There’s been so much in the way of interesting science-related announcements this month that I decided to cut some out as they are either too speculative or perhaps political. What’s left are all still fairly major announcements.
The first bit of news really comes from Sabine Hossenfelder whose YouTube channel I’ve taken to following and I wouldn’t have understood its significance without her laying it clearly. This paper describes success at using a laser to excite the nucleus of the Thorium isotope Th-229. Th-229 is a particular target as its excitation energy 8.4 eV is considered quite low, making it accessible to tabletop laser systems. I won’t go into the technical details of how the team achieved this but the upshot is that this opens the pathway towards optical nuclear clocks that are more precise than anything currently possible. As Hossenfelder points out, this is definitely a Nobel Prize-level achievement as last year’s award was for attosecond physics.
The news about a male orangutan in Indonesia being observed intentionally using a medicinal plant to treat a wound on his face has since gone viral. What is particularly impressive is that it was a multi-step, deliberative process. First, the orangutan chewed leaves from a climbing plant and then smeared the resulting juice on his wound. Then he finished by covering the wound with the chewed up leaves. This plant is known to be used in traditional medicine for treating illnesses like dysentery, diabetes and malaria. The scientists say that the wound was likely from a fight with another orangutan and they currently do not know how this orangutan learned to use the plants in this way.
Many of the pyramids in Egypt are located on a narrow strip of desert, yet researchers today don’t know why they were concentrated on this specific area. In this paper, a team describes how they used satellite imagery, geophysical data and soil coring to show that a now extinct branch of the Nile River used to run at the foothills of the Western Desert plateau. The waterway then would have been critical to transport building materials and workers for the massive construction projects.
Next we have a large release of data that surely yield many, many more papers and theories for years and years to come. The team took a 1mm cubic volume of human brain tissue, sliced it very finely and imaged everything with an electron microscope. The result is about 1.4 petabyes of data covering 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses. It is the largest connectomics study of human brain tissue so far. It will take a lot of time for other researchers to sift through this treasure trove and mine novel insights but already there has been a lot of excitement over previously unseen structures.
Finally, here’s a paper that is sure to be highly controversial. The team used food-liking data from participants in the UK to find associations between dietary habits and mental health. Notable is that instead of deciding what the different food groups are themselves, they look at the data to find natural patterns. From there, they found that dietary choices fell into four types: reduced-starch or starch-free, vegetarian, high protein and low fiber, and balanced. They also found that those on a balanced diet had better mental health and cognitive functions compared to those on other diets. More controversially, they state that those on a vegetarian diet exhibited more mental health issues including anxiety, depression, mental distress and so on. The team is cautious in saying that they cannot draw a causal conclusion but this paper is sure to lead to a firestorm of protests all the same.
A bit of a slow month for science news but we do have some very interesting announcements.
Most people should know that memories in our brains are stored n the way that our neurons connect with each other via synapses. However this is usually how short-term memories are formed. A team has reported a mechanism which forms long-term memories that involves our DNA. In an experiment with mice, they found that breakage of DNA in the hippocampus helps store memories. When they deleted a gene encoding a protein known as TLR9 which has a role in detecting DNA breakage, they found that the mice remembering a chamber that they had previously learned is dangerous. As TLR9 is also involved in the body’s immune response to DNA fragments from invading bacteria, this means that untangling how exactly our memories is much harder than previously thought.
One theory about development holds that paddy rice farming leads to more collectivist societies while wheat farming leads to more individualism. A new paper uses China’s Cultural Revolution to test this theory as the government then randomly assigned people including decommissioned soldiers and urban youths to either rice or wheat farms. The team tested psychological traits of farmers at two such farms that are only 56 kilometers from one another. They indeed found that the rice farmers were less individualistic, engaging in self-inflation less and being more loyal to the community than wheat farmers.
Next is a technological development that is billed as brain-like computers but that’s really getting ahead of ourselves. What they actually made is an artificial synapse that works based on a solution of salt and water. The creators named their device an iontronic memristor that is in effect a microchannel filled with the solution. When it receives electrical impulses, ions within the solution migrate through the channel, mimicking how a biological synapse works. This is still a very long way from any kind of biological computer but it is a necessary first step.
