Last year, everyone expected the prize for physiology or medicine to a specific winner but that prediction failed to pan out. That is rectified this year as the prize goes to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that make mRNA vaccines possible. Such vaccines are an obvious idea but it proved difficult to be made in practice as the production of mRNA without cell culture, called in vitro transcription led to mRNA that causes inflammatory responses.

Karikó and Weissman knew that the bases in RNA from mammalian cells are frequently chemically modified while in vitro transcribed mRNA is not. So they produced different variants of mRNA with unique chemical alterations in their bases and discovered that this change did indeed almost completely abolish the unwanted inflammatory response, making mRNA vaccines viable.

The physics prize is for attosecond physics and is pretty easy to understand as well. An attosecond is a billionth of a billionth of a second and this is the scale that we need to use to examine the movements and reactions of electrons. The prize goes to Anne L’Huillier, Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz. L’Huillier discovered that when an infrared laser passes through a noble gas, the laser imparts energy to the atoms that is then released as light. The light waves interact with one another so that when their peaks coincide, they would become more intense.

Agostini and Krausz, working independently, both turned this insight into workable technology to create pulses of light in the hundreds of attoseconds range. Today this has been further improved down to the dozens of attoseconds range and this is what allows us to see electrons in the same way that very fast camera shutters allows us to capture fast moving objects.

The prize for chemistry is for quantum dots and who would have thought that the marketing blurb for expensive televisions isn’t just bunk. Every high school student who has studied chemistry knows that the properties of an element are determined by how many electrons it has. However on a very small scale, the properties may be governed by quantum phenomena instead and this includes their colors which can vary depending on their size.

The prize goes to Alexei Ekimov, Louis Brus and Moungi Bawendi for making that knowledge work in practice. Ekimov first demonstrated the effect in colored glass, using nanoparticles of copper chloride. Brus later did it with particles floating freely in a fluid and Bawendi improved the process to produce the quantum dots to make it more reliable. The result that quantum dots today are a real thing that are used in computer monitors, television screens and many other applications.

Finally the prize for economics goes to Claudia Goldin for her work in investigating female participation in the labor market and explaining the gender gap in earnings. Trawling through 200 years of data, she showed that female labor did not have a continuously upward trend but instead forms a U-shape. Married women were heavily involved in labor in agrarian societies but worked less during the transition to an industrial society. With the rise of the service economy, female work is trending upwards again.

She also demonstrated how factors like women’s education levels, the invention of the contraceptive pill and having control over when a woman has her first child affect women’s earnings. One particularly interesting finding is in so-called greedy professions like the legal or financial industry which rewards those willing to put in extremely long and unpredictable hours with high pay. In many cases, families maximize their earnings by having the husband specialize in his career leaving the wife with all of the childcare duties while forsaking her own career.

Lots of cool stuff this month and I’m even cutting off breaking news that I’ll try to include next month.

• I like to start off these posts with the news item that manages to hit the mainstream every month. This time it’s the news of a possible human population bottleneck about 900,000 years ago. This was achieved by projecting current human genetic variation backward in time to estimate past population sizes. This is understandably not a very reliable or precise technique but their estimate that the human population was reduced to around 1,300 breeding individuals at one point has enough shock value to made headlines around the world. Probably the more interesting discovery that the period coincides with a severe cooling phase in the planet’s climate, making it a salutary lesson on how critical it is for us to intelligently manage climate change today.
• Using drugs to control obesity is the next big thing in medicine and there’s no doubting the impact that it could have on human health. This paper adds to the knowledge in that area, demonstrating how a specific group of neurons, GABRA5-positive neurons, in the lateral hypothalamic area of the brain help regulate food intake and thereby weight gain. By activating or suppressing these neurons, the researchers were able to control weight gain in model mice without affecting food intake. There’s understandably still a lot of reluctance against relying on drugs to control the obesity epidemic but I have no doubt that this will be mainstream soon.
• We’re all familiar with the adage about opposites attracting and those mature enough should already know how untrue it is. This paper is a systematic review of peer-reviewed studies of male-female partners and their traits. The data shows that partners generally have high correlations in their personal traits whether in terms of political and religious attitudes, educational attainments and others, suggesting that such partnerships are more common and more stable.
• Next here is a paper about intuition, specifically intuitive responses to problems that are wrong and yet are prove to be extremely difficult to correct. It discusses the bat and ball problem which involves calculating the costs of the two objects. The problem has an obvious, intuitive answer which is wrong and the correct answer must be arrived at through reflection. Despite increasingly severe warnings and even an explicit instruction that the obvious answer is wrong, many people still end up inputting the wrong answer.
• Finally this paper discusses correlations between being patient and educational success. This by itself isn’t that revelatory but the technique the team used to determine patience seems novel. What they did was to mine data from social media to determine which types of interests are popular in different places and made their findings based on which interests are associated with the virtue of patience.

