A whole slew of articles to close out the year and I’m even excluding some important news items because they have yet to fully play out at the time of writing, such as the launch of the James Webb telescope.

• I’m waiting until the Webb telescope is actually used to make any new discoveries before posting anything about it but that doesn’t mean there is isn’t anything else of comparable interest in the field of astronomy. This month NASA also announced that its Parker Solar Probe flew through the corona of the Sun for the first time, gathering valuable data on the switchbacks, disturbances in the solar wind that can move around. This is effectively the weather on the surface of the Sun. To do that the probe has to survive temperatures of up to 1,377 degrees Celsius and move at similarly ridiculous speeds. Please look up the video images of the mission if you can, they’re well worth your while.
• One article that particularly intrigued me was this one about the benefits of physical exercise in ways that still quite mysterious to us. Some of the innumerable benefits includes reduced inflammation and increased plasticity within the hippocampus and this experiment shows that exercise changes something in the plasma that induces these effects. The researchers took blood plasma from mice which had engaged in exercise and infused it into mice that had not and found that the benefits were transferable but we still don’t know why.
• By now everyone knows about the dangers of plastics, in particular that they are not biodegradable and hence persist in the environment but as a famous, fictional scientist would say, “life finds a way”. This article talks about microbes in oceans and soils around the world are evolving to eat plastics. They found this by noting the emergence of previously unknown enzymes that are capable of breaking down plastic, with particularly high concentrations in areas with more plastics. This is unsurprising of course as plastics are just hydrocarbon chains engineered by humans and therefore did not previously exist. Now they are abundant, it is normal for microbes to evolve to consume them as a food source. While this seems like good news, we should still be wary of unexpected consequences from such developments.
• Taking a break from all these articles about biology, we make a foray into sociology. One phenomenon that we all know is slowing population growth in many countries around the world. However this happened in France much earlier than anywhere else and this paper links the change to the secularization process in France, arguing that as religiosity declined in particular départements in France and even particular family lines as traced through the data, so too does family sizes.
• A lighter article would be this one about an attempt to survey the average number of words and phrases that dogs with owners know and recognize. Using a methodology similar to that used to assess infant’s understanding of early language ability, they found that the average number about 89, though there is of course wide disparities for individual dogs. The smartest one could recognize over 200 words while the dumbest one only recognized 15.
• Finally for a longer read, here is an overview about how one should not underestimate the sophistication of the minds of insects. Growing evidence and scientific consensus suggests that insects are not autonomic beings that react and behave mindlessly to stimuli but do have internal mental states of their own, and this includes feeling their equivalent of primal emotions like pain or being frightened.

Ignoring the very recent developments on the covid-19 front which are too new and speculative to include here, not much of note this month. So I’m including some cool technology to fill in the blank so to speak.

• One really interesting paper however is the discovery about a novel phase of water they are calling superionic ice. This is of course in addition to the phases of liquid, solid and gas that we are more familiar with. Also nicknamed strange black ice, the team created it by subjected water to intense pressure in between two diamonds and then firing high-intensity x-rays at it. It naturally has very different mechanical properties than what we expect out of water and reminds us that there is so much more that we have yet to know even out of familiar things. Superionic ice is doubly important because it is thought to exist in nature, deep inside our planet for example, and might play a role in maintaining the Earth’s magnetic fields.
• Next is a fun paper about head tilting behavior in dogs. I’m sure everyone has seen dogs do this and notice how it seems like they’re being curious or puzzled. Surprisingly no one has tried to explain this behavior before now and this team guesses that dogs do this when they are paying particular attention to something and learning something new. In particular through tests they isolated a group of dogs they identified as being particularly good at learning things and determine these genius dogs were especially prone to tilt their heads when introduced to new toys and taught their names. This all seems very speculative to me but it is a start.
• Then we have this rather scary article about the so-called vulture bees, bees that rather than feed on nectar, eat meat instead. The existence of this species of bee has been known of for a while and others have noticed them look for rotting carcasses and leave a pheromone trail to summon nest mates to gorge on the flesh en masse. But now scientists have also confirmed that they possess radically different microbiomes to help them digest meat and even protect them from pathogens, similar to the bacteria found in actual vultures and hyenas.
• Plenty of phone screen protectors advertise about their being made of diamond glass but they’re not really diamonds. A team however has been published about their success at creating a glass material that is as close to diamond as you can get and what’s even cooler is that they used the well-known buckyball structure as their starting point. The result is a carbon structure with three-dimensional bonds that they claim is the hardest known glass so far and has the highest thermal conductivity as well. The applications in the electronics industry is of course endless, provided that they can make this at scale.
• Finally a technology that I wouldn’t mind having: a fabric made of engineered silk that can keep the skin much cooler than natural silk or cotton while under direct sunlight. It’s a little sparse on the technical details but this was apparently made by embedding silk fibers with aluminum oxide nanoparticiples with the result being that it can reflect ultraviolet light so well that under direct sunlight it is actually cooler than ambient air temperature. Compared to normal cotton, the claim is that it is cooler by as much as 12.5°C which sounds like the stuff of science-fiction.

