A mix of soft science stuff this month, not that much going on it seems.
We start not with a new paper but a retraction of a particularly famous one. The original 2012 paper about how people who were made to sign an honesty declaration were subsequently less likely to commit fraud was widely publicized and actually put into practice by various governments. Subsequent attempts to replicate this effect however failed and the researchers involved now acknowledge that the data it was based on seems to have been faked. The most famous of the scientists involved is Dan Ariely who claims the data came from an insurance company but refuses to name the company. This is still an ongoing case which threatens to completely destroy Ariely’s reputation and body of work.
Next we have an economics paper that questions the effectiveness of television advertising. Based on a study of 288 brands, the authors conclude that such advertising has a negative rate of return for more than 80% of those brands. That’s a lot more than the more commonly cited figure of around 50% of advertising spending being wasted but I can’t speak for the quality of this paper.
This next article seems highly speculative to me, but it’s worth knowing about it. It claims that as people interact and cooperate with each other, the oscillations of their neural activities appear to synchronize. The call is for a wider understanding of the phenomenon of consciousness and to acknowledge that the boundaries of the self are subject to negotiation with the environment as well as other people. This isn’t completely kooky science. We already know that the mind is what the entire body does, not just the brain, but this way of looking at things does cast the net even wider.
Finally, here’s is a longer read released by DeepMind which is now owned by Google about their efforts to create an AI capable of open-ended learning. We’ve all heard by now about AI being able to beat humans at kinds of game from chess to Starcraft II but these are single-purpose AIs trained on a specific set of data to handle a specific challenge. This article talks about having general purpose AI inhabit a 3D virtual world and learning to navigate and accomplish tasks within that world. There are plenty of pictures too, covering all kinds of thing that the AIs need to figure out without being specifically programmed to do so. It makes for a fascinating read especially as each agent in the virtual world learns to interact with other agents.
Light on anything noteworthy that I’ve seen this month. Perhaps I’ve just missed things.
One thing that did grab my attention is this paper is this one that tries to test what is well known as Bergman’s rule: the hypothesis that animals in colder regions adapt by becoming larger in size while those in warmer place become smaller. This paper examines human fossils to determine if this holds in humans and determines that it is indeed broadly true. They were however unable to find correlations between temperature and brain sizes.
Next is a paper giving us even more reason to care about clean air, as if it weren’t enough that we all need clean air to breathe. It argues that cleaner air has contributed to improved yield gains of maize and soybean in the US. This is based on measurements of four different pollutants, ozone, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide.
Then we have a paper that combines economics with biology. It’s about the nematode worm which biologists love to study because of how simple it is, with a nervous system of just 302 neurons. Yet that is enough complexity for it to seek out food, and the researchers have found that it does so according to the Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preference, a classical measure of utility maximization in economics.
Finally the last paper is hardly a surprising result but it doesn’t bode well either. Basically they had groups of people put together to solve some tasks represented by a game and then later interviewed them to ask who they would consider the leaders of the group. The result was those who spent the most time talking were considered the leaders. Even the person designated by the organizers to be the one to operate the user interface of the game were not more likely to be considered the leaders, nor those who have more experience from prior sessions of the game, nor those who scored more highly at cognitive tasks. The factor that matters most of all is simply being eager and willing to speak up the most.
Pretty much all biology this month. The ongoing pandemic is really giving a big boost to all kinds of biomedical research.
Perhaps the most predictable outcome of our extensive measures to contain the Covid-19 pandemic is that it has also reduced the genetic diversity of known subtypes of influenza. Prior to the pandemic, there were worries that clades of the virus family that causes influenza were drifting apart genetically, making it more difficult to formulate a vaccine that covers all of the strains. During the pandemic it seems that one of the clades has disappeared, though it’s likely that it’s present somewhere but transmission rates have dropped enough that it isn’t seen in circulation. This means that it becomes easier to make a vaccine for influenza again, at least for a while.