This last bit isn’t quite science news but it’s adjacent. Time standards are of course arbitrary yet they’re necessary and this article talks about why the moon needs its own Coordinated Lunar Time. As Einstein taught us, there is no absolute measure of time and so time passes differently on the moon compared to the Earth. The difference is miniscule in the case of the moon, amounting to about 1 second across 5 years. Yet as human activity on the moon becomes more intensive and the precision of coordinating these activities becomes more important, the need to have a standard time on the moon becomes more evident. This is something that can be achieved only through international agreement and cooperation.
Pretty much all biotech stuff this month as if so often the case.
The most important article is also the most boring one. As part of a massive study that included 10.17 million people who were vaccinated against COVID-19 and 10.39 million unvaccinated people from the UK, Spain and Estonia, the researchers conclude that vaccination reduced the risk of post-COVID-19 cardiac and thromboembolic outcomes. They recorded results up to one year after vaccination and looked only for cases after SARS-CoV-2 infection. It makes for strong evidence that vaccination reduces the risk of cardiovascular complications rather than increases them as per widespread popular belief.
Most people agree that babies smell nice, yet children seem to not smell as nice after they grow up. A new study provides evidence that there is a biological basis to this, attributing the change to the onset of puberty. By collecting samples of body odors from infants, toddlers and teenagers, the researchers found naturally occurring steroids with musklike odors in the teens’ sweat. They stem from bacteria and bodily substances that break down the sebum that helps protect the skin. The glands that produce the sebum are active at birth and then go dormant. They reactivate again around puberty. The first time around, the sebum isn’t broken down because infants haven’t accumulated the bacteria yet and don’t sweat much. The situation is different when they become teenagers.
Most people will already know about the Flynn effect, the phenomenon whereby IQ seems to increase from one generation to the next. Most people also believe that our average attention span has gone down, coinciding with changing media consumption patterns. This paper argues that it may be possible to decompose the Flynn effect into different domains and uses a meta-analysis of previous studies to investigate the possibility that one such subcomponent is attention. They found that there has been indeed a generational improvement in concentration performance in adults but not in children. Since this is a meta-analysis I wouldn’t put too much stock in its results but I like how counter-intuitive their findings are.
Many people will have seen online videos of parrots interacting with touchscreen tablets. You may think these are isolated incidents yet there is plenty of evidence that parrots really do love tablets and games on them in particular. This article talks about how parrots of many difference species and sizes have learned to use tablets and seem to enjoy them. It also talks about how they primarily use their tongues to manipulate the touchscreens and are capable of generating a touch much faster than human fingers can. They conclude that these devices enrich the lives of parrots enough that it may be worth developing new, more robust types of devices specifically for their use.
Plenty of science news and what’s even better is that it’s a good mix of groundbreaking stuff and plain cool stuff.
The groundbreaking research relates to the discovery of a new type of viruslike entity that inhabits bacteria found in the human mouth and gut. The team has called these new structures obelisks and they are composed of loops of RNA. Scientists have previously known of the existence of viroids, similar loops RNA without the exterior protein shell that are seen in viruses, in plants. But this is the first time that these structures have been found in the human body. What’s insane about this paper is that we’d long have thought that every part of the human anatomy has already been thoroughly examined and mapped, yet we’ve now found these previously unknown structures and have no idea what roles they play in our biology.
In more depressing news, this paper examines the long-term effects of bullying among school children. What’s particularly notable here is the sheer length of time that the data encompasses. It covers a cohort born in Britain in 1958 up to the age of 62. The findings however are sobering and they find even after so long, it is possible to detect negative subjective effects on those who were bullied as children, lowers their probability of holding a job as adults and adversely affected their mortality.
