A relative paucity of science news this month including one excitable announcement that turned out to be much ado over nothing much.
We start with something from the business world, an article about finding empirical evidence of the Peter’s Principle: people are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. This particular study examined salespersons who were promoted to managerial positions. They found that outstanding salespersons were indeed much more likely to be promoted to become managers and yet their pre-promotion sales performance is negatively correlated with how much value they contribute as a manager. By contrast, employees with more experience in teamwork make better managers but are less likely to be promoted.
Next is a paper that revisits the claim made in 2001 that helped make Steven Levitt famous. The original claim was that the legalization of abortion contributed to crime rates dropping in the 1990s. However the paper also predicted the effect would be even greater roughly twenty years in the future. Now in 2019, this new paper finds that indeed the prediction held true. No doubt there will be plenty of detractors and rebuttals but it’s cool that it held up as well as it seems to have.
The announcement that was briefly exciting is a claim by someone that he had managed to decrypt the famous Voynich manuscript, a famous document from the 15th century handwritten in an indecipherable alphabet and featuring weird drawings and symbols. But as this article such claims are a veritable cottage industry and this newest attempt doesn’t pass the muster of peer review. The university that made the widely circulated press release has since retracted it.
Finally on a light note, here’s a study that found a correlation between incidences of having pimples in middle and high school and subsequent academic and labor market outcomes. Essentially it confirms the stereotype that nerds have pimples but do well in school and at work.
We have not only a wealth of cool discoveries this month but at least a couple of these are huge findings that will likely cause huge waves in their respective fields for years if not decades to come.
We start with an easy to understand but still important economics study about the effect of worries about global warming on the price of seaside properties. It finds that the prices of such properties that are exposed to the risk of rising sea levels are indeed being discounted and that the discount has been rising in response to growing fears of a critical level of global warming being reached. This is of course the rational response and proves that the market is indeed responding to the risks even as government policy is lagging behind.
Anaesthetics obviously work and without it surgery would be impossible but until now scientists have had no idea why it works. This study proposes that they work by hijacking the neural circuitry that causes sleep. Specifically they activate neurons in the brain and causes hormones to be released into the bloodstream that in turn causes the animal to fall asleep. This means of course sleep is a much more active process than previously understood and this finding will no doubt open the way to much more research in the future.
Next up is the public announcement of the discovery of a fossil dig site that is said to be paleontological find of the century. What makes this site, located in North Dakota in the US, is that it records precisely happened at the moment of the meteor impact 66 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs. The unique geological composition at the site seems to have preserved fine bones. Others have raised doubts about it however as the site is privately owned and access to it is restricted but it is certainly the most talked about subject in those circles for now.
Then there’s this case of Chinese scientists being at it again, this time inserting a human gene thought to have connection to intelligence into macaque monkeys. Naturally this immediately prompted widespread accusations of unethical research and concerns about a Planet of the Apes scenario. In any case, the sample size here is small with only five surviving monkeys and they didn’t end up with larger brains and the only intelligence increase they noted was better short-term memory. Nevertheless the lead scientist involved seems intent on pushing ahead with larger sample sizes and more human genes.
Finally to end on a lighter note, here’s a bit about research indicating that cats can indeed recognize their own names, it’s just that they don’t about showing this to their owners.
Not much of note this month. Hopefully it’ll pick up later.
We start with a social science finding from South Africa about racial and gender biases in student evaluations of teachers. The experiment involved having students watch short video lecture using the same script and slides, varying only the race and gender of the lecturer. After having the students rate the lecturers, they found a positive bias in favor of female lecturers and a negative bias against black lecturers, with the surprising result that black students were even more biased in their assessment.
Next is a paper building off of Jared Diamond’s famous Guns, Germs, and Steel, examining the claim that technology spread more slowly on the north-south axis compared to the west-east axis. This paper tries to track the diffusion of technologies across geographical space and time and finds that the claim is generally true.
Still on the subject of the humanities, this intriguing article talks about the relationship between big gods, that is powerful, omniscient gods who are aware of everything that humans do, and big societies. The proposal is that big societies, large enough that everyone can’t know everyone else, need big gods to enforce order as a sort of supernatural policeman. The researchers found that big gods indeed are a consequence of big societies by first assembling and then querying a database of 400 societies, examining many variables and trying to work out when they moved on to worshipping big gods.
Then we have another biological modification experiment out of China. It involved injecting nanoparticles that are attached to retinal photoreceptors into mice in order to give them the ability to see into the near-infrared wavelengths. The mice were able to distinguish patterns perceptible only in near-infrared which normal mammals are unable to do. Effectively this injection gave the mice a superpower.