Decent mix of stuff though all in the life sciences.

• Easily the most exciting of the lot is the discovery of a new class of programmable DNA modifying systems. In this blog, I have talked many times about CRISPR and how it is a game-changer in enabling easy DNA editing but it is always better to have more than one tool in your toolbox. The acronym for this one is OMEGA, standing for Obligate Mobile Element Guided Activity. This is an RNA-guided DNA-cutting enzyme that originated in bacteria is only about one third the size of the Cas9 protein, which should help make it even more useful. Needless to say this is early days yet and we have no way of knowing if this will eventually be deployed but it is exciting news.
• One bit of news that has been all over the net this month is this paper about how quickly some elephants in Mozambique have evolved to lose their tusks as a response to poaching. The elephant population declined by 90% at the height of poaching activity but as the population recovered, more elephants are born tuskless. All of them however are female as the gene responsible for the change is lethal when expressed in male elephants but females can survive the mutation if they receive a non-mutated version of the gene in one of their two X chromosomes. Of interest is how quickly tusklessness increased during the Civil War that enabled widespread poaching and also now that the situation has stabilized female elephants are regaining their tusks as they are after all a useful tool.
• The next bit of news shouldn’t be much of a surprise but I think it makes for an interesting wake up call. It’s about a survey of wildlife, specifically wild boars and rat snakes, in the Fukushima Exclusion Zone which found no significant adverse health effects in the wildlife despite the exposure of varying levels of relatively low-dose radiation exposure. The team suggests that perhaps people shouldn’t be too fearful of moving back into the area but it goes without saying that health standards for humans and wildlife are very different, and rightly so. To me, this shows as in Chernobyl, that the wildlife is able to bounce back quite well following environmental disasters as the benefits from the simple absence of humans outweigh the adverse effects of the pollution.
• Finally, and I think this bit will resonate with quite a few people as we have all had to sit through the sales pitch at opticians’ shops, we have a paper about a randomized controlled trial that aims to determine how helpful blue-blocking lenses really are. This is a straightforward and simple experiment involving participants wearing glasses who were all led to believe that they were using such lenses and assigned to various computer tasks. Afterwards they tried to measure the eye strain experienced by the participants and found no significant difference between those actually using the blue-blocking lenses and those who weren’t. One possible objection is that the period of time under study, two hours of computer use, is relatively short but this isn’t the first time that objections have been raised that these lenses are an expensive add-on of doubtful benefit.

It’s Nobel Prize month and once again I like to highlight the science prizes because of how little mainstream news coverage they get. I don’t think there’s anything too surprising this year except that some people wondered why there’s been no acknowledgment of the mRNA technology that has powered many of the vaccines used to fight the ongoing pandemic. That’s silly of course given the time scales of how the Nobel Prize committee works such that it takes a while for a discovery to be deemed important enough to merit an award.

I suppose the most headline grabbing prize this year is the one for physics because it’s being described as being an award for climate change research. It’s more complicated than that of course as it is really about methods to describe and predict the behavior of large, complex systems with a lot of chaos and the planet’s climate is the best possible use case for such methods. This story begins in the 1960s with Syukuro Manabe for linking increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with higher temperatures and developed the first models of the Earth’s climate.

Some ten years later Klaus Hasselmann showed that local weather despite being chaotic and unpredictable could lead to reliable long-term predictions of the climate as a whole. Then in the 1980s Giorgio Parisi, studying complex materials such as spin glass such as a matrix of copper atoms that also contain scatted iron atoms and hence have complicated magnetic orientations, devised mathematical ideas to understand this complexity. Naturally these are also applicable to other fields including climate science.

