Some very important discoveries this month including a big one that may well be the most important finding for decades, if it doesn’t turn out to be a fluke.
The big news is that an experiment conducted at Fermilab observed muons behaving in a manner not consistent with the Standard Model of physics. After checking the math, the conclusion is that the model is wrong and there well may be a fifth, heretofore unknown, fundamental force in nature that would be needed to account for the behavior. For now, even though it is statistically unlikely to be a fluke, the Standard Model is so well established that no one is going to throw it out based on just this one result and certainly no one knows what is going to come next. But we can be sure that theoretical physicists are up all night trying to make sense of this.
Another important announcement, if it eventually proves to work on humans, is the discovery of a method of regrowing lost teeth. It uses an antibody to suppress one particular gene, USAG-1, and that was enough to stimulate tooth growth in mice and ferrets. There’s a long way to go before it would be even considered for testing on humans but if it works this certainly counts as a discovery that would make a big impact on everyone’s lives.
Next is a review of collected research to suggest that a strategy of promoting bilingualism, even if that means teaching a second language to the elderly or strengthening long unused language skills, is useful to delay the onset of dementia. It seems that even Cantonese and Mandarin spoken bilingualism is sufficient to have measurable effects on the onset of dementia. Since has no effect on Malaysians as we speak multiple languages already but it is interesting to see language learning being promoted as a healthcare measure.
Everyone knows how amazing it is that the world has been able to develop multiple effective COVID-19 vaccines in so short a time to address the ongoing pandemic. This paper argues that this has been possible partly because of the many lessons learned about vaccines across the decades spent trying to develop one for HIV. That effort was met with failure after failure but the argument is that it built up the necessary vaccine expertise to quickly develop one for COVID-19 and so research funds for vaccine development are never wasted.
Finally here’s some fascinating reading material about a particular species of ant known as the Indian jumping ant. As we all know, each ant colony only has a single queen. So what happens when the queen dies? In the case of this type of ant in particular, the surviving females compete to become the new queen and to do this their bodies transform into an intermediate form known as a gamergate to fight each one another with shrunken brains. Eventually a winner will emerge to become the queen but then the losers who survive the fight will transform back into normal ants, which involves their brains growing back again. And yes, queen ants don’t need big brains because all they do is pump out babies.
Trying something a bit different for this month’s edition of serving up cool science news and a couple of pieces really benefit from a visual presentation of the discoveries.
The first of these is a new paper that for the first time lays out a complete model of the workings of the famous Antikythera Mechanism. This is effectively a mechanical calculator or computer from ancient Greece, the fragments of which were recovered in 1901. A complete understanding of how the device worked was difficult to achieve given that only about a third of the mechanism survives. This paper explains how x-ray CT techniques were used to infer the parts that are missing and uses investigative work to fill in the blanks to prove that the entire device was used to calculate the positions of the Sun, the Moon and the five planets known at the time, according to a geocentric model of the cosmos. This excellent video was made to accompany the paper to explain what the device does and how the team arrived at the conclusions they did.
It’s a short month and slow in terms of interesting science news, so I don’t have much.
First we have a long feature about the earliest known domesticated dogs. Based on studies of both human and dog DNA as well as the observation that the genetic lines of dogs and humans tend to merge or spit together in the same places because humans bring their dogs along with them as they move, the current hypothesis is that dogs were first domesticated somewhere in northern Siberia roughly 23,000 years ago. Unfortunately just as more successful human settlers killed off natives as they invade, so do the dogs they bring displace the dog lineages of the natives, all of which can be noted in the mitochondrial DNA evidence.
Here is an amusing story about how pigs can seemingly be trained to play simple video games. They used a ruggedized version of a familiar joystick and had a dispenser for food rewards when the pigs won. Yet some of the pigs still played even after the dispenser mechanism broke down. This isn’t too surprising a result as we already know that pigs are quite intelligent and yes, I would agree that there is a moral imperative to move towards synthetic meat.
Finally this is potentially a huge thing once it can be proven to work on humans. Despite decades of effort, there is currently no contraceptive pill that can be taken by men. This paper talks about triptonide, a natural compound extracted and purified from a herb used in traditional Chinese medicine. Studies involving mice and monkeys show that it induces deformed sperm, greatly reducing its movement ability and hence causes infertility. Moreover it is fully reversible several weeks after cessation of the drug and seems to have no toxic side effects. Needless to say once it becomes available for humans, it will help shift the burden of preventing unwanted pregnancies from being borne entirely by women.
First month of the year and there is already plenty of cool science stuff.
We start with the bit of science news that has been shared the most this month. Many tourists who have visited Bali would know about how the long-tailed macaques there are notorious about stealing items from tourists. A new paper however asserts that the monkeys have even learned how valuable different objects are to humans. Not only are they able to steal objects that have no inherent value to them such as wallets and hats in order to exchange them with things that they do want such as food, but they have learned the relative value of different objects and will only exchange objects of higher value with food that is more desirable. Furthermore they have determined that this is a learned behavior as adult monkeys are the best able to make such valuation judgments while juvenile ones make no such distinctions.
