A little lighter than usual as I’ve been away for much of this month.

• Many parties have been sounding the alarm over the possibility of screening human embryos using polygenic scores, thus ushering in a new era of eugenics. The idea is that while we have established that it is nigh impossible to select for specific genes for desirable characteristics like height or intelligence, it is possible to use large-scale genome-wide association studies to score an individual’s genome for various characteristics. This paper explains the details of what is involved but also lays out the limits of the method in that gains are small and hide wide variances. Nevertheless it is expected that gains can be compounded over multiple generations and that would have critical implications for the future of the human species.
• I’m sure that no one who reads this blog is an anti-vaxxer but this article gives yet more reason to vaccinate against measles. Apart from the causing the disease itself which can kill, being infected by the virus has the effect of wiping your immune system’s memory. As everyone knows, once your body beats an infection, your immune system remembers it so as to better fight it if the same virus is encountered later. This memory is stored in the lymphoid tissues but the measles virus seems to specifically target them and wipe out that memory, causing you to be vulnerable once again to old diseases.
• Next we have a paper that is only semi-serious and is to be taken with a grain of salt as it is from an investment firm and not a scientific journal. Nevertheless it is very interesting as it examines dating trends of the 21st century. The key driver is that most couples now meet online instead of being introduced by friends or meeting at work or in school etc. and that has profound implications for society. In particular it gives women much more power in the dating market as it is easier to decline a date online whereas in person a woman may be under pressure to accept one out of politeness. Online matchmaking also means that looks are all important, meaning that other factors such as smell for example is less important, leading to a decline in perfume sales.
• Finally in lighter news, here’s this bit about Google’s DeepMind AI beating the top human players at Starcraft 2. This isn’t all that new but this time the researchers have deliberately restricted the AI’s reflexes to human-level in order to simulate a competition of pure strategy.

I always feel a little weird writing one of these just after one of the annual rundowns of the Nobel Prizes but the march of science goes on even while we’re celebrating past discoveries. This big announcement this month is seriously major news as well.

• The big news of course is Google’s declaration that it has achieved quantum supremacy. I could have posted this last month when it leaked but I wanted to wait for the official announcement. You should read up on the details yourself but the upshot is that Google has built a 53-qubit quantum computer that can run a specific experiment millions of times faster than a classical computer can. So far that’s the only thing that it has been proven to run and it’s not exactly a useful calculation to perform but one can easily imagine that this conclusively proves that quantum computing is real. You can read up on all of the details here.
• This next bit of news is also about quantum mechanics. It’s not really a new discovery but it works as a convincing piece of evidence that quantum superposition is a real phenomenon. Whereas previous experiments used atoms, this one used comparatively massive molecules, consisting of up to 2,000 atoms each, to demonstrate that the principles of quantum physics do operate on the macroscopic scale.
• Moving on to astronomy, we have a longer article talking about how analysis of the compounds found within the water vapor plumes of Enceladus, a moon of Saturn reveals that they consist of the basic building blocks needed to form amino acids. We should be careful not to get too excited but the fact that the moon is so energetic, with its liquid water and occasional jets of water vapor, plus the discovery of these compounds makes it currently the leading candidate for life elsewhere in our Solar System.
• This next news item is fairly sobering. We all know about declining small towns and how some people leave them and subsequently while those who stay fall ever behind by every measure of economic and physical wellbeing. Shockingly, scientists have found from studying the population of mining towns in the UK, that they can detect differences in the DNA of those who stayed and those who left. Effectively those who left have DNA associated with more positive effects, the most important of which is educational attainment, while those who stayed had more damaging ones. The finding is intuitive, those who are healthier and more intelligent would find it easier to leave, but it is depressing and policymakers should take note.
• Finally as a bit of lighter reading, here is an article about the piracucu, a fish that lives in freshwater lakes in the Amazon basin. You’ve probably never heard of them but you will have heard of the species of fish that they share a habitat with: the piranha. So the obvious question is how the piracucu, a large fish, survive against the notoriously vicious piranha. The answer is that they have developed extremely tough scales that act as armor, consisting of a highly mineralised upper layer and backing it a layer made of collagen fibres that prevent any cracks in the upper layer from spreading. No doubt this is exciting for anyone interested in better armor technology.

Once again the winners of the year’s Nobel Prizes have been announced but the science prizes barely got any press coverage. One surprise is that the prize for literature has been talked about more than this year’s Peace Prize, I think it going to the Prime Minister of Ethiopia isn’t that exciting and there are dual literature prizes this year and some controversy involved. Nonetheless I haven’t seen people talk about the science prizes at all.

The prize for Physiology or Medicine goes to William Kaelin, Sir Peter Ratcliffe and Gregg Semenza who identified the now well known phenomenon whereby cells can detect and respond to varying levels of oxygen. The discoveries include the hormone known as erythropoietin which triggers the process that creates red blood corpuscles, the HIF protein complex that switches that gene on and off, another protein called VHL that regulates how all this works in accordance with oxygen levels and finally how VHL and HIF-1 alpha work together. This created a complete picture of how different oxygen levels regulate the fundamental physiological processes of our bodies.

