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.
More cool stuff this month after a slow February. Pretty all of it is biology though.
Possibly the coolest bit of news I’ve read this month is this one about the massive scale of China’s experiments in agriculture though it isn’t about any novel discoveries. The individual innovations are seemingly minor ones like determining how densely rice should be packed and they apply only to smallholders, but the sheer scale of the experiments involving up to 21 million farmers means that an incredible wealth of scientific data and massive gains. Of course, this was possible only due to China’s command and control bureaucracy and isn’t something that other countries can easily replicate.
Also in agriculture is this article about how herbicides can indeed change both the taste and the nutritional content of crops. This sounds like bad news but it appears that they caused the kernels of sweetcorn being studied to store more protein and minerals. Of course we still need to be wary of them affecting crops in adverse ways but it’s intriguing to think that the nutritional profile of crops can be shaped in this manner.
Next there’s this paper studying how genetics and the environment affect human lifespans. Delving into records of birth dates, death dates and crowdsourced data from very large family trees, the researchers wanted to know if closely related people have similar lifespans. They found however that heredity only explained about 16% of the differences in lifespans meaning that the environment might have more influence than genes on how long a person lives.
In space news, this article talks about NASA’s twin astronauts Scott Kelly and Mark Kelly. NASA deliberately had Scott spend 340 days in space aboard the International Space Station while Mark remained on Earth in order to observe how the extended stay in space would change an astronaut’s body. Some changes like increased height and decreased mass soon reverted after Scott’s return to Earth, genes that were activated during the trip stayed changed, meaning that Scott is no longer genetically identical to his twin brother. They apparently affect his immune system, bone formation, eyesight, other processes and it isn’t yet known what the long term consequences are.
Finally, to end with a bit of lighthearted fluff, here’s an article about how dogs seem to be more responsive to so-called dog baby talk. This is the simple, dog-directed speech that dog owners instinctively know and is similar to baby talk. The study found that dogs do pay more attention when you talk to them in this manner and this helps strengthen their bond with their owners.
Like everyone else, I’ve been distracted by Chinese New Year events and so have probably done less reading than usual this month.
We’ve known that human life expectancy has been increasing as societies grow richer and medical science improves. This study however finds that the pace of life expectancy gains around the world has been slowing since 1950. In a way this isn’t very surprising, as science has improved, the low-hanging fruit of healthcare gains have been harvested and we might be coming near hard biological limits on the human lifespan.
Probably the most viral bit of science news this past month has been the DNA analysis of the so-called Cheddar Man fossil in the UK that sheds some light on how he might have looked like when alive some 10,000 years ago. Contrary to expectations, this early Briton seems to have had dark brown to black skin, dark curly hair and blue eyes. The fossil clearly demonstrates that modern classifications of race don’t apply to the past and of course it upsets racists who like to think that Britain was always inhabited by white people.
Finally here’s a fascinating study that purports to demonstrate that rats in Norway are capable of engaging in transactions with each other that amount to trading. Essentially they put the rats in a situation in which the rats needed help from another rat to groom themselves and noted that they subsequently reciprocated this assistance with an offer of food.
A fairly mixed bag of stuff to kick off the first month.
First, here’s an article about how flying in airplanes exposes humans to more ionizing radiation than working in a nuclear reactor. This means that aircrews are at significant risk as their annual exposure is estimated at 3 millisieverts while nuclear industry bodies recommend that the general public should be exposed to less than 1 millisievert a year.
Then there’s this very cool paper about how there could be more water on Mars than expected, trapped in the form of ice beneath the surface. Data from spacecraft were used to analyzed areas where erosion had occurred, finding eight locations where there is ice layer of more than 100 meters thick as shallow as only one or two meters beneath the surface.
Also very cool is this article how research into how even plants are affected by anaesthetic drugs. They specifically targeted plants that are known for being capable of movement such as Venus flytraps and the creeping herb that folds inwards when touched. Using a variety of anaesthetics, applied either to the roots or added to the air as appropriate, they found that in all cases the plants temporarily became still and unresponsive just as animals would. The hope is that this will help scientists understand exactly how it is that this class of drugs causes unconsciousness, about which we still know surprisingly little. On a philosophical level, it also raises the question of just how conscious plants can be.
A couple of articles from The Economist next. The first of these examines how humans usually have abstract descriptions for colors but not for odors. The research takes place in Malaysia where a local tribe known as the Jahai are the exception to the norm, having a vocabulary that is capable of describing odors in the abstract. The article also presents evidence that the inability of most humans to describe odors is not due to innate language ability or biology but due to lifestyle, with hunter gatherers having more need for a rich language to describe odors than farmers.
The next is about economics. It’s about a massive accounting of the long term returns of many different classes of assets. They found, in line with man on the street expectations but contrary to conventional academic thinking, that the best long performing investment is still housing, beating equities which is also more volatile to boot. The finding further reinforces suspicions that capitalism inherently reinforces inequality as the average real rate of return on wealth appears to outstrip GDP growth.
Finally here’s one that is just for fun. All of which will have heard of the mistaken missile alert in Hawaii. Of course this makes for a fantastic natural experiment when you think about how the announcement changes human behaviors. A large pornography website Pornhub released data showing that immediately following the sending of the message, traffic on their sites crashed massively by 77%. As residents were informed that it was a mistake however, traffic recovered, spiking to well above normal levels before returning to usual patterns. You can probably imagine for yourself the mindset of the average person when confronted with the news based on this data.