By now everyone will have heard of mRNA vaccines, an approach to making vaccines that is completely different from inactivated vaccines. But this technique is being used to treat more than just covid-19 as this paper talks about a promising vaccine for experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis. This is an extremely scary condition in which the immune system acts up and starts attacking your own nervous system and for which no treatment currently exists. The news about this jumped out at me immediately because my wife and I actually know someone who has this condition.
Next is an article about how even the simplest of organisms, in this case, non-photosynthetic bacteria have internal clocks that align with the Earth’s 24-hour cycle. Scientists already knew that photosynthetic bacteria have such clocks, because they rely on the light of sun to make energy, This time they have found similar cycles of gene activity in a soil bacterium that does not use photosynthesis and that such cycles even in an environment that is always dark. This suggests that this is an essential feature of all life on Earth even if we don’t why or how it is achieved.
Finally for fun, here is an article about how the complete genome of the platypus has just been released. Just as you might expect from this weird hybrid animal, its genes are part bird, part mammal and part reptile. This gives intriguing information about its evolutionary history. For example, the platypus lays eggs like birds but produces milk for its young like mammals. Accordingly while birds and reptiles have three genes that encodes for egg proteins, the platypus have only one and humans are zero. Yet the platypus does have most of the milk genes possessed by other mammals. Meanwhile it has also lost all four genes that encode for tooth development in mammals and as such grinds up its food with horn-like plates.
For this last month of a tumultuous year, the theme is probably that of China’s ascendancy in the domain of the sciences as Chinese researchers churn out groundbreaking discoveries one after another. I don’t even have to include China’s moon mission for this as that has yet to yield any novel science.
We might as well start with those first so here’s the story of it switching on its tokamak for real. This a fusion reactor that has plasma as hot as the temperature as the sun swirling around inside, held in place only the magnetic fields created by supercooled electromagnets. The promise of fusion power forever being just beyond the horizon is an old one and it’s still likelier than not that China’s effort to chase viable fusion energy will amount to nothing. But there’s no denying that they are in the race for real now.
The other one is about China’s photon-based quantum computer it has named Jiuzang. Like Google’s Sycamore, this has been built to perform a single type of computation, the one here being known as boson sampling. This involves sending parallel streams of photons as inputs through a series of beam splitters to obtain a result. Apparently trying to simulate this calculation through conventional means takes so long as to be effectively, thus making this a second clear case of quantum supremacy. I have no idea however if this has any practical use.
Still neither of these can match the significance of the next bit of science news: the announcement that Google’s DeepMind AI has effectively solved the protein folding problem. They proved this at an annual competition that involves predicting what shapes given strings of amino acids will fold into. While DeepMind’s solutions were not perfect, they are still so accurate as to essential invalidate every other approach. Despite the fact this means the careers of many scientists in the field have been upended, pretty much everyone is in agreement that this is a truly revolutionary advance that will change the entire biotech industry.
Next is a paper about restoring sight by inducing the retinal ganglion cells in the eyes to regenerate. Techniques to restore youth to cells and turn back the epigenetic clock have long been the stuff of science-fiction so this is a case of it in reality. They achieved it engineering a virus to induce expression of transcription factors that can trigger mature cells that it infects to revert to an immature state. Tested in mice, this approach succeeded in repairing damage to the RGC axon and restoring sight. Naturally they are very interested to learn if this technique also works on neurons elsewhere in the brain and the spinal cord.
Finally there is this bit of news about progress in developing so-called C4 rice. To cover some basics, different plants have different photosynthetic pathways and rice uses the less efficient C3 pathway. Maize on the other hand uses the more efficient C4 pathway. So C4 rice has been a sort of dream project for some time as the C4 pathway is theoretically up to 50% more efficient, so C4 rice would require less nitrogen and less water. This announcement is just about the early stage of assembling a functioning C4 biochemical pathway for rice and the real thing is still many years off but apparently this is still a pretty major advance.
This has been an eventful month in terms of politics but things have been calmer in the world of science. I do still have some cool stuff to share.
I really love the stories about how the pandemic related lockdowns around the world result in inadvertent natural experiments so here’s another one to add to the file. This one is about how the sleep patterns of children has been affected by the extended closure of schools. They found that children on average shifted their sleeping schedule two hours later than usual with online schooling starting later as well. This apparently resulted in higher sleep quality and less daytime sleepiness, suggesting than forcing children to wake up at the break of dawn to go to school in order to accomodate the working schedules of adults may not be for the best.
The most significant news this month in my opinion is the discovery that it is possible to effectively shape and manipulate magnetic fields from a distance. Normally in order to generate such a field, the source must lie within the field itself. This basic fact has not changed but one team found that by creating multiple fields and shaping them in a specific way, they were able to generate a combined virtual field which appears as if its collective source lies outside the field. It’s early days yet for this discovery and apparently the current experimental setup is very limited but if this pans out, the possible applications would be the stuff of science-fiction.