The really big news this month is the announcement that scientists from a consortium of labs all around the world have finally sequenced the entire human genome. This is some 20 years since the first drafts of the human genome were first published. The long delay is because the final 8% of the missing genome has been particularly difficult to sequence, such as the centromeres, the points where the arms of the two chromosomes intersect. New techniques had to be devised to deal with these challenging sections but now that the entire genome is complete it will constitute a complete reference with no gaps and that could be very useful to all types of research.
Next is the news that old-fashioned laughing gas, or nitrous oxide, seems to be a viable treatment for a particularly serious form of depression that is resistant to other forms of medication. Most people are likely familiar with the gas as a mild sedative sometimes used by dentists. The treatment here uses a much lower concentration of the gas and seems successful at reducing the symptoms of depression for months at a time. I honestly cannot understand why it wasn’t known earlier as it seems like an obvious thing to try.
Most people should know that long period of physical activity very quickly leads to muscle loss and a drop in bone density in humans. At the same time, we also know that bears hibernate for months at a time yet they don’t seem to suffer from osteoporosis. A new paper describes the mechanisms that make this possible. In particular, the genes that code for bone resorption and apoptosis are turned down during hibernation but then so are the genes that code for the formation of new bone. It seems that all biological processes that changes the structure of the bone are turned off during hibernation. Needless to say, the ability to regulate bone activity in this way is worth investigating to develop a treatment for osteoporosis in humans.
Finally here’s a paper about banded mongooses in Africa are able to maintain a more equal community by having all mothers give birth to pups on the same night. Thereafter they are seemingly unable to differentiate which pups belong to which mothers and so the community cares for the pups as a whole. It makes for an uplifting story but it’s too close to a just-so to ward off my skepticism.
Decently strong mix of articles this month from various disciplines, with an emphasis on discoveries that have a good chance of being very practically useful in the near future.
Personally the most exciting bit of news to me is that it may soon be possible to make diagnosis of depression more reliable through a blood test. The test works by looking at 13 RNA markers that indicate how active the underlying genes have been, genes that are particularly correlated with the incidence of mood disorders or have been identified in previous work to be associated with depression. The test should also be capable to predicting who will go on to develop bipolar disorder and how serious the condition will be. This test, if it passes the testing stage, will likely only be used to accompany more traditional ways to diagnose rather than be used by itself, but it should be obvious to everyone how significant this will be if it is widely deployed.
But I suspect that most people are excited about is TMSC’s announcement that it has invented a semiconductor that is smaller than 1 nanometer. I don’t know much about the details except that semi-metal bismuth as electrodes. TMSC also cautions that the technology may very well not not make it to commercial production at all. But it signals that we haven’t yet seen the end of incremental improvements to chip technology.
Another piece of technology that I suspect will be deployed rather quickly is vertical wind turbines. The sight of windmill-shaped wind turbines are now a familiar sight in many landscapes but it seems that vertically oriented ones are more efficient and perform even better in a grid formation with some turbines behind others. In the traditional arrangement, this would result in turbulence in the rows of turbines behind those in front.
This paper, though it has yet to be peer reviewed, could have major ramifications as well. As we all know, plants need nitrogen and a lot of what fertilizer does is give nitrogen to plants. This paper describes how a plant that is self-sufficient in nitrogen, by being able to use the nitrogen present in the atmosphere, could be made through synthetic biology.
Finally a paper in economics that I believe adds more nuance to our understanding of wealth inequality. It describes how career earnings growth in the US more than doubled between 1960 and 2017 and this was because of the growing importance of jobs that requires decision-making skills. Accordingly while workers used to hit peak earnings in their 30s, they now hit it in their 50s. This reflects the importance of critical thinking skills in jobs and how learning skills and knowledge over a lifetime adds a great deal of value. I believe this helps explain some of the frustrations of the young in the present day and the disparity in earning potential.
Some very important discoveries this month including a big one that may well be the most important finding for decades, if it doesn’t turn out to be a fluke.
The big news is that an experiment conducted at Fermilab observed muons behaving in a manner not consistent with the Standard Model of physics. After checking the math, the conclusion is that the model is wrong and there well may be a fifth, heretofore unknown, fundamental force in nature that would be needed to account for the behavior. For now, even though it is statistically unlikely to be a fluke, the Standard Model is so well established that no one is going to throw it out based on just this one result and certainly no one knows what is going to come next. But we can be sure that theoretical physicists are up all night trying to make sense of this.
