Another month, another one of these posts. Somewhat embarrassingly, two of these are from The Economist, the only publication I have a regular subscription to.

• The most important finding of the month, though it can hardly be called news, is just how hot the month of February 2016 had been. This article from The Guardian talks about how NASA data shows that the average global surface temperature for the month was 1.35C warmer than the average for 1951 to 1980. The result was shocking enough that some scientists have wondered whether or not average temperatures might have already broken past the maximum limit of a 2C increase that is generally agreed to be catastrophic. If it hasn’t breached the limit yet, my opinion is that it’s probably inevitable at this point.
• The next article is probably an exercise in self-indulgence for myself. It’s from The Washington Post and covers how happiness is correlated with a variety of factors. There are some unsurprising results, for example that people who live in very high density areas report less happiness, but the newsworthy bit is that people with higher intelligence report a negative correlation between happiness and frequency of social interaction. In other words, most people report that social contact increases their happiness, but people with higher intelligence scores report that more social contact instead makes them unhappy.
• Moving onto health-related discoveries, we’ll start with this article from The Economist that discusses the link between exercise and cancer. The research takes quite a few twists and turns and I won’t go into that but the upshot is that physical exertion seems to be associated with an increase in the levels of the hormone epinephrine and the molecule interleukin-6, both of which help the immune system to target tumor cells. In fact, they found that by directly exposing mice to these two substances, the mice developed resistance to cancer just as if they exercised.
• Mice are also the test subjects in this next article which is intriguingly about the retrieval of lost memories. The experiment involved using a virus to introduce a light sensitive protein into the brains of mice engineered to develop Alzheimer’s disease. Normal ice are able to remember areas where they receive an electric shock but mice with the disease do not. But such mice do seem to remember once blue light is used to stimulate a part of their brains called the dentate gyrus after they have been treated with the protein. This suggests that perhaps Alzheimer’s disease does not remove memories but instead damages the ability of the brain to retrieve them, meaning that a technique may one day be developed to repair the memory retrieval mechanism.
• Finally on a lighter note here’s a Bloomberg article weighing in on the issue of whether or not having a habit of regularly consuming alcohol is good for your health. The conventional wisdom in this regard is that moderate consumption of alcohol seems to do some good but this analysis of 87 studies done on the subject concludes that no significant health benefits can be found for even moderate drinkers compared to lifetime abstainers.

Due to being away, I’ve had fairly minimal Internet access over the past month. As such, I’d expected to come across fewer science-related news articles. Strangely, this didn’t turn out to be the case as there have been more than enough news to satisfy my curiosity.

• The biggest science news this month is obviously the confirmation that scientists have successfully detected gravity waves for the first time. There are many articles about this but I’ve picked this one from one of my favorite science-related websites, Ask a Mathematician, for how comprehensive it is. As this site points out, the interesting part about this isn’t the actual confirmation. Our indirect evidence of the existence of gravity waves was already so strong that direct detection doesn’t really add much to our picture of the universe. Rather, what’s interesting is the astounding technical precision needed for this achievement due to how tiny the effect is. Of course, it helped in this case that the phenomenon that caused these gravity waves were immense: the merging of two black holes about 1.3 billion light years away. The ripples in spacetime caused by this merger even results in a signal that is within the hearing range of human ears and you can listen to it for yourself here.
• Due to my family history with the disease, I always pay special attention to research about schizophrenia. That it has a genetic component has always been obvious but so many genes seem to play some part in it that it has always been difficult to pin down exactly what causes it. This article from The Economist highlights a claim that it has something to do with a particular gene known as C4. This gene produces a protein that has a role in the brain’s synaptic pruning, a process in which unnecessary neural connections are eliminated from childhood to early adulthood. Early adulthood is of course when the symptoms of schizophrenia are most commonly identified in patients and it’s easy to imagine that the delusions often experienced by patients may have something to do with having too many synaptic connections. While schizophrenia can currently be controlled using medications, it can’t be cured because researchers have little idea of what causes it. This development however suggests that a pathway to a more permanent cure might one day exist.
• Staying on the subject of medical science and especially mental health, here’s an interesting new paper that will no doubt delight my wife. Drawing data from a wide-ranging survey on the cardiovascular risk factors and cognitive functioning of a sample of 968 adults, it found a positive correlation between the consumption of chocolate and cognitive functions. There’s no suggestion of what the mechanics of the effect may be, just a hint that regular consumption of chocolate seems to be good for the brain and may protect against normal age-related cognitive decline.
• Finally here’s a cool article on how police in the Netherlands have developed methods to take down trespassing drones. As everyone knows, they’re ubiquitous now and pose a real security threat but there’s currently no consensus on how best to safely take down drones that are flying where they’re not supposed to be. This article describes how Dutch police have trained eagles to chase down and physically grab drones out of the air.