Finally here’s an article about a quantum physics experiment that I don’t fully understand but which implies that there is no such thing as an objective reality. This is real attempt to test what was previously only a thought experiment: the Wigner’s Friend. It involved using multiple entangled photons to create two scenarios which are mutually incompatible: in one case, an observer measures the polarization of a photon and stores the result and in the other case, an interference measurement in made to determine if the photons are in a superposition. The two truths are irreconcilable yet that is indeed what both observers see.
Once again, a whole slew of science stuff that mostly appeared on my radar towards the end of the month.
As usual I like to start with what I think is the most important findings instead of what is spread virally the most. This one is huge if the experiment can be replicated and it concerns how multicellularity can evolve in a single-celled species. The scientists exposed green algae to predation and found that they had evolved novel multicellular structures within 750 generations. They also observed that these new traits helped protect the algae from the predator.
Next is research claiming that a lack of sleep can lead to DNA damage. The sample size of the study is admittedly small but the claim is that they examined who had to work overtime shifts and found that they had more breaks in their DNA and less active DNA repair activity than those with more normal sleep patterns. It is theorized that this could raise cancer risk.
Returning to the controversy-laden announcement of gene-edited twins in China last year, there’s been a new claim that by deleting the CCR5 gene to make the girls immune to HIV, the team also inadvertently improved their brains’ ability to recover from stroke and perhaps also increased their overall intelligence.
Moving on from the life sciences, here’s a paper about how autonomous pricing algorithms, essentially AI agents assigned to determine prices to maximize revenue in a market can spontaneously engage in collusive pricing behavior without being specifically programmed to do so and without even being allowed to communicate with one another. This isn’t surprising but it does as the paper states pose a challenge for authorities trying to set competition policy.
Last year there was a paper that tried to value Facebook by asking users how much they would have to be paid to voluntarily give it up. This new paper instead forced a group of people off of the social network and afterwards monitored their activity. It was found that many of them reduced their usage levels even after the deactivation period and some didn’t return to Facebook at all. The researchers make the argument that Facebook could be a net bad for society but the costs of individuals voluntarily giving it up are too high so there is case for forcing a reset.
Finally the news that has been spread everywhere is this bit about zombie deer in North America. It’s caused by an infection that attacks the brain and spinal cord tissue and eventually causes death. But before then it apparently makes the animals more aggressive and affects their coordination, hence zombies. So far it doesn’t appear to pose any risk to humans.
Things started out pretty slow in the new year and I despaired at coming across anything cool. Thankfully, the scientists picked up the pace towards the end of the month. Once again, it’s almost all in biology and psychology.
Let’s start with one that’s easy to understand and sympathize with. It’s a study that asked respondents to install special software on their computer to track their social media activity and particularly what content they chose to share. They found that elderly Internet users above the age of 65 were particularly likely to share fake news and hoaxes, and this remained true regardless of the person’s party affiliation or ideology.
One exciting finding in medical science has been a long sought for answer to what actually causes Alzheimer’s disease. We’ve known that the disease is associated with malformed proteins protein present in the brain but how the proteins came to me. Now it seems that it may be due to the same bacteria responsible for gum diseases that eventually invades the brain. The bacteria uses a toxic enzyme to feed on human tissue and blocking the mechanism of this enzyme might be an effective treatment for the disease.
Next is an update on a previous effort to create organisms with extra DNA letters not found in nature. The idea now is to make new proteins that could not otherwise have existed and one candidate is a synthetic version of interleukin. This is a cancer drug which can promote an immune system response to tumours but in the original form also has side effects which kill the patient. The new version, made with extra DNA letters, binds only to some parts of lymphocytes and not others, thus keeping the desired anti-tumour effects without the toxicity.
Then we have this bit of news that I absolutely don’t understand why it isn’t all over the headlines. It’s about a project that is attempting of improve on natural photosynthesis by simplifying the pathways that plants use to build sugars out of carbon dioxide. It turns that the natural process works but is inefficient and occasionally makes a mistake by using oxygen instead of carbon dioxide, resulting in a toxic by-product. The researchers engineered new versions in tobacco plants with higher productivity and increased biomass. The implications for this is huge if this is allowed to be used for other crops.
Finally we end with a speculative and sure to be strongly disputed paper in economics. It uses tax data to try to determine if the highest earning people in the US, whose income is mainly non-wage income as expected, are the idle rich or the working rich involved in their own private businesses. Their conclusion is that the top earners segment is dominated by the working rich.
It’s the end of the year and I find myself absolutely swamped by the large number seriously cool science stuff. Most of it is admittedly in psychology and sociology.
