments. Just reanalyzing the supplied data to confirm the results. If they actually start collecting fresh data for themselves, I’d bet even few papers will be replicated.
The next paper is personally fascinating to me. It provides evidence that depressed people have a pessimistic bias against future positive events. I found this result validating because they usually claim that they’re just being realistic and see the world more accurately. The methodology they used is brilliant too. They asked the participants to predict what would happen to them in their personal lives in the near future, then checked back later to see how their predictions held up. Interestingly the depressed could be convinced that they were wrong and adjust their attitudes but this new optimism was fragile and they tended to return to their previous pessimism soon.
Moving beyond human concerns, here’s a cool paper that tries to nail down some details of the communication of sperm whales. It adds to the growing body of knowledge that not only do the codas, or series of clicks that they use to communicate, resemble human vowels acoustically, their patterns also seem to parallel the phonetics and phonology of human languages. We’re not yet at the stage where we can understand what it is that they are saying to each other but that we might be able to one day is scary enough.
We end with a fun bit of science news that is not biology. CERN recently carried out an experiment that involved transporting antiprotons in a truck across their site. The extremely volatile material is stabilized in a portable cryogenic trap and the distance involved is short but it does let them claim to be a world first in achieving such a feat. It’s a bit of news that would excite science-fiction fans as this is after all antimatter that annihilates on contact with ordinary matter which would happen if the trap fails. But as there are only 92 antiprotons involved, the theoretical energy released would only be about that of a small static electricity spark.
Not a bad mix of articles this month though a key one is here more as a cautionary tale.
Said big news is of course the claim that a fly has been uploaded, fueling frenzied speculation that the singularity is nigh as demonstrated in a video released by the team behind the project. Detractors disagree with that assessment. The team behind the video used the FlyWire connectome, which mapped every one of the fruit fly’s neurons and synaptic connections with the assistance of AI. They then linked this to a relatively simple physics-based simulation of a fly body to create a video depicting realistic fly behaviors that include grooming, feeding, flying and so on. However these are canned behaviors of the body model and the connectome is only used to select the behavior without actually simulating all of the coordinated movements. The connectome itself is a remarkable achievement but this should not yet be considered a full upload.
Another fascinating news item that went viral is that a tech entrepreneur seemingly created a customized cancer vaccine for his dog with the help of ChatGPT. The dog was diagnosed with aggressive mast cell cancer that kept returning even after chemotherapy and surgery. The owner paid to have a lab sequence the DNA from the dog’s tumor and used ChatGPT to sift through the results to find a sequence that would make for a good neoantigen, a protein sequence that identifies the cancer and helps make it visible to the immune system. He then enlisted researchers who designed an mRNA construct that instruct the body to manufacture these spike proteins, in effect making it a vaccine. The dog’s tumors did shrink after being treated but it is difficult to attribute the success to the vaccine, given that this is a sample of one. The amazing thing about this story is that one person was to mobilize the scientific and medical apparatus to achieve this for his dog and for not very much money at all.
Also in medical news is a result that is perhaps obvious and still important to take note of for anyone who cares about maximizing their lifespan. It’s a study meant to find associations between infection history and frailty. To no one’s surprise, it found that a history of any infection at all is linked to frailty, increasing the risk of death. This means that any infections even after they have been treated and the patient has recovered, could be said to cause lasting damage to the body that affects your overall longevity.
The next paper similarly has implications about longevity. It claims to find an association between caffeine intake and lowered risk of dementia. It even differentiates between caffeinated coffee, decaffeinated coffee and tea to determine that it is the caffeine content that matters. What’s especially impressive is the size and period of time covered by the study, over 131,000 individuals followed up over the course of 43 years, which will certainly ensure that this particular paper will establish an important baseline for years to come.
We have a few good articles this month and even one that isn’t in biology.
We’ll start with that one which talks about developing aluminum tubes that are unsinkable. The tubes are treated by etching onto their interior surfaces microscopically tiny pits. These pits collectively trap a stable bubble of air in them, conferring onto the interior surface hydrophobic properties that repel water. This is the team’s latest iteration of a device they’ve demonstrated previously with improved resilience, being able to continue to float despite severe damage and even when inserted vertically into the water. The applications for this technology are obvious but of course who knows if it’s too expensive to be scaled up.
The next paper is likely to ruffle some feathers. While vegan diets for adults are generally considered to be healthy provided they are well-planned, it’s much less clear how being on such a diet would affect infants. This study shows that infants raised in meat-free families do seem to fall behind in their growth and development at the beginning. Yet by around age 2, their growth usually catches up and differences seem to even out. This seems to suggest that meat-free diets are generally safe for infants but we still have little data on long-term development.
Finally here’s an article that highlights the fact that humans are not the only species that are able to treat the injuries of our fellows. The other species in question here are ants. Depending on the species, they are able to rescue injured comrades from the battlefield and use their tongues to clean their wounds with goo that has antimicrobial properties. Others are able to perform amputations, sacrificing injured limbs to save the ant. Indeed the ants seem to be able to perform triage, periodically checking the wounded if see if their wounds have been infected and either expelling them from the nest or giving them additional care as needed.
A slow start to the year in terms of science news even the world is being rocked on the geopolitics front.
Maybe it’s just me but I’ve been noticing that people have been focusing more on aging healthily, perhaps due to a new breed of activists such as Bryan Johnson. They should take heart in this new development about a potential treatment for cartilage loss. It works by blocking the 15-PGDH protein which becomes more abundant in the body as we age which is thought to inhibit the regeneration of cartilage. In mice, they found that it led to thicker knee cartilage in the older animals they tried in on and there are ongoing trials in humans in humans. The hope is that this will successfully treat osteoarthritis without having to rely on injecting stem cell.