The next paper is included because of how similar the situation it presents is to a short story by science-fiction writer Greg Egan and so he even linked it! The experimenters attached a camera and microphone to a single child for a certain number of hours everyday to record everything the child could see and hear. They then used the data to train a neural net to better understand how children learn language and to see if the AI they built in this way could similarly learn how to associate words with visual references in the real world. I’m not sure if they learned anything other than the fact that this approach does work but it sure makes for something right out of science-fiction.
There are too many announcements in AI to keep up so I’ll focus only on scientific papers especially when they pertain to real-world situations. This paper compares the performance of LLMs against junior lawyers and outsourced workers on reviewing legal contracts. As expected, the LLMs aren’t as good as senior lawyers and may only be slightly better or similar in performance to junior lawyers. But there is no question that the LLMs do that job far faster and for a much cheaper, almost insignificant cost. The conclusion is that junior lawyers certainly are at great risk of being disrupted.
Finally we have this news of the discovery of the brightest object in the universe found to date. It is a quasar located about 12 billion light-years away, stretches about 7 light-years across and is more than 500 trillion times brighter than our own sun. It’s just superlative, barely comprehensible numbers across the board and the funny thing is that astronomers actually noticed it in images taken in 1980 but misclassified it as a star.
Not much in the way of science news for the first month of the year and I’ve decided to hold off on the more speculative announcements until they’re better supported.
First up in big picture news is the discovery of a cosmic megastructure, now called the Big Ring with a diameter of about 1.3 billion light years at a distance of more than 9 billion light years from Earth. It’s too faint to be seen with the naked eye of course but astronomers have been able to determine that it has something of a coil shape, aligned face-on with the Earth. This discovery joins a growing list of other megastructures and that poses a problem for our current understanding of the structure of the universe, that it is homogenous above a certain scale and looks identical in every direction. Either the scale must be redefined or we must admit that the universe has an overall structure after all.
Next is a development in particle physics that is applied to medicine. We all know about how radiation can be used to treat cancer as well as the problems of this approach. One obvious alternative is to use particles that dump a great deal of energy onto the targeted cancer cells and nowhere else in the body. This article talks about how protons beams can be used for treating cancer and how positron-emission tomography can be used to visualize and guide the proton beams. The difficulty is that the protons are very short-lived isotopes and so must be produced on-site using a cyclotron.
In Ecuador, archaeologists have discovered a huge ancient city lost underneath the jungles of the Amazon. Using both ground excavations and LiDAR imaging, they claim to have found plazas and houses connected by a network of roads and canals, with a population in the tens of thousands at least. The city was built around 2,500 years ago and people were living there up to about 1,000 years ago. If this pans out, this could mean the discovery of a completely unknown ancient civilization completely separate from the better known Mayan civilizations of Mexico and Central America.
Finally here a preprint paper detailing some observed trends in head size among humans and brain health. Using data from people born between 1902 and 1985 and controlling for many factors, they found that head sizes have been growing and memory performance has been improving over time. The authors believe that this is caused by early life environmental factors, better nutrition, better health and so on but there’s no telling really. It would be interesting to observe how long this trend can hold.
We have a wealth of cool science announcement to round off the year with.
We’ll start with the announcement about how two separate teams have successfully entangled pairs of calcium monofluoride molecules. This is exciting in the context of quantum computing in which the basic unit of computing is a qubit. The question is what do we make qubits out of, physically? This is the first time that a qubit has been constructed out of pairs of single molecules and will for obvious reasons make it much more feasible to scale a quantum computer to a useful level. Of course so far this news is only about creating the entangled pairs which is a long way from an actual quantum computer.
Next is a product that I’d actually want to use myself if it really works. A new company claims that they have a modified strain of bacteria that when introduced into a person’s mouth, will eventually outcompete the other native bacteria, making it the dominant strain in your oral microbiome. What makes their strain different is that it lacks the gene to create lactic acid from breaking down sugars and it is this acid that breaks down tooth enamel and causes cavities. Their version breaks down sugars into a small amount of alcohol instead. Theoretically a single application would last a lifetime and significantly reduce or perhaps even negate the need to brush teeth or visit a dentist. Incredibly the science behind it has been known since 2000 but it has never been made commercially available to the general public. The usual caution applies in that all this is claimed by the company itself and will need to be independently verified.