This month instead of scientific discoveries we have mostly news that is relevant to science:

• By now, most people will have heard of the Zika virus. There are many articles about it obviously so this is one such. It’s a mosquito-borne disease that is wrecking havoc in South America, especially Brazil and while it hasn’t reached Southeast Asia yet, it could as it can be carried by Aedes mosquitos. Most of the infected have no symptoms and it does not seem to be particularly dangerous even to those who do develop symptoms. But researchers suspect that when pregnant women are infected, it can cause a neurological condition known as microcephaly in infants, which shows up in the form of visibly and horribly smaller heads.
• Next up is yet another bit of news about CRISPR, though an unfortunate one. This article describes how credit for its discovery is being disputed by various parties, something that is particularly important in light of how lucrative the patent rights for it will be. In particular a recent piece detailing its history diminishes the role of key women who involved and has been criticized as the latest in a long line of such instances that diminish the importance of women in major discoveries in favor of male colleagues.
• This one is a follow-up to an earlier news posting about the strange behavior of the star KIC 8462852 whose cyclical pattern of dimming has stumped astronomers and prompted one of them to suggest that it may be evidence of an alien-built megastructure. Now a team has gone through old photographs of the star in question and discovered that it has been steadily dimming over the past century or so, which would seem to preclude comets passing between the star and us as the explanation for our observation.
• Then for bona fide scientific discoveries, this article talks about how sugar seems to be an important factor in the growth of cancerous tumors. So far this finding is based only on animal studies but the experiments show that mice who had been fed a diet dominated by sugars were more likely to develop tumors. Moreover, the more sugar they fed the mice, the faster the tumors grew. Interestingly while all sugars had this effect, fructose had a markedly stronger effect than glucose.
• Finally an announcement about artificial intelligence that has been making the rounds is about how a computer built by DeepMind, now a subsidiary of Google, is capable of beating a human champion of the ancient Chinese game of Go. This is considered one of the most complex games ever invented by mankind due to its vast problem space. As far as I can tell however while this is an important result, DeepMind hasn’t done anything truly stunning as they’ve used familiar Monte Carlo techniques to prune the problem space and threw a staggering amount of computing power at the problem. 1202 CPUs and 176 GPUs is nothing to sneeze at, plus they beat someone who is ranked as being around the 600th best player in the world.

Just a small scattering of science related news for the last month of 2015, and most of them are medical:

