It’s that time of the year again when I do a round-up of the winners of the scientific Nobel Prizes. If nothing else, writing these posts helps me remember and understand what they are for. This task is a little more difficult this year as the prizes for so many categories are split into two fields that aren’t really closely related. But let’s get on with it.
We’ll begin with the prize for Physiology or Medicine as it’s closest to being the same research topic. It goes to James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo for for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation. Researchers have long known the immune system, in particular a type of white blood cells known as T-cells, are regulated by accelerators and inhibitors to ensure that they attack only foreign microorganisms. Allison studied the T-cell protein CTLA-4 which serves as a brake and wondered if using an antibody to block its function would release the immune system to attack cancer cells. Indeed it worked and would eventually be developed into a new treatment for skin cancer.
Not much of note this month. We’ll start with the exciting space news and no, it’s not the one about the tourist going for Elon Musk’s moonshot.
Instead, it’s the strangely under-reported announcement by JAXA, Japan’s Space Agency that two rovers launched by its Hayabusa2 spacecraft have successfully landed on an asteroid named Ryugu. The rovers themselves are only 18 cm in diameter each and Ryugu is a rock with a diameter of about 1 km Yet the interception took place about 300 million km away from Earth and to do so Hayabusa2 made a circuitous journey of over 3,200 million km over four years, making this an incredible achievement in precision and control.
As always, drawing general conclusions about life outcomes from data should always be seen with a skeptical eye but this study about predicting income is sure made for the headlines. Crunching through a trove of data that covers nearly three thousand participants, it purports to show that delay discounting predicts income better than other factors such as age, ethnicity or height. This refers to the ability to delay immediate gratification in exchange for a bigger future reward. The result is as expected but I notice that this ability in the present and not when the participants were children so I’m not sure if it means that much.
The last article is a very speculative one about a new take on the well known Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. Instead of a cat, this scenario uses two physicists, each of whom performs an experiment on a friend that they keep in a box. One friend in a box can toss a coin and send a message to the other friend in a box who can then guess the result of the toss. Each experimenter can then open each box to conclude which side the coin landed on and yet in some circumstances the results will be inconsistent, meaning that the model is wrong or reality itself is somehow inconsistent. Apparently the physics community is still divided over what to make of this experiment though it is currently impossible to actually carry it out.
A huge haul this month, so much so that I’ve had to be a bit more selective than usual. Most of it is once again in biology.
Most of us know that epigenetic inheritance isn’t a thing and that genes are passed down to the next generation. This article talks about how this isn’t necessarily the case and how fathers may pass down information that isn’t encoded in DNA to offspring through a mechanism that makes use of small RNA. The small DNAs appear to influenced by the state of the father’s health and has the ability to conceal genetic information from the cellular machinery, effectively cancelling out some genes.
Next we have one about how what we see is distorted by what we expect. This isn’t exactly news these days but it’s a pretty cool experiment that demonstrates how people naturally expect goal-directed, efficient actions and interpret what they see based on those assumptions even when that this is not what they actually saw.
A lighter bit of news is this paper about measuring how much cows value access to a grooming brush. The brush in question was an automatically rotating brush and the researchers mounted it in an area that required the cows to push against an obstacle to access the area. By altering the energy needed for the push, they found that the cows were willing to work about as hard to get to brush as to a supply of feed. But they were not willing to push to get to an empty enclosure.
Probably one of the more important papers this month is about how personality affects salaries. This particular study is based on school data from California and covers only the smartest students. Using the standard Big Five measure of personality, it found that high conscientiousness and extraversion are correlated with much higher lifetime earnings while high agreeableness are negatively correlated with earnings.
I like this simple story about an NGO working on providing reading glasses to people in poor countries. It’s absolutely trivial, basic stuff but it’s a good example of how much of a difference such work on the ground makes.
Studies about the benefits or harm of different types of foods always seem to swing back and forth so this is likely just another data point to add to the pile. This one is about alcohol and it posits that there is no health level of alcohol consumption. The study found that although there are some benefits from low levels of consumption particularly in protecting against heart disease, these are still more than outweighed by health risks such as its role in causing cancers.
