We’re back to having more science news than I can reasonably cover. Hopefully this represents a decent selection of the most significant announcements.

• Starting with the easier to grasp and happier pieces of news, we have the welcome success of lab-grown blood transfused into a human. Stem cells are extracted from a normal donation of blood, encouraged to grow and then guided to become complete red blood cells. This effectively creates a larger usable supply from small donated amounts. So far the trial uses only very small amounts to determine safety and the process is too expensive for widespread use. It may be a viable means to help with extremely rare blood types however.
• Another piece of good news talks about some unexpected benefits of protected marine sanctuaries where fishing is banned. The normal benefit is that population numbers of valuable species inside the protected area boom and overspill into outside areas where fishing is allowed. A study in Norway however also found that lobsters inside the protected grow larger and exhibit bolder behaviors. In effect, as laws ban the harvesting of lobsters below a certain size, lobsters have grown smaller and become more timid to avoid being caught in traps. The existence of the protected areas counteract that, which improves the quality of the fishing just outside of them as well as the quantity.
• In less happy news, a set of studies examined whether or not cannabis use can somehow promote creativity. Using outside evaluators to assess the quality of creative work, the studies found cannabis use didn’t significantly improve the creativity of users. But it did make them happier and made them believe themselves that they were more creative. But as the article notes, it’s still possible that cannabis use boosts cognitive abilities that weren’t measured or that already creative people are simply more likely to use cannabis in the first place.
• The next paper is from the field of macroeconomics and discusses dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. These models are the predominant framework of macroeconomic analyses. The authors of this paper subject a version of this model to some statistical tests, effectively testing if the model can predict its own simulation. They also test how well the model fits nonsense data. Even with centuries of data, the forecasting error is very high and swapping in nonsense data might actually yield better results. I don’t know enough about how these models work and about statistics to judge the validity of this paper for myself but it seems like a serious challenge that the field of macroeconomics must answer.
• Finally my favorite of the announcements this month is about a novel way to measure time. It involves pumping atoms with lasers such that they enter a high-energy state called a Rydberg state. The movements of electrons under such conditions are subject to quantum effects and are described as a Rydberg wave packet. More than one such wave packet interfere with one another and this interference can be used as a measurement of time. The interesting part is that there is no need to predefine a starting time so scientists can measure any event they want to observe and compare it to the signature of interfering Rydberg states to note how long it lasts. Plus this measurement of time is entirely self-contained and does not rely on some other measured quantity.

In addition to the Nobel Prize announcements this month and the reactions and commentary that always follows, there’s been plenty of cool news science, enough that I’ve had to pick and curate.

• We might as well start with the image that has captured everyone’s imaginations this month. It’s an update to the iconic Pillars of Creation image originally taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995. The new image was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope using its Near-Infrared Camera to view that region of space about 6,500 light-years away. The breathtaking visual captures proto-stars being formed amidst clouds of dust and gas, the powerful gravitic forces involved propelling the clouds of materials around to form these distinctive shapes.

• As amazing as that image was, the one article that captured my imagination this month is this one about implanting corticoid organelles into rats’ brains. I’ve covered the subject of these organelles before, but briefly these are small agglomerations of human nerve cells, cultivated from pluripotent stem cells. The idea is to study simplified versions of complex organs, this one being a simplified model of the brain. This particular experiment involved implanting the organelles into the part of the rat’s brains responsible for the sense of touch. After the human and rat nerve cells had connected up properly, they tested if the organelles could properly respond to sensory input, blowing air on the rats’ whiskers, and if it could direct the rat’s behavior. Both proved true and though the ethical issues with such work are worrying, it makes the important point that such artificial, simplified brains can in principle be made to integrate with live animals.
• Another great article is this one about how pandemics that happened far in the past continue to affect us today. Analyzing the DNA extracted from victims of the Black Death in the 14th century plus those who died many decades after the plague, the team pinpointed a variant of one particular gene that seems to confer some protection and showed how it became more pervasive in those who survived the plague. Experiments with cultured cells further showed that the variant version have macrophages better able to kill the bacterium that causes the plague. Yet there is a downside as this variant is also linked to a greater susceptibility to autoimmune disorders which essentially means that the immune system has been tuned to be overactive against all kinds of threats.
• I don’t like to put too much weight on socioeconomics studies so consider this as just one data point among many. This paper studying how participation in markets affect moral behavior uses data from experiments done in some villages in Greenland. After controlling for other factors, it finds that increased market participation leads to more universalism in moral decision-making, meaning that the villagers saw themselves as part of a wider community instead of valorizing their own co-villagers above outsiders. It’s the kind of finding that is intuitive and perhaps a little too good to be true but I certainly would like it to be.
• Next is another paper that is sure to be politicized. It summarizes the current state of knowledge regarding vegan and vegetarian diets to argue that strict adherence to a purely vegan diet results in too many nutrient deficiencies. In any case, our ancestors consumed plenty of meat, eggs and seafood so our bodies are adapted to it. The paper recommends a diet of mostly unprocessed plant-based foods balanced with modest amounts of wholesome animal foods.
• Finally here is a long article from Google about using AI techniques to discover novel algorithms. It uses the example of matrix multiplication that most people who have some mathematics education should know how to do. In 1969 the German mathematician Volker Strassen showed a way to do the calculation more efficiently at least on 2 x 2 matrices yet until now no one knows how to extend this to larger matrices or if even better algorithms are possible. The article talks about Google using a system they call AlphaTensor to gamify the process of searching for better algorithms and actually succeeds in finding novel solutions though it take a far mathematician than myself to understand how to use the new algorithm. Since matrix multiplication is used in many, many fields of computing even the slightest optimization makes a huge difference. But this also raises the old fear that AI-led discoveries will soon lead us into territory that human minds will struggle to understand.