Only a handful of news items this months but they’re all really critical ones.

• The most important science event of the month is of course the announcement of the supposed room-temperature superconductor LK-99. This article serves as a good overview of what happened, beginning with the claim made by a team led by a pair of Korean scientists that they had discovered such a material. Specifically they claim that a form of lead apatite, modified according to a formula that they provided, could conduct electricity without resistance at ambient pressure and temperatures. Such a material would be the stuff of science-fiction with the potential to revolutionize countless fields. After the initial burst of enthusiasm however the consensus is now that the material doesn’t have the desired properties as efforts to replicate it have failed. There are plausible explanations for the observations made by the original team, including that it may be diamagnetic instead. Novel science might still arise from further study of the material but it seems this will not change the course of human development.
• Anyone reading this will have seen the reports of how this is the hottest year on record ever and the spate of disasters a hotter climate has been causing all over the planet. Apart from the usual, one reason might be the end of an unintended form of geoengineering that helped reduce the planet’s temperature. It used to be that the fuel used in ocean-going ships contained sulfur but since 2020 regulations have cut sulfur pollution and improved air quality. However the sulfate particles also used to create reflective clouds that follow in the wake of ships and these helped to reflect sunlight and thereby cool the planet. The regulations therefore amount to a natural yet unintended experiment in geoengineering to prove that seeding clouds using sulfate particles does help counteract global warming even if it comes with other costs that we dislike.
• Resistance to antibiotics in bacteria is another long-term problem that the world has to struggle with. While people intuitively understand how chance mutations can cause a bacterium to be more resistant to particular drugs, bacteria seem to be evolving resistance faster than this mechanism would imply. This article talks about another mechanism via the viruses that infect bacteria. It goes into detail about how this works in several different ways that I won’t repeat but the upshot is that bacteriophages can transfer the genes of one bacterium to another or even integrate their own genomes into that of their prey. This causes the genetics of the bacterial population to change faster than expected and explain why bacteria seem to evolve resistance to antibiotics so quickly.
• Next we have a paper discussing how latent diffusion models actually work. These are the AI models that create images and just like the large language models that are used to generate text, researchers aren’t quite sure what’s happening internally within the models. This paper claims that the models, as part of the process of being trained, actually create internal representations of the geometry of scenes. This is despite the fact that the images they are given as training data contain no depth information at all.
• Finally as a bit of more lighthearted science news, this talks about how scientists assigned to the remote outpost of Antarctica have developed a subtle yet unique accent of their own. The interesting part is that the scientists assigned there change all the time yet there is still enough carry over from group to group to create an accent as the isolated population there influence one another as they speak while having less interaction with the rest of the world.

Again, lots of cool announcements this month, so much that I had to pick and choose among them.