The prize for Physics is split into two, for separate discoveries though both are in astronomy. James Peebles is awarded one half for his contributions to the so-called Big Bang model of cosmology. This award is apparently unusual because instead of a single big discovery, it is for a lifetime worth of insights and work that taken together changed the field. It may make it easier to award Nobel Prizes in the future of similar such contributions. The other half goes to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for the first discovery of a planet outside of our solar system. They used the Doppler-shift method of measuring how the frequency of starlight arriving at Earth oscillates due to the gravity of a planet orbiting it to detect a gas giant twice the size of Jupiter very near to the star Pegasi 51. Since then many thousands of other exoplanets have been founds.

Unlike the other science prizes, the one for Chemistry goes to a technology that everyone reading this is familiar with and most probably use daily, It goes to John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino for the development of the now commonplace and essential lithium-ion battery. This began with the discovery, out of pure curiosity, that when lithium ions entered atom-sized spaces in titanium disulphide, electricity could be stored. Next, the titanium disulphide was replaced with cobalt oxide, which doubled the output voltage. Finally the highly reactive and hence dangerous lithium anode was replaced by petroleum coke to finally create the reusable and safe version of the lithium-ion battery that we now all use.

Finally the Economics prize goes to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for their work in development economics to help fight poverty. There is too much variety in their published papers to easily summarize but their approach can be described as using carefully designed and targeted experiments to empirically find out which interventions work. Examples include using randomized trials to study the effects of different educational policies in Kenya, measuring the rates of return of using fertilizer, evaluating the effects of micro-credit loans, proving that the benefits of deworming programs far outweigh the costs and much more.

Biology again predominates this month and they’re really interesting bits of news too.

• The excellent Zootopia famously featured a sloth in a scene and this helped make them popular. This feature article details some of the workings of their biology, possible only because their tree-based life cycle means that they are almost completely free of predators. In many ways, they have adapted to be more like reptiles than other mammals, soaking up energy from the sun and moving slowly to conserve energy.
• Next is an article featuring cats but isn’t actually about cats. Instead it uses the typical ranges of medical costs for cats and other pets to note how different this market is compared to healthcare for humans, especially in the US. While we all know about inflation in healthcare costs for humans, it notes that medical costs for pets have actually declined modestly. It’s interesting example of how insurance markets and greater consumer choice influence prices.
• Moving on to people, we have an article about education. Many universities now allow students to rate the quality of their professors and the quality of the instruction they get. The article differentiates between active learning, using methods that encourage students to get involved, and passive learning which consists mostly of listening to lectures. The data show that active learning is unequivocally superior but require more effort from the students. Yet as a result, students give higher ratings to professors who employ passive learning methods, especially when they are enlivened with amusing stories and anecdotes. The tragedy is that students think they have learned a lot from superstar lecturers but tests actually show the opposite.
• Are different languages spoken at different speeds? This article explores this and related questions. The truth is that they do and yet a new study concludes that despite this speed difference, the rate that information is conveyed using different languages is about the same. This is because some languages, such as English, are more efficient in that information can be conveyed in fewer syllables. Others like Japanese need more syllables but speakers speak faster using them and so need the same amount of time to convey the same information.
• Finally we end with an article about Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). We all know that AI is all the rage but thus far most ANNs we use rely on blank slates that are then trained using vast reams of data. This article asserts that we ought to take a page from nature in that the brains of most animals don’t start out as blank slates but are highly structured by their genomes. As such the way to get past the bottlenecks of current ANNs is to incorporate innate behavior even in their initial state.

A much better selection of news this month, though it’s all about biology.

• We start with a feature article about how China is leading the rest of the world by a large margin in using the CRISPR gene-editing technique to achieve new breakthroughs. This one focuses on how it is being deployed to rapidly make changes in crops, reducing corn’s vulnerability to a fungus for example or boost their resistance to insects, in order to grow enough food to feed China’s vast population. These new strains not on the market yet and they will be very soon.
• Next is this very controversial report that a notable Spanish-born biologist Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte has been working with Chinese scientists to make human-monkey hybrids. These aren’t complete organisms, being human stem cells injected into monkey embryos that are not allowed to grow for long. But it’s obvious why even this is highly disturbing.
• As this article itself notes, the technology of editing memories has long been the province of science-fiction. While it isn’t really available yet, this review of various research avenues and techniques show that it isn’t impossible either. This article focuses on techniques that would be safe in humans for treatment of trauma and differentiates between those that focus on consolidation, meaning memories formed immediately after experiencing an event; and reconsolidation, meaning when an old memory is recalled and then stored away again. It seems that different techniques apply to those two stages.
• In lighter news, here’s an announcement of the discovery of fossils of parrot bones in New Zealand dating from 19 million years ago. The cool part is that extrapolating from the size of the fossils, the parrots must have stood a metre-tall and weighed up to 7 kilograms, making them giants. It also goes on to speculate that the phenomenon of gigantism has been observed in New Zealand, probably due to the lack of competition, but this is the first time that it has been seen in parrots.