Next are a couple of papers in the field of AI. The first of these describe an autonomous laboratory that successfully synthesized novel materials, specifically inorganic powders. The platform integrates machine learning models to propose synthesis recipes to attempt, a robotic laboratory that carries out the recipe, and characterization of the result through X-ray diffraction. When the recipe fails, the system is able to propose improved follow-up recipes to try. The system was able to create 41 novel compounds over 17 days of continuous operation. I’m sure how useful these novel compounds are or how this compares to the productive output of traditional laboratories staffed by humans. But it’s proof that AI-led scientific development is a real thing.
The other one is a deep dive into a research project by Anthropic to understand what actually goes on inside a neural network. As we all know, these networks are essentially black boxes. We feed it an input and we get an output but it’s impossible to understand how it arrived at that output. So Anthropic built a very small and simple network and with the help of another network built an interface to understand and break down the first network into its smallest components. In particular, the smallest component isn’t a single neuron because the activation of a given neuron might have a specific meaning but that same neuron activated in combination with some others might mean something else entirely. The paper really only for the experts but it’s a fascinating attempt at looking inside the black box.
Finally we end with a weird bit of science news to prove that reality is crazier than the imagination of any science-fiction writer. This article talks about the Japanese green syllid worm, a species that reproduces through a process called stolonization. This means that its rear end, or butt, can detach from the main body to swim away and seek out other detached rear ends from other worms to mate with. To make this possible, the rear end of the worm has its own set of eyes, antennae and a simple brain. The article goes on about the genes that regulate the development of this strange organism and speculate that at some point in its evolution, it started to develop a second head further down its body leading to this form of reproduction.
A few interesting bits of news this month but nothing truly groundbreaking. I am happy that there are articles from different fields though.
The first one delves into the currently hot field of AI and it’s actually about two things. On one level, it’s about training neural networks to make predictions about rogue waves, monster-sized waves that are much larger than expected. One another level, it’s about making the model comprehensible to humans instead of being a black box. This involved taking the particular neural network that produced the most accurate predictions, then using a separate algorithm to generate equations that match its results as closely as possible based on the variables that it uses. So this is not only a practical method of predicting rogue waves but also represents a novel way to make sense of the results of neural networks.
Next is an announcement of very promising results from a project to stop the spread of dengue by infecting mosquitoes with the Wolbachia bacteria. Such mosquitoes are known to have a reduced ability to spread disease and indeed studies of areas where these special mosquitoes have been released in Colombia show reductions of dengue infections of up to 97%. There are concerns about how safe this is, that it’s expensive and that the pathogens may in time find ways to adapt to the Wolbachia dengue but this is still good news.
The next article is somewhat similar in that it’s as much about the general approach as the specific results. The broader problem is how do you carry out placebo-controlled trials of substances whose effects patients are aware of if they are present. The substance in question here is ketamine which is thought to have antidepressive properties, yet its psychoactive effects makes it impossible for those dosed to be unaware of it. This experiment therefore involved patients who were undergoing routine surgery. Under the effects of anesthesia, they were given either ketamine or a saline placebo and being unconscious, would not have been aware of the difference. The outcome was assessed during follow-up visits. Unfortunately they found that the ketamine had no greater effect than the placebo in reducing the severity of depressive symptoms but their approach at least is novel.
Finally, here’s an economics paper that is sure to generate a great deal of follow-up discussion. It challenges the conventional view that income inequality in the US has gone up over time. The claim here is that such views are based on estimates of income shares that are derived from individual tax returns. However this leaves out government transfers, changes in social conditions and demographics. College education for example raises lifetime income but delays entry into the labor market. Adjusting for all these factors, the author claims that real incomes have risen over time for all income groups and there has been little change in the share of income that goes to the richest. The author works for the US Treasury Department so the claims here aren’t so easily dismissed.