Finally just to have a bit of variety, here’s a bit of news on the materials science front. The claim is that they’ve made the most wear-resistant metal in the world made out of a platinum-gold alloy which sounds incredibly expensive to make. To me, the interesting bit is how it works. When being worn down, the material generated a black film on its surface that has the effect of acting as a lubricant, protecting it from further erosion. The engineers identified it as a diamond-like carbon, so in a sense this metal generates diamonds when you rub it hard enough.
A whole boatload of stuff this month plus they’re from a nice range of domains too. I’ll try to be brief with each of them.
The big economics article of the lot is the much talked about one about how secularisation appears to precede economic development but only when it is accompanied by increased respect for individual rights. As the authors note, this doesn’t prove causation but you can see why it’s been a hot topic.
Here’s another that touches on the topic of sunk costs which has long been known to affect human judgments of value. According to new research, this sensitivity affects mice and rats as well, leading them to continue performing an apparently unproductive activity after they have already invested time and effort in it.
If you’ve paid attention to the news, you’d have already heard about the discovery of a large body of liquid water beneath the surface of Mars, sparking the usual excitement about finding life on the planet.
A corollary to that might be this announcement about how roundworms that have been frozen for 40,000 years in the Arctic permafrost have revived after being dug up by Russian scientists and simply placed into Petri dishes with a nutrient medium. There’s still a chance that they came from contamination and not the samples but if it pans out, it’s by far the longest period organisms have been revived from cryogenic preservation.
The next article presents a real time view of natural selection based on a population of anole lizards in the Caribbean after a devastating hurricane season. Examining the population before and after the hurricanes, the researchers found that the average measurements of the lizards’ toe pads and lengths of their front and back legs had changed simply because the storms had killed off the lizards with legs and feet less adapted to surviving those conditions. Going forward it can be presumed that breeding will lead to a lasting change of this type in future generations.
Moving on to computer science, this difficult to read paper talks about how quantum computers may be less in thrall to the arrow of time than traditional computers. By this, it is meant that certain computation operations have a natural order in which it is easier to perform the operations in one direction but much more difficult or impossible to do it in the reverse direction. Ths paper claims that switching the same computation to a quantum mechanics model and performing them with a quantum computer eliminates or at least reduces the overhead of going in the opposite direction.
My favorite paper of the lot however is this one which takes direct aim at all of the excitement around machine learning and AI. It argues that neural net models directly correspond to the polynomial regression models already well known in mathematics and that solving the same problems with the latter is both easier and more precise.
Once again, biology dominates the cool science news this past month.
We start with a report on an attempt to replicate the marshmallow test, a frequently cited study about how a child’s ability to delay gratification is correlated with academic achievement. The new experiment however found that the correlations were smaller than previously reported and were further reduced after controlling for factors like family background and home environment. Their conclusion is that associations between delay time and measures of behavioral outcome by the age 15 are statistically insignificant.
Probably the most anatomically distinctive feature of humans is our disproportionately large brains. A couple of studies have zeroed in on the cause of this as being a gene known as NOTCH2NL. The presence of this gene leads the brain to develop more neurons and hence a larger brain and the researchers were able to estimate that it became active roughly three to four million years ago which was when the brains of our ancestors started expanding.
The Flynn Effect is the well known phenomenon of human IQ scores steadily improving throughout the 20th century. This article talks about the effect seems to have ended and perhaps even gone into reverse in more recent years. Looking at results from three decades of Norwegian conscripted into the military, they found IQ scores falling over time, even between members of the same family tree. While there are plenty of offered suggestions as what could be causing this, all of this is speculation for now.
Next is a sad story of how many baobab trees seem to be either dead or are dying. These are some of the oldest trees in the world, aged between 1,100 and 2,500 and are known to be able to live to some 3,000 years, all in southern Africa. It is not known why they are dying but the cause is suspected to be related to climate change.
Finally just for the pleasure of reading, here’s an in-depth overview of the underwater tunnels that connect the various Faroe Islands halfway between Iceland and Denmark. It seems strange given the isolation of the islands and their very low population but the tunnels have been a success, both from an engineering perspective and economically as well. This article talks about the history of these tunnels, how they made it all work and ends with the current proposal to construct a huge underwater tunnel to connect the southernmost island to the mainland.