Next is a paper that will likely be of interest only to computer science nerds but is a clear sign that Chinese scientists are now very much state of the art. It presents a new algorithm to find the shortest path from a source to every other vertex in a graph. For over 60 years, the best possible algorithm to solve this fundamental graph problem was Dijkstra’s algorithm and it was thought to be optimal. Now this team presents a new way to solve the problem without having to sort the entire set of vertex distances in advance. It’s a huge deal in the world of computer science as such algorithms are widely used in all sorts of networks and even the smallest of optimizations can scale up.
Finally here’s the results of an experiment about creating the largest ever superposition yet. Instead of mere electrons or even single atoms, the team assembled clusters of around 7,000 atoms of sodium atoms and directed them through the equivalent of slits constructed with laser beams. They proved that rather than behaving as a single object, each cluster behaved like a wave, spreading out into a superposition and interfering to form a pattern. The results are identical to that of the famous double-slit experiment with tiny particles and suggest that there truly is no limit to how big a superposition can be, provided it can isolated enough, as predicted by quantum theory.
The last entry for the year is again dominated by the life sciences but I like how they’re broad findings. Feels like a neat way to summarize the year.
What better way to show this than with a large, comprehensive study on the effects of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines? Harping on the subject feels like a beating a dead horse yet it’s still needed due to widespread public skepticism and misinformation. This is a French study covering 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals over a period of 45 months. They found that vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and no increased risk of all-cause mortality. As the authors note, this doesn’t eliminate all possible risks but it should be enough to address most reasonable ones and put an end to vaccine hesitation. But we all know that it won’t.
Next is another large-scale project which will only slowly yield dividends over time. It’s an effort to map the genetic landscape across 14 psychiatric disorders to find the genomic factors that they might have in common using data from over a million patients. The team found that there is pervasive genetic overlap across these disorders. They also found that schizophrenia and bipolar disorders have high levels of polygenic overlap. Other distinct groupings are compulsive disorders, internalizing disorders such as major depression, anxiety and PTSD, substance use disorders and neurodevelopment issues such as autism and ADHD. This suggests that rather than relying solely on symptoms to diagnose psychiatric disorders, it may be possible in the future to investigate the shared biological roots of these issues.
We do have one bit of science news this month that is space-based and it too comes down to the biological sciences. The findings are from analysis of samples taken from the Bennu asteroid delivered to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Among the discoveries made five-carbon sugar ribose and six-carbon glucose. Along with the lack of deoxyribose, it suggests that the buildings blocks of biological molecules were widespread throughout the solar system and that the first forms of life relied on RNA. Other findings include a strange, gum-like substance and abundant supernova dust from the asteroid. The latter indicates that the parent body of the asteroid formed in a region enriched in the dust of dying stars.
We end with an article that updates our understanding of how dogs developed their close relationship with humans. One finding leverages data from the dog and wolf skulls spanning the past 50,000 years to determine that the distinctive shape of dog skulls first emerged about 11,000 years ago and that there was a large diversity in the shapes of dog skulls from that period. This suggests that the wide range of shapes and sizes dogs have today isn’t solely a product of the human-led selective breeding programs. The second finding focuses on humans and dogs in Eastern Eurasia, using genomic data to match shifts in the ancestry of dogs with the movement of specific human groups. They found that while the dogs of different human cultural groups moved together with them, there was also evidence that the humans traded their dogs with one another, leading to a shift in the ancestries of the dogs with them.
An absolute treasure trove of fascinating findings this month, this time including economics and history papers in addition to the usual lineup from the life sciences.
We’ll start with the economics paper. It uses data from France to show that existing residents of municipalities are willing to pay a premium to avoid having lower income peers becoming their neighbors. They obtained this result from leveraging a French policy to require that municipalities build more social housing or pay a fine. All households dislike having lower income neighbors and the higher income the municipality, the more they are willing to pay to avoid having to host social housing projects. This result is of course both intuitive and unsurprising but does help illustrate the obstacles against building more housing to alleviate high prices in the property market.
Last month I highlighted research about how schizophrenia patients mistake mistake inner speech with external stimuli, leading to auditory verbal hallucinations, i.e. hearing things that aren’t real. This month I have a startlingly similar finding in the same vein by a different team. They show that the same principle applies to the sense of touch when the experiment called for the subject to differentiate between touching their own arm, being touched by an experimenter and touching a pillow as a control. From observing the brain activity of the participants in the study, the researchers were able to notice significantly higher activity in the right superior temporal gyrus among schizophrenia patients when touching themselves compared to healthy individuals. Similar results were found in other variations of the experiment.
How many people remember the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage about a submarine being shrunk down to microscopic size and inserted into a human body so that the crew can repair that person’s brain damage?? It seems that we’re about to have something similar though of course it’s not a submarine but tiny robots guided through the body using magnetic fields. The article describes trials of the microrobots in the blood vessels of pigs and sheep which are guided to the target sites to release precise doses of drugs at specific locations. The system has yet to be tested in humans but the potential to deliver such precise doses, avoiding the toxicity of inundating the entire body in drugs, and to target hard to reach areas are obvious.
Next we have this news about how North American raccoons are physically changing as they adapt to life in closer proximity to humans. Specifically they find that raccoons living in urban environments have significantly shorter snouts than those in rural areas. They classify this as an early form of self-domestication as selection pressures push them to be bold enough to forage for food from human garbage yet not appear as a threat to humans. This is similar to the processes that proto-dogs and cats went through.
Finally we have the release of a high-resolution dataset of the roads of the Roman Empire. The dataset draws on published historical and archaeological information, topographic maps, and remote sensing data to create a map of the Roman Empire at its maximum extent at around 150 CE. The resulting map includes an astonishing 299,171.31 km of roads, revealing just how extensive the reach of the empire was.