Next is this paper which nicely illustrates what a big difference genetically modified foods can make. This one is about the impact of GM brinjal introduced into Bangladesh based on a randomized controlled trial with a control group given a conventional variety of brinjal to plant and another group given a variety that is identical in all respects except that it has an added gene that is meant to have extra protection against pests. The result is a 51% increase in yields per hectare compared to a control group and a 37% drop in pesticides costs. They also note that the very significant drop in pesticide use also resulted in noticeably better health outcomes for the farmers involved.
I also like this article about a population of seals that live in Lake Baikal, effectively isolating them from other seals and they are the world’s only known species of freshwater seals. Scientists however wonder how they manage to find enough food to eat as there are so many of them within a closed ecosystem. It turns out that they eat amphipoda, tiny shell-less crustaceans, in addition to a more normal diet of fish. This is surprising because such creatures are far too small to be eaten by other seals and indeed it proves that this particular population of seals have evolved comb-like structures in their teeth that allow them to filter the amphipoda out of the water. This is of course very similar to how some whales collect and consume krill, inviting speculation that these may be whales in the making.
Finally here is another paper that involves CRISPR because it’s the gift that keeps on giving. This one involves using the technology to treat metastatic cancers, using it to target the damaged DNA of cancer cells and cut out that DNA, thus preventing the cells from replicating. Preliminary trials on mice show promising results but the most important part of this approach is that in theory it should only target cancer cells and leave normal cells alone, hence the researchers insistence that this isn’t chemotherapy with its heavy collateral damage. Of course, this is early days yet and we have seen plenty of other results using CRISPR where the targeting isn’t truly precise but there is no doubt that there is a huge step forwards in curing cancer.
A real wealth of science stuff this month and that’s coming off of the slew of science writing related to the Nobel Prize announcements earlier. Hope you’re prepared to do a lot of reading.
We’ll get the big headline-grabbing bit of news out of the way first though I’m personally not so sure that it makes much of a difference. This is of course the discovery of the world’s first superconductor that works at room temperature. This is of course a staple of science-fiction and a technology that would revolutionize everything if works reliably and cheaply enough to be widely deployed. However in this case, it relies on squeezing hydrogen, carbon and sulfur together at a pressure of about 2.6 million times that of Earth’s atmosphere. As such this discovery is interesting in that opens up new pathways to explore but it’s not in any way a practical technology.
Next is an article that I actually find interesting because it reminds me even when we think we already know everything, there still may be things that we have missed. After all what can be more settled science than human anatomy and yet this team announced that they have found a heretofore unnoticed set of salivary glands in the human nasopharynx, the upper part of the throat behind the nose. The existence of these glands was suspected because radiotherapy for cancer patients in this region brings unexpected side effects and their presence was then confirmed with PET/CT scans. This is effectively a discovery of a new organ, albeit a very small one, of the human body.
Still on the subject of humans, I like this neat little experiment about measuring how well we form a mental map of our environment. In a setup that resembles one we usually use for mice and the like, participants were tasked to navigate a path through a space in which different types of food were placed. They were then asked to recall the locations of each food and predictably they were much better at remembering the locations of high calorie foods like brownies and potato chips than low calorie ones like fruit, regardless of their individual personal diets. It’s an obvious result but it’s nice to have the confirmation.
Next is my favorite science article this month. This isn’t a report of a single new discovery but rather a broad overview about how the the scientific understanding of hybrid species and their role in evolution has changed over time. Previously hybrids were mostly thought of as being evolutionary dead ends that are either sterile or less well adapted than their parents. Growing evidence however has emerged that some hybrids can inherit combined traits from their parents that leave them better off and that there are mechanisms which prevent them from being absorbed back into the parent species. Furthermore such hybridisation seems to be much more common than previously thought and can result in an explosive growth of new species in a short amount time, overturning the old understanding of evolution by mutation as a slow process. The result is that the old picture of evolution as a tree is hopelessly outdated and evolution looks more like a tangled web that keeps criss-crossing back and forth. It took a long time to convince biologists to change their thinking of evolution and it will take longer yet for this to filter down to the general public.
Then we have this paper that purports to show the support given to Trump in the 2016 election stems not from those who were economically left behind but instead from groups who felt that their previously high status were being threatened by future developments, including those anxious over the perceived erosion of US dominance in the world. The claim here is that the difference between these two causes is established by a set of carefully crafted surveys but this is always tricky to prove. Still I include it here because it makes for interesting reading.
Finally here is the last one which I can only classify into the I don’t know what to make of it category but it sure seems important. It’s about time crystals interacting with one another. This is a strange form of matter that has the ability to repeat motions through time, with no external force being applied, apparently indefinitely, in a way that doesn’t violate the laws of thermodynamics. The claim is that scientists have now observed two time crystals interacting with one another in a controlled fashion and this is an important step in using them for any practical purpose but I won’t pretend I actually understand what is going on here.