• I’ve probably written more about CRISPR-Cas9 more than any other science subject over the past year. It’s just that promising, scarily so even, but the major problem encountered so far is that it doesn’t seem to be very precise. This article talks about how a team modified it by changing just three of the around 1,400 amino acids that makes up the enzyme. This tiny change apparently reduced “off-target” edits to genome sequences to undetectable levels. I find this hard to believe but if true, this would probably kick off an explosion in the usage of this gene-editing method.
• Next up is this announcement of a discovery that may spell an end to pain for humans. Through a combination of blocking the sodium ion channel that helps generate electrical signals that travel through pain-related nerve cells and a very low dose of an opioid drug, a team of researchers managed to eliminate pain in mice. Interestingly, in human subjects they’ve managed to do the reverse: make people who have never before experienced pain due to a genetic mutation feel the unpleasant sensation. This may seem like insignificant news for some people but having seen terminal illness in a couple of my relatives, perfect pain management is a huge deal to me.
• Still on the subject of medical science, this cool new paper quantifies how important it is to follow your doctor’s advice exactly. Most people are probably rather lax about adhering to their doctor’s instructions about the dosage of medicines. The paper found that less than half of patients consumed the prescribed amount of medicines but those that did so lived 2.5 years longer than those who took less than 70% of the prescribed amount and 3.2 years longer than those took more than 130% of the prescribed amount. Yes, it means that overdosing is more dangerous than under-dosing.
• The Flynn Effect is the well known phenomenon in which the average intelligence of humans seems to be increasing over time but the causes for it are a matter of some dispute. This blog post highlights new research that correlates the effect with the size of humans similarly increasingly over time. There’s some discussion that better nutrition resulted in larger brain masses and hence improved intelligence.
• Finally just for your reading pleasure, here’s a very long article about the real reasons for the failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940. Ever since then its collapse has been the go-to example of the catastrophic effects of forced resonance and popularized the idea that any object can be destroyed if it is induced to resonate at its natural frequency. This article seeks to debunk that explanation once and for all and advances a much simpler reason: that the wind hitting the side of the bridge caused it to sway. It goes into plenty of detail about the design of the bridge and why so many people latched onto resonance as the explanation.

A slower month and more emphasis on the softer sciences this time around:

• The one research paper that has gotten the most attention over the past month is the one that shows a startling increase in mortality rates among middle-aged white Americans. Certainly one factor in its fame is that one of its co-authors Angus Deaton won the Nobel Prize in economics this year. But the main factor must be the sheer surprise of its findings, exacerbated by the fact that this spike in deaths isn’t mirrored in the statistics of other high-income countries. Obviously any explanation of this anomaly will be politically charged. Personally I like this article on Vox which discusses some theories with the gist being that a certain group of white Americans can no longer look forward to the kind of prosperity and social status that they’d been led to expect and this despondency has led to a marked increase in substance abuse.
• In more hopeful news, here’s a bit about how gene editing may have been used to save a person’s life for the first time. The patient is a one-year-old girl suffering from leukemia and conventional chemotherapy had already failed. The doctors therefore pioneered a new technique using T-cells from a donor to attack the cancerous cells. However since the patient’s own immune system would ordinarily also attack the foreign T-cells, these cells had to be edited first to remove the markers that would make them targets. This isn’t quite bespoke medicine yet as it’s a pretty general technique but it’s a clear example of the way forward.
• I confess that I included this next article because of its extremely disturbing title. It covers an experiment in which scientists have been able to induce a species of flatworm to grow the heads and brains of another species of flatworm only by manipulating the electrical synapses within their bodies. In particular as they did not touch the worms’ genome at all, it makes for a fascinating demonstration of how much morphology can be manipulated through means other than genetic engineering.
• Finally here’s a longer-form piece on multi-model sensory experiences. In particular, it focuses on the work of Charles Spence who discovered among other things that the noise made by a Pringles chip when you bite into it affects your perception of how fresh it is, how the color of a cup influences the intensity of the taste of coffee and how merely listening to different types of music alters the perceived taste of an alcoholic beverage. Naturally this has hugely influenced the design of the packaging for many products. This seems especially pertinent after learning about the McGurk effect in the Philosophy and the Sciences course recently.

Running very late this month as I was on holiday in South Korea, but I haven’t forgotten about this. In fact, I’ve collated more than the usual number of articles over the past month.

