For a while now, I’ve been talking about how public transport should work ideally in private conversations with my wife. This is because I think privately owned motor vehicles are terribly inefficient. They’re idle the vast majority of the time, they transport too few people for the road area they occupy and consequently waste too much energy. I for one was shocked when I first learned than more than 50% of the area of a typical city is devoted solely to roads. But in practice, privately owned vehicles are so convenient compared to the alternative of public transport that, except for the very densest of cities, they’re the method of transportation of choice despite their inefficiencies.

So all this has remained my personal pet peeve. (I guess I’m also personally biased against cars because I dislike driving.) Until now, at least, because with the advent of Google’s driverless cars, suddenly my vision of an efficient public transport system now seems almost like the inevitable future. Some relevant links to consider:

• This news item about Google being granted a license to operate driverless cars in the state of Nevada early this month kicked off a lot of articles and blog posts about the effects this development will eventually have.
• This article about a reporter’s account of being transported in one of Google’s cars reveals that a lot of work remains to be done. Google’s engineers wouldn’t allow the car to be driven away from the fixed routes it was trained on and the computer handed back control to the humans at a few moments when it was unsure about what to do.
• Still, it does seem that the kinks will be worked out eventually and this blog post points out how the widespread deployment of driverless cars could drastically reshape our urban geography.

Of course, driverless cars would also alter our lifestyles. Freed of the need to pay attention to the road, time spent in transit would be extra time to spend as you wish, whether working, reading, watching videos or even sleeping. I predict that with transport becoming vastly more efficient, this would drive down transport costs and raise effective standards of living. And of course, cities would be more beautiful and more pleasant to live. This truly would be the next revolution to look out for.

February may the shortest month of the year but there’s certainly no shortage of interesting science-based news. Maybe because it’s a leap year?

• The New York Times has a story about how Alzheimer’s spreads from brain cell to brain cell like an infection. What’s particularly interesting here is that it’s not being spread by viruses or bacteria, but by distorted proteins known as tau. I pay special attention to all news articles about Alzheimer”s as it’s an especially terrifying disease to me.
• Also from The New York Times, the next article talks about how people who suffer from dyslexia, which is usually associated with impaired reading and learning ability, may benefit from unexpected side effects. In particular, people with dyslexia seem to have superior peripheral vision and can process an entire image at a glance, as opposed to specific details in an image, more quickly. The article then goes on to speculate if these improved abilities have any real world applications.
• Nanotech robots circulating in your blood stream to fix your body has been a science-fiction staple since at least the 1966 film, Fantastic Voyage. This article from BBC News covers research into an attempt to build similar devices out of strands of DNA molecules. Unlike the film, the proposed DNA robot doesn’t come equipped with a tiny surgical laser. Instead, its mooted use is to deliver exactly determined dosages of drug molecules to pinpoint sites in the body.
• Everyone knows that 2012 is a leap year, but did you know that there are also leap seconds? As this article from The Economist explains, leap seconds are inserted into our timekeeping to account for the very slight discrepancy between the strict definition of 86,400 seconds in a day and irregularities in the Earth’s rotations. Without this contrivance, our account of time would eventually fall out of sync with perceive day/night cycles, though hundreds of years for it to become noticeable in day-to-day life. This system however may soon be coming to an end as it is inconvenient for computers around the world to have to manually reset their time every so often whenever a leap second needs to be added. Instead, the powers that be seem likely to allow the discrepancies to add up and fix them in one go later.
• When we think about planets, our first impression is that all planets are like the Earth, in that they are part of fixed system orbiting around a star. This article from the Stanford Report says that this picture is probably untrue and that by far most planets that exist in the universe are actually nomad planets that wander through space without orbiting a star. Such planets may even be big enough and have enough of an atmosphere to support life, relying on radioactive sources and tectonic movement to generate heat energy. Attention all science-fiction writers, update your space exploration paradigms, stat!

The first month of 2012 has been a good month for interesting reads of all kinds, not just science ones, but this series is all about the science, so here goes:

• Scientific American reports on a clever experiment which attempts to shed light on how multicellular organisms evolved. These have always been a bit of a conundrum since indications are that the earliest such organisms were clusters of single cell creatures that somehow “decided” to stick together and work together for the common good. This is perplexing because while it makes sense for a single cell to snag resources for its own well-being, it’s a bit of leap from that to how the cells came to subsume their own self-interest in favor of that of the group as a whole. In this experiment, single-celled yeast were observed to achieve the earliest forms of multi-cellular organisms when selection pressure induced by the scientists encouraged them to cluster together and even develop a rudimentary version of division of labor.
• The next article is from Malaysia’s very own The Star (actually just an article bought from Reuters, but whatever.) Researchers on Alzheimer’s disease have known for some time that people who actively exercise their brains through activities like reading and playing games seem to build up a sort of reserve of mental capacity. This allows their brains to function normally even after the destructive proteins that characterize the disease show up. However this new finding indicates that such activities do more than that. It appears that as long as these activities are started early on in life, they actually help to prevent the plaques from forming in the first place. The caveat is that starting brain-stimulating activities after Alzheimer’s has already been diagnosed does nothing so only a lifetime’s habit of being intellectually engaged appears to help.
• The next two articles are somewhat related and they deal with open-mindedness, and what might or might not cause it. Discovery News highlights a finding that contravenes a commonly held belief, that as people age, they tend to become more conservative. This is based only on statistical data from surveys from 1972 to 2004, plus interviews, so it’s not exactly hard science. I think it makes sense with the key being that even if old people are conservative, their views become less extreme as they age and they learn to appreciate a greater range of other views from a lifetime of experience, even if they don’t agree with them.
• The last article however is the controversial of all. Live Science cites research claiming that conservative beliefs are correlated with low intelligence. In particular, the correlation is between low levels of IQ measured as children and conservative beliefs held as adults when they grow up. As usual correlation doesn’t prove causation but the working theory is that it is more mentally draining to deal with people who are different from you and hence people with lower IQ gravitate towards beliefs and ideologies that stress conformity to tradition and resistance to everything that is new and different. These findings were buttressed by other studies that showed that people with lower cognitive abilities had less contact with people who did not share their race and were more likely to be prejudiced against homosexuals.