Not much in the way of science news. I suppose the Nobel Prize announcements have a way of overshadowing things.

• Easily the most headline grabbing news this month is the announcement by a team in China that they have successfully cured a patient’s type 1 diabetes with stem-cell therapy. They took fat cells from the woman, induced them to behave as pluripotent stem cells and used these to create islet cells, the type of cells that create insulin in the pancreas. These were then injected back into the woman’s body between the skin and the abdominal muscles where they successfully engrafted. They claim that the woman no longer needed insulin injections around two and a half months after the procedure and remained so for a year afterwards. They’ve since tested this on two other patients and results are still pending. It’s an exciting result but it is still just one person for now and I found it weird that this woman is now apparently producing insulin from a part of her body that is not her pancreas?
• The next article is tough to understand, especially when it keeps using the term phonon laser and you don’t know what that means. This video from the always excellent Sabine Hossenfelder uses an easier to understand term for what they are: sound lasers. It’s not a new idea but it’s been difficult to get a sound source to achieve the required amplitude increases that remain coherent for long enough. This team uses the familiar approach of trapping a metallic ball with lasers but they also use an alternating electric field to amplify the sound vibrations inside the ball. The results are apparently impressive even though the experimental setup currently exists only in a vacuum and doesn’t actually create a beam as it opens a brand new field of possibilities.
• Finally, here’s one that I debated over including as it seems a little petty but it’s sound science and publishing it called for some courage. It examines the habit of gossiping among women and how it is used as part of intrasexual competition. In particular, it finds that although most people dislike malicious female gossipers, it is possible to frame the gossip as an expression of concern for the person being talked about. This reduced the negative social effects on the gossiper while being just as effective in harming the social reputation of the person being talked about.

October is the month in which the Nobel Prize committee announces its annual winners and they usually stagger out them out across several days. So this year, let’s do this in order.

The physiology or medicine prize goes to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microRNA. As most will know, our genes encode all of the information needed to construct every part of our bodies. Yet how does each part know to specialize and make only the specific proteins needed for that part? Different types of cells must be able to specialize by executing only the genetic instructions relevant to them.

Last year’s Nobel Prize in the same category was for the development of mRNA vaccines and indeed by the 1960s, scientists knew that mRNA was involved in the regulation of genes. Ambros and Ruvken, working on the now famous roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans discovered a short RNA molecule that did not code for any proteins but does inhibit the activity of another gene. They found that this microRNA turns off a specific gene by binding to a complementary sequence in its mRNA, thus proving the existence of an entirely new principle of gene regulation.

Their announcement initially didn’t make much of an impact it was thought that this mechanism was specific to C. elegans. It was since been shown that this form of gene regulation is universal among multicellular organisms, hence the award of this Nobel Prize.

Next the physics prize goes for the technological achievement that is foremost in everyone’s minds right now, yet is very much not physics. Instead it goes to two computer scientists who developed the artificial neural networks that are the basis of today’s AI. Recreating the neural networks in biological brains in the form of computer simulations was an obvious objective but early efforts were discouraging. Then in the 1980s, John Hopfield was inspired by his background in physics and devised a network with a property that is equivalent to the energy in the spin system found in physics. It can be trained to remember data and later retrieve them.

Upon learning of the Hopfield network, Geoffrey Hinton set out to improve them by adding a probabilistic element. He called his version the Boltzmann machine as it makes uses of the Boltzmann distribution in statistical mechanics, named after Ludwig Boltzmann. It consists of two types of nodes, visible nodes into which information is fed, and a hidden layer of other nodes. As the values in the nodes are updated one at a time, the pattern can change but the properties of the network as a whole remain the same. In this way, the machine can learn from being given examples to recognize similar traits in different things.

Both of these developments are foundational to the field of machine learning and led to the huge neural networks consisting of billions of nodes and arranged in multiple layers that power the LLMs that we know today. It’s still not physics but it’s probably the closest category the committee could think of for the discoveries that undoubtedly do deserve the prize.

The prize for chemistry also goes for AI, or at least close enough. Proteins are the building blocks of biology and they consist of strings of amino acids twisted and folded together into three-dimensional structures. It is the specific structure that they have that gives them their unique properties and while the shape is theoretically predictable, the large number of ways that a given string of amino acids can fold makes it an overwhelmingly difficult problem. That’s where the computers come in.

