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.
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.