Every year I write a summary of the Nobel Prize winners in the sciences and in economics. Sometimes however the achievements in the sciences may be so esoteric that I struggle to understand what the prize is for. That isn’t the case this year are the winners are either very famous discoveries or quite straightforward to make sense of.

We start with the prize for physics for discoveries that most of us have already heard about one way or another but are so badly explained even in respectable publications. This refers to the phenomenon of quantum entanglement in which particles can be entangled with one another such that what happens to one particle can determine what happens to another no matter how far they are apart. Albert Einstein was notoriously skeptical that this could seemingly violate the speed of light limit.

Building on the ideas of John Stewart Bell to tell the difference between whether the strange entanglement effect truly exists or if there are hidden variables that determine what happens, John Clauser built a practical experiment that showed that such hidden variables probably don’t exist. A loophole remained however which was closed by the second laureate Alain Aspect by switching the measurement settings of the experiment after the entangle pair had left the source to prove that the setting could not affect the result.

Finally the third laureate Anton Zeilinger exhibited the phenomenon of quantum teleportation which involves moving the quantum state of a particle to another at a distance. This is the basis of quantum computing and quantum cryptography.

The prize for physiology or medicine goes to Svante Pääbo who essentially founded the field of paleogenomics. This is the study of the genomes of ancient, perhaps extinct, biological species. Extracting and sequencing ancient DNA has been known to just about everyone since Jurassic Park but the reality is more difficult as DNA degrades over time and samples tend to be contaminated by bacteria and contemporary organisms. So Pääbo began by studying the mitochondrial DNA of Neanderthals as they are small and thousands of copies are present in each cell.

As technology and his own techniques improves, he also sequenced the nuclear DNA of Neanderthals, allowing comparative analyses with the DNA of modern humans. He was later also able to identify a completely new species Homo denisova from DNA evidence alone. He showed that this species interbred with Homo sapiens and helped establish ancient migration patterns.

I think the research that went into the prize for chemistry is the least well known of the lot to the general public but it’s not really hard to understand either. Barry Sharpless, for whom this is the second Nobel Prize, and Morten Meldal conceived and created a mechanism to implement what is now called click chemistry. In chemistry, you often want to snap different groups of molecules together and you want a joining process that works regardless of the chemical properties of each group. These two laureates, working independently, came up with the process called the copper catalysed azide-alkyne cycloaddition that used copper ions to speed up the previously known process of using two groups of chemicals azides and alkynes to snap together like buckles and reduce unwanted byproducts.

However copper ions are toxic to living things, making this process unsuitable for purposes like making pharmaceuticals. The third laureate Carolyn Bertozzi therefore invented a new way to make the process work without copper ions. Her idea was to put the alkyne half of the buckle under strain to make it more reactive. She used it to attach fluorescent marker molecules to carbohydrate polymers on the surface of cells, allowing them to be more easily tracked as they move about the body. Her version of the process is called bioorthogonal reactions.

Finally the prize in the economic sciences goes to Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig for their studies of financial crises and the banking system’s role in them. Diamond and Dybvig showed that banks are intermediaries between savers and borrowers, which sounds simple enough but by pooling many deposits, banks are able to offer long-term loans to borrowers to support investments while also assuring depositors that they can access their funds at need. This however only works if the banks are trusted to be sound and the system is at risk of a bank run if depositors try to withdraw their money en masse.

Bernanke is of course well-known as the chairman of the Federal Reserve during the financial crises of 2007-2008 but it is his work in studying the Great Depression that was cited for the prize. He showed that the banks were not just a victim of the crisis, but when banks failed, the loss of information about borrowers contributed to prolonging the crisis. As The Economist noted, these insights seem like fairly obvious ones but I suppose the formal, academic treatment of the subject is valuable.

Still a little light on science news this month. Even I am more concerned about economic and war-related news right now.