Demis Hassabis co-founded DeepMind and developed AI models to play boardgames. The company was later bought by Google and its AI was improved until it was able to beat the world champion at playing Go. Their true goal however was always to predict protein structures and their AlphaFold model achieved an accuracy that beat the best humans but still fell far short of what was needed. Then DeepMind hired John Jumper who applied the transformers architecture of neural networks to the problem and managed to obtain results almost as good as X-ray crystallography.

David Baker too participated in the same competitions to predict protein structures and he made his own piece of software Rosetta to do so. Then he realized that he could also use Rosetta to work in reverse, allowing a user to specify the desired protein structure and obtain suggestions on the needed amino acid sequence. To test its effectiveness, they created an entirely new protein structure, obtained the amino acid sequence from the software and then made the novel protein structure. They then used X-ray crystallography to confirm that its structure matched what they had specified.

The economics prize is awarded for engaging with the question of why some countries or societies are so much richer than others. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson jointly published the seminal paper The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development that divided the institutions established by European colonizers into two types: inclusive ones and extractive ones. One key factor was the density of the indigenous population at the time. In more populous places or o colonies with a high rate of settler mortality, due to the Europeans being poorly adapted to local diseases, the colonizers exploited the local supply of labor, creating extractive institutions.

In less populous places, the Europeans themselves moved in to settle there and in turn built more equitable, inclusive institutions. The authors call the result a reversal of fortune as the more populous and prosperous societies fell behind the newly established ones that promoted long-term prosperity. Even after the end of colonization, local elites simply took over the extractive institutions and had no interest in transitioning to a more equitable society. While this was an undeniably influential paper, it’s also a contentious one and historians for example question the neat division of extractive and inclusive institutions.

We have a lot of science stuff to get through this month and even a couple that are not biology!

• Let’s get through the non-biology stuff first. The title for this new physics paper is difficult to parse and the abstract isn’t much better. What it is really saying in simple language is that the team succeeded in making the electromagnetic counterpart of an “air vortex cannon“. We’re all familiar with the electromagnetic waves that underpin so much of our communications infrastructure. This team however has proven the ability to create an antenna that transmits electromagnetic pulses that have toroidal shapes. As the paper notes, there are all kinds of possible applications in communications, remote sensing, positioning and so on. What it doesn’t say is that it probably will be useful as a weapons technology as well.
• The other one is this economics paper that is being widely talked about, offering a conclusion that is intuitively obvious and yet apparently original. It examines the issue of why workers so viscerally dislike inflation when in theory wages gains should match the increase in prices. The authors explain it in very simple terms. In times of inflation, workers must engage in conflict behavior with their employers to demand higher wages or risk settling for wages that are declining in real terms. It’s not surprising that many workers are uneasy or unwilling to engage in such conflict behavior and so they hate inflation above and beyond what we would expect.
• Next we have a simple paper that lays out a plausible explanation for the long COVID affliction that some patients experience. They find that fibrinogen, the central component of blood clots, is abundant in the lungs and brains of COVID-19 patients and is a predictive biomarker for post-COVID-19 cognitive deficits. They posit that antibodies that target fibrin may be an effective treatment for the condition.
• Then we have this study about transgender men given testosterone supplements that is sure to add to the ongoing debates around trans issues. They found that these transgender men who were assigned female at birth underwent changes in their immune systems that made them more closely resemble that of cisgender men. That is their immune responses to the type 1 interferon proteins, used as a proxy for the strength of their response to viral infections, decreased, while their responses to a signaling pathway that is typically associated with inflammation increased. The sample size is small so this is just a start but the changes seem startling after a course of testosterone supplements of only three months.
• Another paper that is sure to spark widespread debate is this one that finds evidence of human evolution in ancient DNA. They compared DNA of ancient humans with that of contemporary people and conclude that there are many loci that were likely altered as a result of selective pressure. They claim for example that there is evidence that the predisposition to store energy during food scarcity has changed after the advent of farming and that there are other changes such as lighter skin color, lower risk for schizophrenia and bipolar disease, slower health decline and many more. In short, they claim that changes in human DNA has accelerated in response to civilization. I expect a lot more noise on this paper in the near future.
• Finally here’s a strange discovery that feels like it could be science-fiction but actually makes sense upon reflection. The researchers found that applying a commonly used food coloring to the skin of mice effectively makes it transparent. Specifically they used the food dye tartrazine which was was found to absorb light in the near ultraviolet and blue part of the spectrum and allowed red and orange light to penetrate deeper into the tissue of mice. This allowed them to watch neurons tagged with fluorescent markers in real time without doing anything else. The medical applications of this is obvious though it isn’t immediately possible to use this on humans as our skin is much thicker and the dye would have to completely saturate our skin tissue. It does make one wonder why this wasn’t tried earlier.

