Loads of medical science news. That bodes well for the transhumanist agenda of living forever I suppose. We’ll start with the exception first.
Included because I’m very much in favor of YIMBYism, this paper posits that environmental land use regulation reduces the construction of new housing. Specifically these regulations apply to areas near the habitats of endangered species and as more species are added to the list, the land area affected grows as well. It’s an obvious conclusion but the paper lays down some numbers on many housing units have been displaced and deterred by such regulations. The estimated range is wide but the author puts the central estimate at 6.3 million units or 4% of the US total housing stock as of 2025. The point is not to claim that such regulations are bad but that we should be aware of the trade-offs that are being made.
Over the past month, I’ve seen a marked push to get older adults to take the herpes zoster (HZ) or shingles vaccine. One impetus may be this recent paper studying older adults admitted to a nursing facility. They found that those who received the recombinant HZ vaccine (RZV) were associated with lower risk of developing dementia, especially as time goes on. This evidence is of course correlational only but adds to previous observations that there is a protective effect. That’s enough to convince me to get the vaccine personally even if it is rather expensive.
Accompanying this is this article looking into claims that Chinese teams have been successful in reversing the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease through surgical intervention. This isn’t new but the initial claims in the form of videos of dramatic recoveries weren’t taken seriously at first. Since then many more surgeries have taken place and larger, more rigorous trials, are being held. The treatment supposedly works by improving the flow through the array of fluid-filled channels that run alongside blood vessels through the brain to flush out waste. Most of the gains seem modest but there have occasionally been drastic improvements. There are also doubts over how long the beneficial effects can last.
The viral science news of the month has to be the announcement that a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine combined with immunotherapy has been successful in treating melanoma. Specifically it was shown to be able to reduce the recurrence of the cancer and prevent it from spreading to other parts of the body. The vaccine is made-to-order based on the mutations of the patient’s tumors and the results are promising, hence the immediate uptick in Moderna’s share price following the announcement. While this applies only to skin cancer so far, the hope is that the same approach can be readily applied to other types of cancer.
A decent number of articles for this month from different fields to boot.
To start off, we have an astonishing announcement about fully synthetic cells, that is living cells that have no ancestors and they are entirely made in the laboratory. Nicknamed Spudcells, these are bubbles of liposomes containing chromosomes engineered to be a minimum viable set. The cells can reproduce after a fashion but arguably are not truly alive because they are dependent on a diet of DNA-free liposomes to survive and thrive. They have no metabolism and do nothing but execute the instructions in their DNA to replicate provided they have the right building materials available. Even so this is a huge step in creating the earliest forms of purely synthetic life and is the stuff of real science-fiction brought to reality.
Next we have a more modest but still interesting paper that studies the cognitive impact of participating in the annual Ramadan fasting. What’s cool here is that to measure potential differences in cognitive performance, the researchers used data from tournament chess games, covering almost 10,000 players from 178 countries. The result is that they were unable to detect substantial differences in between Muslim players’ during Ramadan and outside of it, implying that the cognitive impact is minimal.
It has become a truism that discourse on all social media trends towards the negative. This paper expands on that, arguing that when many people comment on the same topic online, there is a natural urge to differentiate yourself, to say something different from what has already been said. To that end, users tend to make increasingly negative comments over time. They observe that this tendency is especially strong when the initial post is positive, prompting users to counteract that positivity by making critical comments.
Finally we have the news that astronomers have detected for the first time an atmosphere surrounding an Earth-like rock planet orbiting within the habitable zone of its star. Before anyone gets too excited though, what they actually detected was helium escaping from the upper atmosphere of the planet in question, LS 1140 b about 48 light-years away. This is enough evidence that the planet retains an atmosphere but should not be construed as meaning that the atmosphere is mainly made of helium. It does serve as a good demonstration that their methodology for detecting atmospheres around exoplanets work and suggests that this is only the first of many such discoveries.
Once again all of the good bits this month are in the life sciences but at least it’s heartening news.
Among the most positive developments is a gene-editing therapy for certain patients with high cholesterol. It applies only for those with so-called gain-of-function mutations of the PCSK9 gene and the enzyme it produces. Such patients often have high levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, leading to heart disease. The VERVE-102 therapy consists of a single intravenous infusion of a messenger RNA encoding an adenine base-editor protein and a guide RNA targeting PCSK9. The current is very small and observed patients over a very short duration only. Nonetheless it has so far proved to be safe and extremely effective, lowering LDL levels by 9% to 62%. I consider this to be a fantastic example of the coming wave of gene therapies.
Doomsayers often warn that rising life expectancy will inevitably impose unbearable pressures on healthcare and retirement costs. This paper focusing on thirty years worth of data from the US however points out, among other things, that while demographic changes inevitably lead to higher Social Security spending, Medicare spending has not increased by as much as previously expected. This is attributed to the fact that the increased life expectancy were entirely healthy. I consider this to be great news that societies can indeed adapt to a world with longer human lifespans in an economically sustainable manner.
This next oneI included more because of the clever way that the project exploited a natural experiment rather than any specific findings. It’s about the Pakistan Genome Resource, a biobank established to expand the breadth of the available data on human genetic variation by sequencing the genomes of hundreds of thousands of participants across Pakistan. Specifically because of a high incidence of cousin marriages in the country, it is more common to discover instances of genes in which both of the alleles inherited from parents are of the identical loss-of-function variants. Effectively these are natural versions of ‘knockouts’ in which the gene has been turned off. This understandably makes it a valuable treasure trove of genetic data, obliviating the need to deliberately knock out genes to study the effects on human development.
Finally the last bit of news is just plain weird without any real explanation so far. Even the discovery was pure happenstance, coming from videos taken to study how many people could share a space while keeping a safe distance during the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers simply noticed from these videos that crowds overwhelmingly walked in an anticlockwise direction. Further experiments yielded similar results and the bias seems to hold true across cultures, right-handedness, men or women and so on. So far no one knows why this bias exists though one theory is that it stems from human biomechanics as our bodies aren’t perfectly symmetrical.
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.