Last month was incredible in terms of new discoveries. This month less so. Instead we have mostly feature articles rather than new findings.

• First we have this cool little paper that talks about how most of the text in international treaties are actually copy-pasted from previous treaties and agreements. Textual analysis of preferential trade agreements indicate up to 95% of the text is copy-pasted. That isn’t truly surprising and it makes sense since they would want consistency across many types of documents. But I like how it gives us a little window into the kind of work that trade negotiators actually do.
• One exciting announcement we do have is this one about how scientists in China have edited the DNA of a germ that enables it to harvest free electrons as an energy source. I consider this super speculative and not really credible, especially when it’s published by such grandiose claims as potentially opening the door to granting humans superpowers as various cells are supercharged. Nonetheless it’s not completely implausible and the germ in question that has been engineered is the lowly E coli. I am however not very sure what “70% improved performance” in E coli translates to physically.
• Colors, that is pigments and paints of specific physical colors, are such a simple thing that we often don’t appreciate the difficulty that creating them involve. This article talks about how hard it is to create bright, vivid reds that don’t involve toxic metals or require harvesting them from an animal. This search led a team to experiment with crystals and semiconductors to find suitable materials from which to make the desired shade of color. I found it to be a look into an interesting corner of industrial science that most people take for granted.
• Finally for gamers, here’s a detailed and refreshingly honest post-mortem by a scientist with a PhD in experimental psychology who was hired to advise on the design of the videogame Halo 2. Specifically he advised that players should be given the maximum amount of control when it came to multiplayer options and he based it on feedback that he received from players themselves. As he now admits, he was wrong as the success of the actual design that was implemented in which a matchmaking algorithm automatically assigns players to game sessions has proven to be so successful that it is now the industry standard. The problem was that the opinions of the players at the time were wrong as they had never experienced automatic matchmaking and so said that they hated it. Once they did try it, it turned out that they liked it.

I’ve been swamped by the number of cool science stuff. It’s been a great month for some amazing announcements and studies.

• We start with what is really more of a wake-up call than a new finding and that’s about improvements in the CRISPR technique that I’ve talked about so often here. This comes from a team in China which claims to have tripled the efficiency of the technique and greatly reduced errors. This means it will soon be safe enough to deployed on a mass scale even though the ethical and legal debate about it is far from being resolved.
• Most people who are born with extra fingers on their hands have non-functional digits. A rare few have fully developed extra fingers with working muscles and nerves but most still have them amputated as they considered undesirable. This study examined how they work when allowed to grow and develop normally, It found that the subjects were indeed capable of more complex manipulation with their hands than normal people and that their nervous system is able to accomodate them without loss of control to any other fingers. In effect they have a kind of superpower and it has interesting consequences when it comes to adding future bionic implants that need to interface with the human nervous system.
• We all know by now how worries about the causes of autism has led to all manner of bad practices. New studies, backed by evidence, now claim that it may be caused by differences in the population of bacteria present in the gut. Experimental treatments which consist of transplanting faecal bacteria from healthy people to those diagnosed with autism have been able to alleviate symptoms and similar findings have also been made with mice that given transplanted bacteria from both normal humans and those with autism symptoms. Indeed, mice given bacteria from autistic humans began showing autistic symptoms themselves.
• Next is a fascinating study about how some chimpanzees in Guinea practise crab-fishing. It is apparently the first known instance of a non-human primate being shown to habitually catch and eat aquatic crabs. Also interesting that populations who ate crabs more, ate ants less. I always think it’s cool to learn when animals have a wider range of behaviors than we expect.
• One widely shared bit of science news this month has been a social experiment on civic honesty. The team deliberately dropped wallets containing identifying documents, some including money and some not, then waited to see how many would be returned. This was done in 40 countries and 355 cities around the world so the data is good. The unsurprising find that the return rate is highest in countries like Switzerland and the Scandinavian nations, lowest in African and Asian countries. The surprising find is that it is higher when the wallets actually contain cash.
• This is a little old by now and it’s so widely talked about that I had to share it. It’s a primer on the Baumol Effect, the name given to the phenomenon whereby prices rise inexorably in industries that don’t increase in productivity. This explanation is not new, being named after the economist William Baumol but as it’s not widely understood, this primer is timely and very digestible even to laymen. I’m not summarizing it here so read it for yourself.
• Finally for fun reading here’s a physics paper describing how lightsabers are physically possible in theory but implausible in practice due to the extreme energy densities required. The key challenge they wanted to solve was how to get light interact with itself in a vacuum. However in quantum mechanics, the vacuum is not fully empty but instead filled with virtual particles. The passage of an electromagnetic wave can polarize the quantum vacuum. allowing two lightsaber blades to interact with one another. However the energy required is immense and even the most efficient theoretically possible energy production methods would result in a ridiculously large and heavy lightsaber.