For once I have a decent mix of interesting science-related news announcements that are not all centered around biology.

• The one medical paper in this lot is rather sobering one about the long-term risk of regularly using marijuana. The study uses insurance data and claims that those who use the substance daily for years, and especially those with cannabis use disorder, meaning that they overuse it, have a much higher risk of developing head and neck cancers. As they note, they didn’t differentiate between methods of using the substance and it could be that the increased risk comes mainly from smoking it rather than the substance itself. Still with marijuana use becoming more socially and legally acceptable, usage rates are shooting up and the long-term effects do call for greater scrutiny.
• Then there’s this paper that has major implications for all of life on Earth so I supposed it counts as being biology-related. It concerns the discovery of so-called dark oxygen, referring to oxygen made by metallic nodules deep under the surface of the ocean. This presents a challenge to the conventional assumption that all oxygen on Earth is produced by living organisms through processes like photosynthesis using sunlight. The nodules however seem to be able to create oxygen using a sort of seawater electrolysis process, effectively acting like natural batteries. The discovery opens new possibilities for the ongoing search into how life began on our planet as aerobic life might well have begun deep under the ocean where there is no sunlight.
• Next is another finding that is planetary in scale but it’s about Mars. By analyzing data from a seismometer carried on Nasa’s Mars Insight Lander, the team claims that they have found liquid water in reservoirs deep in the rocky crust of the planet. Though we already know that there is water frozen at the poles of Mars, this is the first time that liquid water has been found there. At around 10 km to 20km beneath the surface, the reservoir is still far too deep to be of practical use but it does help answer the question of where all of the water that was known to be Mars go.
• Finally here’s a paper that hit news headlines around the world. By analyzing the composition of the central Altar Stone that is part of Stonehenge, the team claims that it must have come from Scotland at least 750 km away. As the stone is thought to have arrived at Stonehenge around 2620 to 2480 BC, this represents a considerable feat of transportation and logistics. More interesting to me is what it tells us about the importance of the site as the builders deemed it necessary to transport a stone so far and what that implies for the level of societal organization that existed even so long ago.

Once again so much new stuff on health and biology but we do have a couple of papers in economics and sociology!

• First, we have a simple and rather straightforward paper about a result that is perhaps obvious. A team of China-based researchers have published a paper claiming that antihistamines inhibits SARS-CoV-2 infection. The mechanism is that the histamine receptor H1 acts as an alternative receptor for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Antihistamines then competitively bind to HRH1, blocking the viral spike protein from gaining access. This discovery might seem less urgent now that the pandemic is under control and vaccines exist, but as virologists warn, SARS-CoV-2 could yet evolve and make a comeback and it’s always good to have more tools in our arsenal.
• Next we have a paper whose very technical title both makes it difficult to understand and perhaps understates its significance. It describes using something they call bridge DNA to insert DNA at specific genomic target sites and allows programmable DNA excision and inversion. The specific details are far beyond my layman’s understanding but the upshot is that this comprises a new DNA editing tool far above the capabilities of the CRISPR/Cas 9 genetic scissors. Given how much of a difference CRISPR made, this is surely a Nobel Prize-level discovery and a harbinger of much accelerated development in the biosciences.
• This next paper is sure to be contentious in a US election year and like all such papers which attempt to find statistical correlations in large masses of data, I would be cautious about its findings. Its objective is no less than to find correlations between intelligence and political beliefs, focusing on left-wing and liberal ideals. The result is the expected one that social liberalism and lower fondness for authoritarianism is correlated with higher intelligence, as measured by both IQ and educational attainment.
• The next paper however is less flattering to liberals. There has been a lot of interest lately in studying the effects of potential Universal Basic Income schemes. This experiment compared 1,000 low-income individuals who were given a substantial amount of money unconditionally over three years with a control group. They found no significant effects on investments in human capital and no impact of quality of employment. Instead they found increases in time spent on leisure. Arguably this still represents a net increase in human welfare but it will be hard to politically sell as government policy.
• Finally here’s a discovery that is both fun and made me wonder why no one ever noticed it before. In addition to many other elements that already make Komodo dragons so deadly, It seems that their teeth are coated with a layer of iron and that helps them to keep the edges sharp. This discovery was made when someone noticed orange pigment on the serrated edge of their teeth and analyzed the substance to find that it contains concentrated iron. It rather puzzles me why no one noticed this before and it is apparently the first time this kind of coating has been found in any animal. It all feels too much like science-fiction to be true but for now, I suppose it stands as an established scientific fact.