Another important announcement, if it eventually proves to work on humans, is the discovery of a method of regrowing lost teeth. It uses an antibody to suppress one particular gene, USAG-1, and that was enough to stimulate tooth growth in mice and ferrets. There’s a long way to go before it would be even considered for testing on humans but if it works this certainly counts as a discovery that would make a big impact on everyone’s lives.
Next is a review of collected research to suggest that a strategy of promoting bilingualism, even if that means teaching a second language to the elderly or strengthening long unused language skills, is useful to delay the onset of dementia. It seems that even Cantonese and Mandarin spoken bilingualism is sufficient to have measurable effects on the onset of dementia. Since has no effect on Malaysians as we speak multiple languages already but it is interesting to see language learning being promoted as a healthcare measure.
Everyone knows how amazing it is that the world has been able to develop multiple effective COVID-19 vaccines in so short a time to address the ongoing pandemic. This paper argues that this has been possible partly because of the many lessons learned about vaccines across the decades spent trying to develop one for HIV. That effort was met with failure after failure but the argument is that it built up the necessary vaccine expertise to quickly develop one for COVID-19 and so research funds for vaccine development are never wasted.
Finally here’s some fascinating reading material about a particular species of ant known as the Indian jumping ant. As we all know, each ant colony only has a single queen. So what happens when the queen dies? In the case of this type of ant in particular, the surviving females compete to become the new queen and to do this their bodies transform into an intermediate form known as a gamergate to fight each one another with shrunken brains. Eventually a winner will emerge to become the queen but then the losers who survive the fight will transform back into normal ants, which involves their brains growing back again. And yes, queen ants don’t need big brains because all they do is pump out babies.
Trying something a bit different for this month’s edition of serving up cool science news and a couple of pieces really benefit from a visual presentation of the discoveries.
The first of these is a new paper that for the first time lays out a complete model of the workings of the famous Antikythera Mechanism. This is effectively a mechanical calculator or computer from ancient Greece, the fragments of which were recovered in 1901. A complete understanding of how the device worked was difficult to achieve given that only about a third of the mechanism survives. This paper explains how x-ray CT techniques were used to infer the parts that are missing and uses investigative work to fill in the blanks to prove that the entire device was used to calculate the positions of the Sun, the Moon and the five planets known at the time, according to a geocentric model of the cosmos. This excellent video was made to accompany the paper to explain what the device does and how the team arrived at the conclusions they did.
It’s a short month and slow in terms of interesting science news, so I don’t have much.
First we have a long feature about the earliest known domesticated dogs. Based on studies of both human and dog DNA as well as the observation that the genetic lines of dogs and humans tend to merge or spit together in the same places because humans bring their dogs along with them as they move, the current hypothesis is that dogs were first domesticated somewhere in northern Siberia roughly 23,000 years ago. Unfortunately just as more successful human settlers killed off natives as they invade, so do the dogs they bring displace the dog lineages of the natives, all of which can be noted in the mitochondrial DNA evidence.
Here is an amusing story about how pigs can seemingly be trained to play simple video games. They used a ruggedized version of a familiar joystick and had a dispenser for food rewards when the pigs won. Yet some of the pigs still played even after the dispenser mechanism broke down. This isn’t too surprising a result as we already know that pigs are quite intelligent and yes, I would agree that there is a moral imperative to move towards synthetic meat.
Finally this is potentially a huge thing once it can be proven to work on humans. Despite decades of effort, there is currently no contraceptive pill that can be taken by men. This paper talks about triptonide, a natural compound extracted and purified from a herb used in traditional Chinese medicine. Studies involving mice and monkeys show that it induces deformed sperm, greatly reducing its movement ability and hence causes infertility. Moreover it is fully reversible several weeks after cessation of the drug and seems to have no toxic side effects. Needless to say once it becomes available for humans, it will help shift the burden of preventing unwanted pregnancies from being borne entirely by women.