Starting with something in the harder sciences, here’s an article about how amoebas seem to be able to find an approximate solution to the famous Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP), an NP-hard problem, in linear time. The experiment involves growing amoebas growing in a medium. The amoeba wants to grow towards agar but also avoid light. By manipulating the light can simulate distances between cities in the TSP. The system is much slower than conventional computers since amoebas move slowly but it’s intriguing to think whether or not such a setup can be scaled up.
Mammals are known for secreting milk to suckle their young but this next article talks about a species of spider that does something similar. The mechanisms are completely different, with the nutritious fluid being secreted from the canal that the female spider lays eggs. Observations however show that the young spiders are completely dependent on it for nutrition 20 days after hatching and though they are able to leave the nest to find food on their own after that, still partially depend on the fluid until about 40 days after hatching. It’s a good reminder that nature is much weirder than we think and mocks at our arbitrary systems for classifying organisms.
Next up are fruit flies and what has been billed as a very primitive form of culture in their behavior. After adding artificial colors to male flies the researchers allowed female flies to watch other female pick mates. They found that those females were much more likely to later pick mates of the same color that they had seen the previous females choose. More interestingly, this preference persisted in subsequent generations.
Then we move on to people. Facebook has been in the news a lot lately and at least part of the debate involves how much value it generates for its users to see if that justify the costs in terms of data leakage risks and other dangers. However traditional methods of valuing the service is difficult as it is free so instead researchers have turned to asking how much would they need to be paid in order to give it up for a year. This particular survey found that the average Facebook user would need to be paid US$1,000 in order to agree to deactivate their account for a year.
Academics are well known to lean leftwards and be more skeptical of markets. One hypothesis is that markets are only contingently sensitive to school achievement, leading academics to be disappointed that their success in school is only imperfectly correlated with economic success. This survey of 1,500 French academic respondents claims to find evidence that this is true.
The next article surveys a mixture of millennials and older people in order to test the ability of older people to discern the truth. Specifically, the respondents were instructed to tell a lie first and some time later were asked their own opinion on the topic. They found that older adults were more committed to the lie that they first told, as if the lie becomes embedded in their memory and becomes the truth.
Finally, let’s end this with a paper that should really be read in its entirety to get it read but to roughly summarize it asks the question of whether cultural values and opinions in a society change over time due to people changing their minds as they get older or because the people who hold older values die off over time. The paper crunches data from a large General Social Survey in a way that I can’t pretend to understand to conclude that the effects of the latter dominate, that is overall opinions change because the people who held them die over time.
Many articles this month, ranging from genuinely exciting stuff to just cool news.
This most significant piece of news comes late, being a claim of the first human gene-edited babies being born. As this comes from China there are plenty of skeptics but it seems sound enough. The claim is that fertilized embryos were edited to disable a gene known as CCR5 which can act as a protein pathway for HIV infection. The idea is that this can help to improve resistance to the disease. The most important bit seems to me is that the edited embryos were implanted back into the mother and successfully carried to term. The science isn’t that new but the ethical implications are more important.
Next up is another piece of news that is also more interesting due to how it came about than the actual result. In this case, a deep learning algorithm was used to analyze images of the retina, and it found a correlation between the images and cardiovascular risk factors. In essence, it might be possible to predict such risks by looking at patients’ retinas, an association that most likely would not occur to doctors and could not have been found using means other than an AI trawling through a huge trove of data.
Next is a depressing finding about how mobs nominate members of a group to be victims. They discovered from a simulated mobbing game that even in exchange for very modest gains, members will not only single out individuals to be victimized but will coordinate with one another to ensure that only a single person is targeted at a time as per the rules. There is no sense of pity as the group will repeatedly target the same victim if that is what the group agrees on and fear of being the next victim does not seem to dissuade the group.
Moving on to lighter stuff, here’s a cool post speculating about how the unknown interstellar object that has entered our solar system could be a piece of a solar sail from an alien civilization. The object called Oumuamua is thought to be more than just a piece of space rock because its movement shows signs of acceleration that is not due to gravitational forces plus it has no signs of emitting a tail that would indicate a chemical reaction creating that acceleration. Since it doesn’t appear to be a comet, it may be that the acceleration is due to solar radiation, suggesting that it may be a piece of solar sail due to having the right physical properties. Of course, it’s all pure speculation but it’s fun to think about.
Finally here’s an article about how science-fiction author Greg Egan contributed a partial solution to a mathematics puzzle. It’s an entertaining read because apart from Egan’s minor celebrity status there’s the fact that the puzzle are originally posed in 2011 as a question of the ordering of episodes of a television show. Shortly after that an anonymous poster submitted a lower bound to the solution but it was until recently that Egan offered an upper bound. The puzzle and the solution itself, part of something that Egan calls superpermutations, is of interest only to mathematicians, but I love the whole story of how this came about.