• I usually start with the biggest piece of science news for the month. It’s a bit hard to judge that this time around but probably the news that the most people have seen is the announcement of the World Health Organization’s finding that red meat and processed meat is carcinogenic after all. The risks involved for processed meat is clearly much more significant but it’s still fairly low. I’d file this in the good to know but mostly just confirming what we all already suspected category. If you already have a balanced diet and a fairly healthy lifestyle, this doesn’t seem to call for any changes.
• The next most significant news is what is supposedly the final nail in the coffin of the hidden variables explanation of quantum mechanical spooky action at a distance. This article covers what is described as the most comprehensive and loophole-free iteration of the famous Bell test experiments yet performed, proving once and for all that quantum entanglement effects are real and do violate locality. However so many enthusiasts have equated this with faster than light communications that I feel compelled to point out that this isn’t true at all and as the article states, the most we can look forward to in the way of practical uses is improved cryptography.
• Continuing in the vein of important news, here’s this analysis that continuing climate change will eventually make some portions of the Earth uninhabitable to humans. The prediction is that extreme heat waves will make population centers like Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Doha among others impossible to live in by 2070 as temperatures rise so high that the human body is unable to get rid of excess heat through sweating. This isn’t exactly a surprising prediction, but it’s important to note this as just another reason why carbon emissions is a big deal and urgent action is required.
• One common assumption about modern life is that humans sleep less than they did before the advent of electric lights and easily available entertainment. This article tests for that by examining the sleep patterns of pre-industrial groups of people who continue to live largely as hunter-gatherers. Surprisingly they were found to actually sleep slightly less than people who lived in modern societies, staying awake for an average of over three hours after nightfall. The biggest difference is that their sleeping patterns vary more across seasons compared to urban populations.
• On lighter news, I’m amused by this announcement that a comet, named Lovejoy, has been found to be releasing large amounts of alcohol into space. It doesn’t do this constantly of course since its chemical activity ticks up only when its sufficiently heated by proximity to the Sun but at its peak it apparently releases the equivalent of 500 bottles of wine per second. More seriously, since alcohol counts as organic molecules, it adds to the evidence that the early development of life on planets may have been kickstarted by passing comets.
• Finally the most exciting discovery is the strange variations in the brightness of a star, designated KIC 8462852, that’s about 1,500 light years away from our Sun. Small dips in a star’s brightness is normal and is indicative of a planet passing between the star and us but the changes in brightness for this star in particular is far too large to be explained by a planet in transit. The changes also don’t seem to be periodic. This means that a plausible explanation for this weird behavior is that an extraterrestrial civilization is messing with that star, perhaps by building some large structure. It’s still a pretty unlikely conclusion as the changes are probably due to some natural process that is still unknown to us, but it is a possibility that is very exciting to think about.

It’s that time of the year again so naturally I’m here to once again provide a run-down of the winners of each of the categories because as usual news coverage of this event is almost non-existent.

The physics prize goes to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald for proving that neutrinos oscillate and therefore change identities while travelling from the Sun to Earth. This means that neutrinos must actually possess mass, even if that mass is extremely small, leading to a revision of the Standard Model of physics that originally required neutrinos to be massless.

The chemistry prize once again goes to a series of discoveries that could also qualify for the medicine prize. It goes to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar for each discovering a different mechanism for repairing damaged DNA. Tomas Lindal was also the first to note that without some way to repair damage, DNA decays at a rate that should make life impossible on Earth.

The physiology prize itself goes to two separate efforts that ended up providing vital medicines against parasitic diseases. William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura discovered Avermectin which is used to treat River Blindness and Lymphatic Filariasis. Youyou Tu found a promising plant from traditional Chinese herbal medicine and extracted the active component to create the medicine now known as Artemisin, used against malaria.

As usual, the economics prize is awarded for a lifetime of work which is more difficult to summarize in a single paragraph. It goes to Angus Deaton who helped answer such questions as how consumers distribute spending among different goods, how much of a society’s income is spent and how much is saved and how to best measure poverty and the effectiveness of welfare spending.