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.
I’d thought it would be a quiet month on the science front due to the Nobel Prize announcements but there’s a decent mix of stuff.
Probably the bit of news that has been most talked about this month in academic circles is the attempt to replicate the famous Sokal hoax. Three people collaborated on a year-long project to write 21 bogus papers and submitted them for publication. Seven of these were accepted. The papers were deliberately outlandish, such as one about dog on dog sexual assault, and the idea is to mock the preposterousness of some fields of humanities. Yet as this article that I chose to highlight lays out, the joke seems more on the three than the field in general and their political motivations are obvious, such that this needn’t be taken seriously at all.
To balance out the above, next is a respectable paper on gender studies with a result that I find legitimate but may annoy some feminists. Based on survey data, the authors find that contrary to some predictions, the more that women have equal opportunities, the more skewed their participation in different occupations may be because they have more freedom to enter fields that they prefer. The data showed that the more developed the country, the more women expressed different preferences from men in their willingness to perform different jobs.
Staying on the topic of gender but in a different way, how could I avoid covering the news about baby mice being born to two female parents. The team used the CRISPR technique to ensure that the full set of genes that comes from a female mouse are switched on and injected the edited stem cells into the egg of a second female mouse to form an embryo. The resulting animals were born healthy and were even able to have babies of their own in the normal way. Of course, this is an artificial, invasive technique so it’s not as if males are completely obsolete just yet.
The next paper we cover has a pretty obscure title: voluntary arousing negative experiences (VANE) but its subtitle says it all: it purports to explain why people like to be scared. The researchers surveyed visitors to a “haunted” attraction and measured their EEG reactivity to cognitive and emotional tasks. They found that going through the scary experience improved the mood of the participants, especially if they were feeling tired, bored or stressed beforehand, and could help them cope with stress afterwards.
Finally, here’s a longer read, a retrospective of the Spanish flu pandemic that the article argues was the worst catastrophe of the 20th century, killing at least 50 million people and perhaps as many as 100 million. Yet it is almost forgotten today except by historians and health experts. The article covers its history and notes that the virus could not have evolved as it did without the trench warfare conditions of the First World War that, due to so many young men forced to live so close together in unsanitary, dangerous conditions, made it the perfect incubation environment to create a uniquely virulent form of the flu.
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.