Hopefully most people still reading this already know what catalysts are and why they are essential in chemical reactions to turn one type of molecule into another. It was thought however that catalysts fall into two types: enzymes, which are large, complicated protein molecules, and transition metals, the elements in the middle of the periodic table. Benjamin List and David MacMillan, working independently but towards the same ends, discovered an entirely new type of catalysts now called organocatalysts, for which they have been awarded the prize for chemistry.

These are relatively small organic molecules that don’t include metal. The latter is a desirable trait because metal compounds are frequently toxic and metal-based catalysts don’t distinguish between different mirror-image versions of molecules and as these have different effects, drugmakers usually want only one specific version. Since about 2000 when these discoveries were made, organocatalysts have become widely used in many industrial processes.

The prize for medicine may not seem so exciting but it is a natural extension of the realization that our senses work through incredibly specialized organs and channels and we still don’t know all of them, including elementary ones like how we sense temperature. David Julius beginning in the 1990s studied capsaicin, the active ingredient that makes chili peppers hot, and worked out which protein in heat-receptor cells are sensitive to capsaicin. In doing so, he discovered the ion channel protein now called TRV1 and worked out it is triggered when heat rises to painful levels. This led to other discoveries of other temperature sensing receptors including work by both Julius and Ardem Patapoutian to use menthol to identify cold sensitive receptors.

Patapoutian also found touch sensitive receptors, beginning with Piezo1 which is actually found in organs like the bladder. This sensitivity to mechanical pressure is what causes people to feel the need to urinate. Through its similarity to Piezo1, he also found Piezo2 which is responsible for our more familiar sense of touch and proprioception, which lets us know the position and movement of our body.

Unlike the physical sciences, it is extremely difficult to perform experiments in the social sciences or economics. David Card however realized that one could identify natural experiments such as when the state of New Jersey passed a minimum wage law in 1992 but nearby Pennsylvania didn’t. Reasoning that the two states are similar enough, Pennsylvania could serve as the control group to work out the effects of the minimum wage law. This seems obvious today but apparently it was quite novel back then.

Often however such differences between two groups aren’t so neat as that, and it may be necessary to tease them out in clever ways. Joshua Angrist was one of those who realized that the date of birth of each school student makes a small but measurable difference in how much schooling that student gets in the US. Effectively those were born earlier in the year gets slightly less schooling than one born late in the year. This makes it possible to work how the length of schooling a person receives impacts lifetime earnings. Guido Imbens is also included as one of the winners for working out the theoretical framework to analyze the causal relationships in these empirical phenomena.

Another light month in terms of new discoveries, so how about a long, review-type feature article for your reading pleasure and edification. We’ll start off with a couple of articles about the ongoing pandemic and the technologies that have emerged around it however.

• First we have this one about an antibody treatment for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Far less attention has been paid to them than vaccines, but such treatments are another important tool to manage the pandemic. This one seems particularly important it seems capable of neutralizing not only all known strains of SARS-CoV-2 but also all known serbecoviruses, which means it covers all viruses of the same genus. It achieves this by binding to a particular site on the coronavirus spike protein that is thought to be unlikely to vary by much from mutation.
• Meanwhile the same technology that enabled mRNA vaccines is making its way to cancer therapies with human trials starting in Europe. BioNTech actually has several different mRNA cancer therapies in the works, targeting different types of cancers but all work on the same principle of programming the immune system to target tumor cells. Needless to say if the human trials work out, this would make a huge difference in the health outcomes of cancer patients.
• Next here’s an announcement about a team succeeding at synthesizing starch out of carbon dioxide. They claim that their process is more efficient than conventional agriculture but I’m not sure what that means as it applies to energy-use or economics. Nevertheless this is clearly a major discovery especially as carbon dioxide is now seen as a major pollutant. Converting it to food seems incredible. Incidentally I’ve read recently that companies trying to grow meat without animals aren’t having much success at making it economical and it may well be impossible to achieve at scale.
• Finally here’s a broad review of the current state of physics. Essentially the field is in upheaval because the Large Hadron Collider has failed to find so-called sparticles, the heavier supersymmetric partners of the known fundamental particles. This throws the entire principle of supersymmetry into doubt and along with it string theory as the leading theory of everything. This is a real problem for physics as theoreticians have bet on it being true and have done a lot of theoretical work ahead of finding empirical evidence. Now the doors are thrown wide open again to alternative theories of everything with one favorite, among many others, being entropic gravity.

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.