A solid mix of lighter articles for this month with an emphasis on history:
The news of the discovery of the remains of a Hobbit-like hominid species on the island of Flores made waves around the world some years back. Newer discoveries not only confirm this but even reveal that the species may go back much further than previously suspected. It is now thought that they must have arrived on the island more than a million years ago, enough time for them to have evolved along a separate branch and to have shrunk down in size from the prevalent Homo erectus. This also ties in to recent research which suggests that all animals tend to develop dwarfism if they are forced to live on an island with limited space.
Next is this announcement that rice farming goes back much further than previously known. This article talks about how the discovery of rice plant material that have been domesticated dating from over 9,000 years ago have been found in the Lower Yangtze Valley in China.
Then there’s this article about new excavations at the port of Piraeus in Greece. It provides fresh information about the size of the Athenian navy some 2,500 years ago which seems to be larger than previously thought. Apparently the sheds housing the fleets have an area of more than 110,000 square meters.
Moving on from ancient Greece to ancient Egypt, this article describes the application of modern metallurgical analysis techniques to the iron dagger found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. They confirm earlier suspicions that the dagger is made of iron of meteoritic origin and that the ancient Egyptians placed great value on iron recovered from fallen meteors.
Finally here’s an article that explains the concept of the gene drive. It’s a new genetic editing tool that all but ensures that the changes that are made to an organism will be passed on to all subsequent offspring. This effectively ensures that virtually all members of the altered species will eventually have the edited genes. This is understandably very powerful and one use that has been mooted is to use to eradicate all mosquitoes.
Another month, another one of these entries. They’re pretty good ones too, though almost all are about human psychology.
Let’s start with the bit of news that isn’t about people. This article covers a research team who wants to establish that trees definitively do sleep at night. They did this by using laser scanning techniques to track the movement of the trees and noted that the trees slowly drooped their branches after sunset and returned to their original position a few hours after sunrise. I’m not sure how useful this study is since they don’t offer a mechanism beyond stating that all tree movement is connected with the water balance in the trees but I guess for one definition of the word sleep, it does prove that trees sleep after all.
Next we have an interesting finding that humans tend to be pretty bad at knowing who our friends are. The study works very simply: gather up a group of test subjects and ask them who their friends are. Then ask the ones they name if they also consider the first group to be their friends. It turned out that only about 50 percent of the friendships were bidirectional. They went on to build an algorithm that would collect data on the relationship, number of friends in common and total number of friends for example, that predicts whether or not a friendship is bidirectional and if not the uni-direction of the friendship.
This next one is fairly predictable but it’s good to establish it for sure nonetheless. It’s a series of studies, involving a total of over 2,000 participants, that found that people have unethical amnesia. That is people tend to remember the times that they have acted ethically but forget the times that they acted unethically. Note that this isn’t about lying or something like that. People really do just forget the occasions that they acted in a dishonorable manner, perhaps as a defensive measure.
We already know that physically beautiful people have it better in life in all sorts of ways, perhaps the most easily measurable metric being that they earn more money. This is generally identical for both men and women, that is both men and women earn more in a similar manner according to how attractive they are. This study however adds a measure of how much time and effort people put into grooming themselves into the mix and tried to work out how this changes the dynamics. Surprisingly, they found that grooming explained almost all of the attractiveness gradient in women, that is the link between physical attractiveness and earning power, but only half of it in men.
Finally, I’m not sure how serious this study is, but it’s perfect for the silly season that is the American presidential elections. The researchers created something they call the Bullshit Receptivity Scale, a measure of how people perceive bullshit statements are being profound. They tend searched for correlations between this BRS and favorability ratings for U.S. presidential candidates. Positive correlations were found for all three Republican candidates (Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz) though surprisingly the correlation with Trump was the weakest of the three. Positive correlations were also found for the two Democratic candidates (Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton) but they were deemed to be too low to be statistically significant.
It’s been a pretty slow news for science so there are a couple of articles that might not have made the cut in a more fruitful month show up here:
This morbid but fascinating article from the Smithsonian Magazine talks about a rather obvious conclusion, that human sacrificial rituals in many cultures, far from being motivated by religious belief, was a tool to terrorize the masses and ensure continued stratification between the different social classes that comprise their societies. The claim is that statistical methods is used to find out the patterns, a technique that I’m always dubious about, but the effects seem reasonable enough: societies which practice human sacrifice are unlikely to progress to a stage in which everyone was socially equal.
The next one is the link to the Harvard paper itself rather than any article covering it. It has been fashionable in recent years to blame the upsurge in crime in the 1980s to exposure of children to lead. This paper takes this further and examines the relationship between homicide rates in American cities between 1921 and 1936 and the construction of water systems using lead pipes. This paper confirms that finding, concluding that cities that had used lead in their pipes had homicide rates that were 24 percent higher than those cities that did not.
Then we have an economics paper about how publicly-traded companies have indeed been in decline in the US. Even more worryingly, it found that the decline of publicly-traded companies was not matched by an increase in private firms, suggesting that companies are being successful in stiffing competition and that they are enjoying correspondingly higher profit margins as a result.
Finally the most incredibly science news all month is how a homeowner in England accidentally uncovered an elaborate Roman villa in his backyard. Experts examining the find have concluded that it was built between 175 and 220 AD and has not been touched since it collapsed 1,400 years ago. Its excellent state, large size and the high quality of the artifacts found in the villa, makes it probably the most important archaeological discovery of the year.
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 Bloombergarticle 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.