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.
Quite a rich trove of articles this month but once again the really fascinating stuff are in the life sciences.
Easily the most significant and controversial finding of this month’s batch is the discovery in China of a human skull that dates from a million years ago. The skull found in Hubei province and called Yunxian 2 was originally assumed to belong to a member of Homo erectus. New analysis now suggests that it was actually a member of Homo longi who was thought to have lived alongside Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. If true, this sets the timeline of the evolution of large-brained humans back by at least half a million years. Some are using this finding to challenge the established provenance of humans as being from Africa but it’s more likely evidence that there is still so much more that we don’t know.
One of the key symptoms of schizophrenia is auditory hallucinations, hearing things that aren’t there. One explanation for what is going on is that the patients are unable to distinguish between inner speech and external voices. A new study tests this hypothesis using EEG to monitor brain activity while they were asked to internally produce a sound without speaking it out loud and while listening to an audible syllable without doing anything else. The team found that patients known to have auditory hallucinations had brain activity that suggests they experience inner speech as more real than external sounds.
Here’s something that won’t occur to most people but will likely seem like a horror story once they hear about it. Some children suffer from epilepsy so severe that the treatment consists of surgically disconnecting the part of the brain in which the seizures originate from the rest of the brain. Yet the tissue remains intact and remains alive. One team wanted to find out whether the part that gets disconnected still has some awareness. So they took EEG readings of both the intact brain and the disconnected region before the surgery and at regular intervals afterwards. Thankfully the results aren’t horrifying. Electrical activity in the intact portion of the brain showed no changes but in the severed portion, the EEG showed slow rhythms called delta waves which are consistent with deep sleep. So it’s not dead but at least it isn’t fully aware all the time.
Finally here’s an article about similarities in sounds made by birds of different species separated by vast distances and how the phenomenon provides new insight into the development of human language. The researchers found that more than 20 different bird species across four continents produce nearly identical “whining” vocalizations when they spot parasitic birds. They performed playback experiments which showed that birds who hear the calls for the first time will come to investigate the sound. They are then able to learn and reproduce that sound in the future. This suggests a novel pathway for how languages might have developed.
As usual as I like to do a rundown on the scientific prizes every year because it’s downright criminal how little attention the announcements get. The task is a little easier this year because the discoveries they involve should be straightforward for the layman to understand.
I always prefer it when the science news is both highly significant and relatively easy to understand and directly relevant. Most of the articles in this batch seem to fit these criteria.
We’ll start with the news that is the least approachable but it’s really not that bad. Since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) started delivering data, the results have seriously challenged longstanding assumptions in cosmology. The latest one is a claim that the mysterious Little Red Dots seen by the telescope is a primordial black hole with the mass of 50 million Suns. The issue is that according to our current understanding of how galaxies are formed, it should be impossible for such massive black holes to form so early in the history of the universe. So this adds more evidence that to the gathering pile that present theories about the birth and expansion of the universe are just wrong.
Next we have the discovery that a single mutation in horses led to them becoming rideable by humans and thence changed the course of history. The gene in question is called GSDMC and the researchers the date of the mutation to about 4,200 years ago. In horses, this mutation is known to reshape vertebrae, improve motor coordination and boost limb strength. They were able to show that the frequency of the mutated GSDMC variant shot from 1% to nearly 100% in a few centuries as humans specifically bred horses with the mutation they spread all across Eurasia.
One uplifting bit of news is the discovery of a process that turns plastic into fuel at 95% efficiency in one step. Other processes already exist but they include dechlorination as a separate step for PVC to avoid releasing toxic compounds. Their new process is apparently do it in a single step and handle mixed PVC materials and polyolefin waste, which includes both polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), together. There’s no mention of how expensive this is or whether this can be scaled but it still sounds like good news to me.
There’s been a great deal of debate lately about allowing smartphones in classrooms with many countries opting for a ban. This paper which covers a randomized controlled trial involving 17,000 students found that a ban did result in better grades, but the improvement was very minor. Perhaps more significantly, they also found that students exposed to the ban became more supportive of phone-use restrictions, suggesting that a ban might be popular with both parents and students. Yet this is very far from the last word on this issue as others have pointed out that the study fails to account for the possible benefits of using smartphones in schools. This is one area in which many commentators feel like they need to have their say.