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.

Still mostly biology this month though the most visible bit of news is space stuff.

• This being NASA’s announcement that its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has discovered liquid water on the planet’s surface. The water involved is highly briny, which helps keep it liquid at low temperatures, and even so it only flows seasonally when it’s not too cold. Plus, of course, we’ve long known that water already exists on Mars in the form of ice and ancient water deep beneath the surface. Still it’s a significant milestone that will reinvigorate the search for life on the red planet. I suspect that this will also cause NASA to be much more careful about contaminating Mars with microbial life from Earth.
• But the most significant finding over the past month is probably this paper about a new species of the homo genus found in Africa. Now dubbed homo naledi, they are represented by fossils found of at least 15 distinct individuals in South Africa. The discovery was originally made in 2013 but it has taken until now to fully study the fossils and the researchers’ conclusion is that the unique morphology of the specimens warrant classifying them as belonging to a hitherto unknown and now extinct specifies of humanity. Early reporting of this paper excitedly emphasized that they may had culture as the fossils were all found together is what is thought to be a burial site. This is a shock given that this should date from long before any form of civilization. But I’m dubious about this since it’s also possible that it was just a convenient place to dispose of trash.
• Moving on to more sci-fi stuff, DARPA announced the development of neural technologies that allow patients to experience sensation from prosthetic limbs. This is rather crude at the moment as the connection is formed with electrode arrays on the patient’s and sensory motor cortex to torque sensors on an artificial hand, allowing the patient to both feel and control the individual fingers of the hand. Basically it amounts to a proof that cybernetic limbs that can transmit a sense of touch are possible.
• Finally, this Nature article talks about how a genomics firm in China is now offering gene-edited pigs for sale to the public as pets. These pigs have been modified to disable one of two copies of the growth hormone receptor genes that they possess, so that instead of their normal weight of around 35 to 50 kilograms, they will grow only to about 15 kilograms. The company also claims that in the near future, they will offer versions that can be modified to have different coat colors and patterns. But as the article notes, pigs’ size are not the only reason why they are not generally raised as household pets and owners who expect to be able to house train them will end up being disappointed.

Okay, no more space articles this month. Instead, it’s time for biology.

• This Molecular Psychiatry paper describes an attempt to identify genes that are associated with high intelligence. Specifically they sampled genes from individuals with IQs of over 170 and matched them against a control group to search for genes that are common in the high intelligence group but rare in the control group. Their finding however is consistent with previous such studies in that no genes that are reproducibly associated with high intelligence can be identified even though individual differences in intelligence is known to be highly heritable. This suggests that inherited intelligence relies on the complex interplay of many different genes rather than the presence of any rare ones.

Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (August 2015) →

As no doubt everyone reading this blog will know, the past month has seen an absolute bonanza of space-related science news. Lots of cool and exciting stuff there but we’ll start with the non-space stuff first.

• Given my recent post on the Dog Emotion and Cognition course, this first bit is especially relevant. This BBC article covers a Japanese experiment which shows that dogs are able to observe strangers interacting with their owners and calibrate their own behavior accordingly. Specifically when offered food by a stranger, dogs will decline the offer if the stranger has previously been observed as acting in a “mean” manner to its owner.

Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (July 2015) →

It’s been a particularly rich month for science with some really cool articles. Here goes:

• Due to my own interest in computer science, I couldn’t not include this. This Popular Mechanics article explains how a computer program created a model of the inner workings of a flatworm. The scientists were interested in how the worm’s genes regulate the organism’s impressive regenerative ability. The program essentially took a brute force approach to the problem, randomly making guesses and matching the results to the available data and refining its guesses until it ended up with a model that is a perfect match. This is the kind of work that would take human researches ages to do manually even if humans can explore the search space more intelligently and it’s likely that we’re going to see more and more of this kind of science.
• It’s been said again and again that science is a work in progress and we’re constantly revising what we know. But one of the areas that everyone has long thought is settled science are the structures of the human body. It turns out we were wrong when we thought we’d thoroughly mapped every part of the body because scientists have discovered a lymphatic network that links the brain and the immune system as this Neuroscience News article explains. Needless to say this is a huge bit of news that has implications for every brain disease in existence and all of the medical textbooks will need to be revised.
• Staying on the subject of the brain, this article from Hacked talks about how a team has managed to build what is in effect an artificial neuron. They claim that it is made of organic bioelectronics with no living parts but is capable of mimicking the function of a normal organic neuron in every way. Since the device is currently the size of a fingertip, it’s not going to be implantable into a real brain any time soon but you can bet that miniaturization is on the cards.
• Finally here is yet another paper on the favorite thought experiment of quantum physicists, Schrödinger’s cat. This article from Nature covers a new, purely theoretical finding that quantum superpositions would collapse in the presence of gravity. As such the classical setup of the cat would only work in deep, interstellar space far from any planet.