All of the articles this month relate to human health and well being, with the findings on mental health sure to be contentious.

• Most should know about the growing problem of myopia in children but the extent of it is still shocking. The epidemic is global and was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic which lead children to spend more time indoors. Previous predictions of the incidence of myopia are doubling or tripling, leading governments to scramble for solutions. As the article notes, as this cohort ages, the high incidence rates and increased severity of myopia may lead to increased susceptibility to conditions like macular degeneration, making this a serious health issue.
• One health-related announcement that was viralled around the world is a new study claiming that sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, appears to help prevent dementia. The claim is actually fairly modest, saying only that sildenafil is able to get into the blood vessels in the brain and hence improve blood flow. There’s no direct data yet on the drug’s effects on dementia patients but that study is sure to be coming.
• There’s a tussle going on in the developed world right now over whether or not the mental health crisis among the young have cultural roots, either being worsened by social media or the normalization of having a mental health condition. This article covers findings from a survey of college students to say that liberal students have worse mental health than moderate and conservative students. Furthermore, liberal female and non-binary students have the worst self-reported mental health. I won’t go into the editorializing about the causes but I will say that I am sympathetic to the view that to some extent mental health issues seem to be contagious. The more you talk about them and raise awareness about them, the more students will report that they suffer from such issues.
• Finally another paper claims that people’s satisfaction with their life correlates with their personality types, as classified under the Big Five domains. Emotional stability, extraversion and conscientiousness correlated with high life satisfaction while openness and agreeableness were not. These findings remained true across a span of ten years for individuals. This suggestion that life satisfaction is to some extent shaped by personality traits contradicts the belief that happiness is determined mainly by one’s lot in life.

There’s been so much in the way of interesting science-related announcements this month that I decided to cut some out as they are either too speculative or perhaps political. What’s left are all still fairly major announcements.

• The first bit of news really comes from Sabine Hossenfelder whose YouTube channel I’ve taken to following and I wouldn’t have understood its significance without her laying it clearly. This paper describes success at using a laser to excite the nucleus of the Thorium isotope Th-229. Th-229 is a particular target as its excitation energy 8.4 eV is considered quite low, making it accessible to tabletop laser systems. I won’t go into the technical details of how the team achieved this but the upshot is that this opens the pathway towards optical nuclear clocks that are more precise than anything currently possible. As Hossenfelder points out, this is definitely a Nobel Prize-level achievement as last year’s award was for attosecond physics.
• The news about a male orangutan in Indonesia being observed intentionally using a medicinal plant to treat a wound on his face has since gone viral. What is particularly impressive is that it was a multi-step, deliberative process. First, the orangutan chewed leaves from a climbing plant and then smeared the resulting juice on his wound. Then he finished by covering the wound with the chewed up leaves. This plant is known to be used in traditional medicine for treating illnesses like dysentery, diabetes and malaria. The scientists say that the wound was likely from a fight with another orangutan and they currently do not know how this orangutan learned to use the plants in this way.
• Many of the pyramids in Egypt are located on a narrow strip of desert, yet researchers today don’t know why they were concentrated on this specific area. In this paper, a team describes how they used satellite imagery, geophysical data and soil coring to show that a now extinct branch of the Nile River used to run at the foothills of the Western Desert plateau. The waterway then would have been critical to transport building materials and workers for the massive construction projects.
• Next we have a large release of data that surely yield many, many more papers and theories for years and years to come. The team took a 1mm cubic volume of human brain tissue, sliced it very finely and imaged everything with an electron microscope. The result is about 1.4 petabyes of data covering 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses. It is the largest connectomics study of human brain tissue so far. It will take a lot of time for other researchers to sift through this treasure trove and mine novel insights but already there has been a lot of excitement over previously unseen structures.
• Finally, here’s a paper that is sure to be highly controversial. The team used food-liking data from participants in the UK to find associations between dietary habits and mental health. Notable is that instead of deciding what the different food groups are themselves, they look at the data to find natural patterns. From there, they found that dietary choices fell into four types: reduced-starch or starch-free, vegetarian, high protein and low fiber, and balanced. They also found that those on a balanced diet had better mental health and cognitive functions compared to those on other diets. More controversially, they state that those on a vegetarian diet exhibited more mental health issues including anxiety, depression, mental distress and so on. The team is cautious in saying that they cannot draw a causal conclusion but this paper is sure to lead to a firestorm of protests all the same.