So obviously the whole world is facing what looks like the crisis of a lifetime and the science there is moving far too quickly for a mere blog like this to keep up with. I’ll only post a link to a single good overview of the coronavirus and stick with some other interesting science stuff still going on this month even if some of them feel a bit out of place given the current situation.

• So far the best broad overview of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is this one which covers the history of coronaviruses, their anatomy and how they work as well as the most promising treatments currently in development and which mechanisms they target. Note that while everyone is most excited about vaccines, those are still at least over a year away while effective medication might be deployed in a matter of months.
• We’ve all had anecdotal evidence that people who drive expensive cars are more likely to be jerks on the road, and now here’s a study confirming that hunch. This particular study used pedestrians wanting to cross a street to check to see which cars were willing to give way, concluding that the most expensive cars were the least likely to do so.
• Are young people or middle-aged people most responsible for founding successful fast growing firms? Popular culture suggests the former but this study indicates that the mean age for a successful entrepreneur is 45.
• As everyone knows, physical beauty matters and numerous studies have proven that attractiveness impacts lifetime earnings. This study examines college admissions and finds that there is a correlation between beauty and admission rates of white men to highly ranked colleges. However there does not seem to be a beauty premium for women, minorities of either gender or for colleges in China in general. Draw your own conclusions.
• Finally, an amusing bit of news that made the rounds recently is the discovery of a tree in Sabah, Malaysia that is able to soak up nickel from the soil and accumulate it within itself. This raises the possibility of mining such trees for the metal, which is apparently done by collecting its sap every once in a while, hence why it’s now known as the metal-bleeding tree. I have doubts over how feasible this is on a commercial scale but the news itself seems real enough.

A dearth of scientific news this month as the whole world’s attention is on the new coronavirus. As the science on that is still being worked on and is in flux, I’m not posting anything on that subject. Indeed, many scientists working on other areas have chosen to work on the new virus which has caused some rumbles of discord as that means funding and grants originally intended for one purpose is being used for another purpose entirely. How that plays out will be interesting to watch.

• Meanwhile let’s just go with what grabbed my attention this month.Starting with a simple one, here is one about studying the effects of sleep on the urban poor in India. It found that attempts to increase sleep quantity didn’t improve sleep quality. However offering naps in the workplace during the daytime resulted in increased productivity, cognition and psychological well being. Of course, this could well be only because it is difficult to get peace and quiet throughout the night for the urban poor in Chennai where the study took place.

• Next is a study that tries to understand how anti-immigration sentiment arises from increase immigration. What makes this particular study interesting to me is that it uses data from the so-called Age of Mass Migration in the late 19th century to the early 20th century, consisting of mainly Europeans moving to the United States. That’s far enough removed from the present day and we can look upon on it with some emotional detachment and few people today now regard the descendants of those immigrants as not being Americans. The study found that immigration actually economically benefited native workers yet still aroused anti-immigrant sentiment. It found a relationship between the intensity of the rejection and the cultural distance between immigrants and natives.

• The rise of AI and machine learning has led to some speculation about so-called digital socialism, the dream that computers can efficiently allocate resources in a complex economy so as to do away with the market. This paper argues that the problem with resource allocation isn’t merely due to a lack of computational capacity but that information in an economy is distributed across all players in the market and everyone has no incentive to fully disclose that information. Any computer or network of computers that purports to stand in for the market as a whole must somehow obtain all of the information that is known to all of the participants in the market and that seems pretty impossible.

• Finally, just for fun here is a paper that studies the kinematics of the wok tossing techniques that is the basis of fried rice in Chinese cuisine. This involves a very high speed movement that slides the rice along the wok and then tosses it in the air. Both are necessary in order to expose the rice to temperatures of 1,200°C without burning it but is suspected of causing chronic shoulder injuries among chefs in Chinese restaurants due to the rapid movements and the weight of the wok. By working out the precise kinematics of these movements, the authors hope to help chefs improve their technique and perhaps develop robots that would be capable of replicating these actions.

Absolutely swamped by science articles including feature-length ones. Unfortunately none of them are about the coranavirus which is still too new.

• Getting the really hard stuff out of the way first, here is a long and highly speculative piece about how there may some kind of deep connection between the fabric of space-time as described by quantum mechanics and the error correction codes developed for use in quantum computers. These codes are necessary for physical quantum computers to be built at all as any physical implementations of qubits are prone to be randomly flipped by an uncountable array of causes and so these errors must be caught and corrected by an algorithm. Mathematicians and physicists however have noticed that these codes are essentially identical to a particular quantum mechanical construct called an anti-de Sitter space. This is not the same as our real universe but it does raise the exciting possibility that the fabric of our own space-time can be represented by these error correction algorithms.
• Next is another highly speculative article about organic robots made by stitching together stem cells of a species of African frog. They are not capable of much more than moving and pushing pellets around in a Petri dish but that is already astounding so long as they can be programmed. Still these aren’t true organisms as each of them has to be handmade by surgeons and they are not capable of reproducing nor indeed do they possess any means of replenishing the energy stores within their cells. Still once this technology has been improved, it’s obvious enough that the applications are endless.
• Everyone knows that normal body temperature in humans is 37°C but this study shows that this standard was established in the 19th century and the mean recorded temperature recorded now is lower. It seems that body temperatures have been steadily dropping over time and that has important ramifications on human physiology. The reasons are unknown but they could be due to people being more subject to inflammation due to diseases or evan a byproduct of modern humans having greater body mass.
• Next is a study with results that shouldn’t surprise anyone. The authors attempt to dissect what leads to people becoming atheists, what they call the origins of disbelief, and concludes that by far the most important determinant is simply being raised in an environment with few cultural cues that point towards religious belief.
• Moving on to economics, what has everyone all abuzz is this paper arguing that real interest rates have been in steady decline since the 14th century, roughly the beginning of capitalism. The paper doesn’t attempt to offer explanations but it is obvious to everyone that this has important implications on the ongoing debate over inequality centered as it is today on the historical return on capital as well as the urgent issue of interest rates today entering unprecedented negative territory. The suggestion is that while everyone currently expects this to be a temporary aberration that will eventually revert to the mean, this may well be a permanent change.
• This next article isn’t included for the sake of the scientific discovery itself but for the insight that will profoundly reshape all study of human behavior. As everyone knows surveillance cameras are now ubiquitous and are used primarily to fight crime. But what happens when you open access to researchers of human behavior to see what people actually do instead of what they say they do? The article notes that the well-known phenomenon of the bystander effect doesn’t actually seem to exist after observing plenty of CCTV footage of emergency situations as bystanders do seem to readily intervene. This represents a treasure trove of data that will no doubt revolutionize the study of psychology though of course the usual concerns about privacy apply.
• Finally here is a long but fascinating article on how modern television shows for children are crafted. It shows how through decades of experience, producers have finely honed their understanding of exactly what works for children of various ages and deliberately target different shows for different age groups. Collaborating with child psychologists, everything from the design of the characters, the types of plots, the length of camera cuts and so on are taken into account. That’s why shows that seem like complete nonsense to adults are meant to impart specific types of knowledge to the target children that the producers know works due to extensive trial and error.

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.