It’s time to do the last of these entries for the year.
The first of these highlight how evolution can work faster than you might expect. This article talks about a couple of cases but I’ll only summarize one of them here. It talks about snail kites a bird living in Florida that eats snails. Since a new type of snail arrived from South America, the birds seem to be evolving larger beaks to make it easier for them to feed on these larger snails. The rate of change is astonishing given that the snails only appeared in 2004.
The next article is a follow-up on an earlier announcement of how a team has created a bacterium using a six-letter genetic alphabet instead of the four usual bases. Now they’ve announced that the bacterium can make proteins containing amino acids that are not found in nature, which means that synthetic, tailor-made proteins will soon be available for use for a variety of purposes.
Continuing on with my series of pro-dog propaganda, a recent paper claims that while dogs don’t have the largest brains, they have an unusually high number of cortical neurons. Cats seem to have only about half the neurons of dogs and while bears have large brains, they only have around the same number of neurons as cats. The researchers were further surprised to note that domesticated species don’t have fewer neurons than their wild cousins, which was the prevailing assumption before this.
Next is a paper that attempts to quantify search costs by calculating how much shoppers lose out on if they accept the first price they see when buying common household goods instead of spending effort to shop around. The paper makes the rather surprising claim that the shopper who shops around gains a price advantage of only around 1% on average. This sounds too low to me but if it’s wrong I’m sure plenty of economists will want to challenge this paper.
Finally a paper that seems deliberately timed for the holiday season talks about the size of wine glasses in England over time. Between 1700 to 2017, the average capacity of wine glasses increased seven-fold. Perhaps of greater concern is that the increase was gradual up to the 1990s and then shot up markedly.
Lots of stuff this month. Some bits are of more science value than others but all are worth including I believe.
First off, I should help debunk the widely circulated announcement about a human head transplant. Pretty much all the respectable science sites have condemned it. Here’s one example. The procedure involved transplanting a head from one corpse to another which proves nothing. Most people in the field consider the surgeon in question Sergio Canavero to be a fraud as he prefers to make big announcements to the popular press instead of publishing papers in the usual scientific publications.
An announcement that is just as exciting but is actually real is the discovery that bottom quarks can theoretically fuse together in a powerful flash. The explosive energy this releases has been calculated to be something on the order of eight times that of the usual nuclear fusion. This was so alarming to the researchers that they considered keeping the discovery a secret until they realized that there is no way to create a chain reaction of such bottom quarks and so there probably aren’t any military applications.
The next article isn’t about a discovery but about the construction of the Giant Magellan Telescope which when complete will be the world’s largest optical observatory. Lots of impressive details about how they manufacture the seven mirrors that are used in the design, each of which weighs 17 tons, and how they are machined and polished to an absurd degree of precision, removing all irregularities larger than 20 nanometers.
Another bit of cool technology is how feeding spiders with graphene and carbon nanotubes resulting in them producing super strong spider silk. This was done by adding the materials to their drinking water and the resulting silk is five times stronger than normal. Of course, the silk went back to normal once they stopped adding the special ingredients to their water but they are now thinking of trying it with other animals to see if it strengthens skin, bones and exoskeletons.
A cool paper I read recently is this one about Armillaria, a type of forest fungi. They are a parasite that preys on many types of plant hosts and incredibly individuals of the species can grow to encompass up to 965 hectares and weigh 600 tons. Apparently a whole network of rhizomorphs can be just one individual. Most of the paper is an analysis of its genome which is beyond my comprehension but simply learning about the existence of this species is fascinating.
Finally a pleasant article is this one about how getting a dog seems to increase your lifespan, especially if you are single. The result isn’t terribly surprising and perhaps part of it is because owning a dog is correlated with a more physically active lifestyle which is good for general health anyway. But part of it appears to be another affirmation of the importance of having some companionship.
With the Nobel Prizes being awarded earlier this month, there seems to be a bit of a lull in other science-related news.
The most fortuitously timed announcement, in light of the Nobel Prize for physics this year, is that for the first time a collision between two neutron stars has been observed through detection of both the gravitational waves and the electromagnetic radiation generated by the event. Not only did this demonstrate that light and gravitational waves travel at the same speed but it also provided astronomers with a treasure trove of information as the two sets of data can be used to compare against one another. An astonishingly large proportion of the astronomers and astrophysics in the world now seems to be involved one way or another in this endeavor.
For a century, average human intelligence has been going up, a phenomenon that is now known as the Flynn effect. Now however scientists have noticed that this trend seems to be reversing. This was first noticed in 2004 but seems to have begun sometime in the mid-1970s. Since the decline in performance seems concentrated in deteriorating working memory the best guess so far is that it has something to do with the average age of the human population as a whole going up.
Now that dating websites have been around for a while, scientists have enough data to examine how they have changed society. This study based on US data found that the rise of online dating has resulted in an increase in interracial marriages as well as more stable marriages. The first result isn’t surprising as it is a natural result of people dating outside of their usual social circles and it is a bit of surprise that married couples who know each other online appear to have lower breakup rates.
Finally a bit of news that is closer to home. A Singaporean team has sequenced the genome of the durian and identified the genes that are responsible for its characteristic smell. They also announced that the genome of the specific variety they studied, the popular Musang King, consists of about 46,000 genes, nearly double the number in the human genome, and traced the fruit tree’s evolution back 65 million years. Apparently a distant relation of the durian tree is the cacao tree which produces chocolate.