It’s been a busy, eventful month here in Malaysia and things have been interesting on the science front as well.
Last month I had an entry about brain organoids and the ethical implications therein. This here is an article about the same thing except using stem cells edited using CRISPR to more closely resemble Neanderthal DNA. The hope is that it would yield insights into behavioral differences between Neanderthal and humans.
In space news, a reexamination of old data showed that the Galileo spacecraft apparently passed through a plume of water shooting into space while doing a flyby of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. With both water and apparently enough energy in the system to send geysers into space, this makes the moon an even more attractive prospect to search for life.
One story that made the rounds a fair bit is how California police apparently use genealogical data to trace a murderer. Using DNA found at crime scenes dating from the 1970s, they matched it to people living in the 1800s, then followed the family trees back to the present to find descendants who most closely fit the profile they were looking for. It’s an impressive piece of detective work boosted by modern technology that would put any CSI episode to shame but as usual raises all kinds of privacy concerns as information about one person can reveal information about others.
I’m not sure how legitimate this next bit is as it seems rather far-fetched but SCMP is usually a reliable source so here it is. The article is about how large companies in China are collecting data directly from the brains of their employees by having them wear headgear with sensors that monitor brainwaves. The idea is that they can then measure fatigue, emotional spikes, attention loss etc. Needless to say all this data is extremely useful and valuable, allowing the employers to have far more control and knowledge over the performance of different employees, how best to arrange shifts and work routines and so on but it’s pretty scary to give this level of power to companies.
Finally here’s a more wide-ranging article about how a variety of companies have learned to use classical music to deter unwanted people from loitering near their premises. The practice was apparently first used by 7-11 stores to repel loiterers in the 1980s but is now common in many transit systems. Baroque music in particular seems to work best to discourage transients from being too comfortable but as the article states, it feels sinister to weaponize classical music in this manner.
Not too much stuff this month and even what we have is lighter fluff than usual.
The outlier here is this economics study examining how being financially invested deters a proclivity to war. The researchers gave Israelis seed money to trade stocks and then periodically quizzed them about their voting intentions. The intent was to prove that people who become invested in the stock market also become more favorable to peaceful outcomes, in this case peace with Palestine. The results appear to be small but positive.
I don’t usually post news about gadgets but I love how this has been a staple of science-fiction forever and is only just now becoming reality. It’s a wearable device that recognizes subvocalizations, that is speaking in your head without actually making sounds. It works by interpreting neuromuscular signals, not actually reading your mind, so I guess you do still need to work your tongues and throat and mouth muscles even if no air passes through your lips. I would say it’s still much more usable than talking to yourself to give voice commands to devices.
An article that is closer to home is this one about the Bajau people of Malaysia and the Philippines. Renowned as being expert divers, they have long been subject to speculation about whether their abilities are trained or genetic in nature. A new study found that the Bajau do indeed have larger spleens than usual, which are used to store oxygenated red blood cells and release when the body needs them. Genetic analysis of the people, compared against closely related but land-locked peoples also show genetic modifications related to an enlarged spleen.
The bit of science news that got the most play this month is the accidental discovery that puffin beaks are fluorescent. A researcher shone a UV light on a dead puffin based only on a whim and saw that the ridges on their beaks do indeed light up. It’s a revelation of no great consequence but serves as a reminder that nature still has all sorts of surprises for us right under our nose especially when we realize that other animals who can see into other parts of the spectrum have known about this all along.
A more involved read is this article about the ethical aspects of growing brain organoids. These are blobs of tissue grown from stem cells, with brain organoids in particular being made out of neurons. Scientists have known how to make them for a while and they are useful as a smaller, simpler model to study than a complete brain. But as the organoids have grown larger, with some research involving linking distinct organoids together or transplanting them into animal hosts, ethical concerns are raised as to when exactly an organoid become a brain and develop a consciousness. This article doesn’t provide any answers but it does serve as a good overview of the topic.