• Probably the most shocking news headline this month, if you’ve been paying attention at least, is that the tilt of Earth’s orbit has changed due to how much groundwater has been pumped out. The angle of the planet’s rotational axis regularly shifts over time due to a variety of factors including the movement of molten rock, changes in atmospheric pressure, changes in the mass of glaciers and ice sheets and so on. This new study shows that extraction of groundwater over the past two decades, mostly in western North America and northwestern India, too has moved the tilt. It’s difficult to say exactly how this affects everything else but it’s a sobering reminder that the actions of humans have major unintended consequences.
• Another important announcement is the neuronal wiring of a female common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, has been fully mapped. That’s about 130,000 neurons and includes plenty of other information as well. The upshot is that scientists who want to conduct experiments on the brains of fruit flies can theoretically now do so on a fully digital, simulated version rather than a real, live fly. Already there are people using it to simulate a fly eating and there will no doubt be many more such projects. We shouldn’t expect this digital twin to perfectly simulate the real thing but it should be obvious what an incredible boon this will be to researchers.
• There’s so much news about AI lately and so little of it is about how it’s been put to use in practice. This news about how generative AI has been used to help develop a new drug to treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is therefore welcome. This is an Nvidia puff piece so there should be an appropriate amount of skepticism. Still it’s educational to read up on how the company’s suite of AI tools was used to search for molecules a drug could target, generate drug candidates based on those molecules and simulate how well the candidates would bind to the molecules. The next step is to move on to Phase 2 clinical trials, meaning human patients have already been administered the new drug to test how well it works.
• Next is an article about a wide-ranging survey of hunter-gatherer societies, seeking evidence about the longstanding belief that in such societies men usually do the hunting and women do the gathering. Searching through accounts from the 1800s to the 2010s and covering 63 forager groups throughout the world, the survey found that women participated in hunting activities in 80% of these groups. This puts paid to the old myth, still perpetuated in popular culture but mostly disdained by modern anthropologists, that men roamed far and wide in pursuit of prey while women stayed close to home.
• Then there’s this paper that comes to a rather obvious conclusion: how much a person favors or disfavors inequality corelates with whether they are high status or low status. Through simulated experiments with and without a veil of ignorance, the researchers found that those who landed in high status positions were happy with inequality and the opposite was true of those in low status positions. They also found that their opinions change in accordance to changes in their social status. It turns out that people are self-interested. Who knew?
• Finally here’s an article about a mysterious exoplanet with a very high albedo, that is it reflects 80 percent of the light from its star. The planet in question is known as LTT9779 b and its high albedo is especially surprising because its radius is slightly larger than Neptune, which in ordinary circumstances is so big that it would be considered a gas giant. Using data from the Cheops space telescope, astronomers now believe that the planet started out as a gas giant but has lost mass over time. Now it has atmosphere composed of a silica-like material and titanium. Just picture it, it’s a planet covered by clouds made of metal vapors. Even science-fiction authors couldn’t make this up.

After the relative paucity of science news the previous month, I’ve been hit by an absolute deluge of important announcements in June.

• The most important of these concern the realization that the history of intelligent life on Earth may need to be completely rewritten. Homo naledi was a species of hominids who were much shorter than modern humans but had human-like hands and feet and more ape-like hips and shoulders similar to Australopithecus. They were first discovered in 2013 and due to the small size of their skulls and therefore their brains were not thought to be intelligent in the way humans are. Now researchers have found not only evidence of ceremonial burial but abstract geometrical patterns carved into cave walls that may be a form of primitive art. This has forced researchers to revise their opinions that such small brains could not be intelligent and to reevaluate the evidence of stone tools, cave art and remains of fires as hominids other than Homo sapiens and Neanderthals may have been responsible for them.
• Another important announcement is that a team has succeeded in creating synthetic models of human embryos by reprogramming stem cells without the need for human eggs or sperm at all. These model embryos are useful to study the earliest stages of human development and it is not clear that they ever have the potential to grow into living creatures. It is currently illegal to implant them into human wombs and animal versions of these models have failed to develop properly in animal wombs beyond a few days. Nevertheless it’s easy to see what a significant development this is and why there are so many ethical concerns over this announcement.
• The line ‘life finds a way’ is such a meme by now but it’s the best way to describe the case of a female American crocodile that laid a clutch of eggs by itself despite having being kept in complete isolation from other crocodiles throughout its life. This makes it a clear case of parthenogenesis in which female gametes develop without being fertilized. Of the 14 eggs laid, 7 appeared to be fertile and were artificially incubated. Unfortunately none hatched and only seemed to have a fully formed fetus inside. DNA analysis proved that the fetus was essentially a clone of the mother with no paternal alleles at all. In this instance, the clutch of eggs all failed and suggests that such eggs are inherently less healthy that properly fertilized ones. Nonetheless it makes for a fortuitous, unplanned experiment that demonstrates that the phenomenon is real.
• Then we have a paper that talks about using targeted neurostimulation to treat major depressive disorder (MDD). As the paper notes, patients with MDD are resistant to other forms of treatment and the condition itself is widely thought to be the result of disordered communication across the entire brain network. It shows that targeted neurostimulation can restore typical propagation patterns of signals within the brain and this could the mechanism by which the treatment works.
• Finally here is an article about the so-called study drugs that are popular in some circles. These include such brands as Adderall and Ritalin, taken because they are thought to boost brainpower. A double-blind study however found that those on these drugs spent more effort on completing cognitively demanding tasks yet performed worse on average. In fact, even those who did well after taking the placebo performed poorly under the effects of one of these drugs.

Not much in the way of science news this month that is particularly worth highlighting. The AI scene is still moving very quickly of course with new models released weekly but that wouldn’t be of interest to the general public.

• One paper that may turn out to be significant is this one that claims to offer a new perspective on the causes of the obesity epidemic. Put simply a person gets obese when more energy goes into the body than goes out. Everyone knows of course that less exercise means less energy being spent. But the authors here argue that there is a difference between energy expenditure from reduced physical activity and the basal energy expenditure (BEE) just from living. They claim that the data show that BEE has dropped over the past three decades. Exactly why this is so is unclear but it may be linked to a lowering of human average body temperatures over time. I’m wary of this seemingly letting people who simply don’t exercise enough off the hook but it is an important consideration to take into account.
• Another important article is this overview of phage therapy. Most people will be aware that the effectiveness of antibiotics diminish over time as bacteria evolve resistance. Without new classes of antibiotics being developed, this leads to increasingly many superbug infections that are untreatable. As this article explains, one solution is bacteriophages, viruses that infect and kill bacteria. Bacteriophages were little studied in the Western world however but they continued to be developed in the former Soviet states making the current centers of expertise in this field. The best part of this is that viruses can evolve just like bacteria to match their defenses.
• Finally this counts as one of those announcements that is exciting to know but likely will have no real consequences at all. This is about the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting LP 791-18, a dwarf star about 86 light years away. What makes this particular planet is that it is Earth-sized and about the same mass and has an equilibrium temperature that makes it possible for water to present in liquid form. Combined with tidal heating and strong volcanic activity, it is a fantastic candidate for searching for extraterrestrial life.

Plenty of science news this month but I’ve avoided talking about AI. Things are moving too fast in that space and with everything still up in the air, it seems unwise to tout early findings and announcements before things have settled down.

• Almost all of the stuff I have this month are about biology so we’ll start with the ones that aren’t. This article talks about reliable methods to detect when someone is lying. Obviously there are all kinds of devices that purport to do so with dubious efficacy and law enforcement officers are trained to look for telltale signals. This group of researchers posit that it is necessary to look for only one type of signal: the level of detail in the story the person is telling. They even tested this by separating groups of students who really did an activity and who were told to simply lie about it. Those who actually did were able to provide much more detail in their account and that in turn is a more reliable method of telling who is lying and who isn’t.
• Next we have a paper about a particular Mayan calendar which had stumped researchers for a long time. The calendar is known for having a 819-day cycle and researchers had difficulty synchronizing it to the movements of the visible planets. This paper shows that by increasing the length of the calendar to 20 periods of 819-days, it is possible to create a pattern that matches with the synodic periods of all of the planets visible to the Mayan civilization. What blows my mind is that this is effectively a 45-year calendar proving just how long the Mayans must have watched the skies to learn and understand the larger cycle.
• Moving on to biology, we have a paper that discusses how plants emit ultrasonic sounds when under stress. The experiments they conduct confirm that plants do emit airborne sound that can recorded using microphones but that machine learning models that differentiate between the sounds to tell when the plants are stressed by drought, cut or normal. To be fair, this doesn’t mean that plants are sentient as they lack a nervous system and the sounds that are being emitted are most likely a physiological consequence of the different conditions they are subjected. But as the authors note, this is still information that can be used, either by humans or other plants and animals in the vicinity.
• Next we have two articles that are vaguely related. First is further news about the discovery of fungi that can consume plastics, specifically polypropylene that is used in takeaway containers and cling film. The fungi are already naturally present in plants and soil so there is no fear of them being dangerous. It still takes a great deal of time to fully degrade the plastics though the process is accelerated by ultraviolet light and heat. But if it could be scaled up, this could be very useful way of breaking down plastic waste so that it won’t stay forever in the environment.
• In what makes for a great example of the familiar ‘life finds a way’ tagline, researchers have discovered that coastal creatures have made the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch their home. This is the well known concentration of plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean that most people will have already heard of. The researchers found that many species of coastal organisms, meaning crabs and anemones that usually live in coastal areas and not in the middle of the ocean, are colonizing the plastic waste and forming communities there. Of course the garbage patch remains a problem but it serves as a powerful reminder to us that life adapts and goes on in spite of what humans do.
• Finally on a lighter note, here’s an article about how pet parrots were taught to use touchscreens to make video calls. They found that the parrots were indeed able to make such calls to other birds and seemed to enjoy socializing with each other through the screen. The project is too small in scale to draw firm conclusions but as parrots are usually kept as solitary pets while they live in flocks in the wild, this may actually be a useful way to help alleviate the psychological issues that many pet birds develop.