• We’ll start with the COVID-19 news first as it’s still relevant even if we’re at the tail end of the pandemic. Pretty much everybody will have wondered why some people remain uninfected even after being exposed multiple times while others get infected only through casual contact. According to the preprint of a new study, it seems that around 1 in 10 carry a genetic mutation, called HLA B 1501, that led them to mount a more effective immune response against COVID-19 using T cells generated from common colds. They still get infected but they are usually asymptomatic as their immune system fights it off so quickly. Note that this study still needs to be peer reviewed however and no doubt it will receive plenty of attention.
• Next is a study that has major implications on our understanding of how air pollution leads to cancer. The conventional view was that many of the carcinogenic substances that constitute the polluting particles in air directly damaged cells, leading to cancer. The team found however that many such substances don’t seem to directly damage cells at all. Instead, their presence activates an alarm signal in the lungs and when already damaged cells receive that signal, they may become cancerous. This raises the potential of taking drugs that block this alarm signal for people who live in particularly polluted areas to prevent damaged lung cells from actually becoming cancerous.
• Finally a more speculative paper examining what causes some sub-regions of countries to want to secede. They determine this by applying a large dataset of 173 countries into a model of the political economy, which is always a little subjective but perhaps better than nothing. The upshot is that regions mainly want to secede not because of economic reasons but because the people of the region hold to an identity different from that of the wider country.

Finally here’s the video of NASA’s DART mission to attempt to redirect an asteroid by crashing a spacecraft into it just because it’s so cool. It’s just a test and so far there’s no word yet on how much they have managed to alter the asteroid’s trajectory with such a small spacecraft but it is undoubtedly cool and the stuff of science-fiction turned reality.

A little light on science news this month and we’re all preoccupied by political events here in Malaysia but also in the US and elsewhere.

• This isn’t really a new scientific discovery but it earns its place here due to sheer coolness factor. It’s NASA interpreting the data coming from the Perseus black hole as sound audible to the human hearing range. As the team explains, while space is mostly vacuum and therefore cannot transmit sound, the clouds of gas around the supermassive black hole is dense enough that sound can propagate there. The sound is far too low in frequency to be audible to human ears and so must be processed and of course the data that we get comes from the x-rays it emits.
• Next we have a paper by a team from China about genetic engineering rice to boost yield and reduce growth duration. This particular effort overexpressed a particular gene that they identified by its responsiveness to low light and low nitrogen. The plant that resulted seemed to be able to use nitrogen more efficiently and therefore grew faster. This is only one of many genetic engineering projects on crops but I wanted to highlight this as it is a project from China and if commercially distributed, would result in being able to produce the same amount of rice by using much less land and using less nitrogen fertilizer.
• Then we have a huge study that serves as an update on an earlier one that made quite an impact when it was released back in 2000. It was about the erosion of social interaction between Americans who are mostly strangers to one another, calling this social capital. The new study mines Facebook for data, mapping the connections between millions of users. The findings seem to broadly agree with the previous study and found that the deterioration of ties across social classes makes it more difficult for those born in poorer families to improve their station in life.
• Finally this just made the cut by appearing within the last few days of the month and I’m not sure what to make of it. It’s an announcement by a team from China that they have successfully created the world’s first mammal with fully reprogrammed genes. What this means is that they took the chromosomes of a mouse, broke them apart, stitched them back together and used it to birth live animals. To get the mice to survive, they had to shorten the chromosomes and use few numbers of them but it’s unknown how else the new mice have been changed. It seems mostly like an effort to develop and prove expertise in the application of genetic engineering techniques than anything else, but I’ll have to wait to see reactions from the rest of the scientific community to learn more.

Mostly articles about biology this month, except for the big release of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Note that one bit of news that has been circulating this month talks about how plankton levels in the Atlantic Ocean has dropped precipitously. I was going to include it but there has been pushback about how that paper wasn’t peer reviewed and in any case covers only one part of the ocean and not the whole ocean, so I dropped it. No doubt those claims will be examined more closely and will make the news again if it proves to be true.

• The James Webb Space Telescope images are just that images and it will be some time before new scientific discoveries will come from it. Still they are of such high quality that they are exciting to look at and the first glimpse of the farthest away galaxies 13 billion light years away is quite something. You may wish to read up on the telescope’s potential and how much effort, including over-engineering, was made into ensuring that the launch went perfectly and that this very expensive investment would not be a failure.
• I first wrote about a possible link between gum problems and Alzheimer’s disease three years ago and now another new study appears to offer more confirmation. This one actually covers a different type of oral bacteria than previous studies and is based on animal experiments only. Yet it does show that the bacteria causes an inflammatory response that subsequently leads to the symptoms of brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s getting worse.
• This news came pretty late in the month but it’s too important to ignore and is also about Alzheimer’s disease. The claim is that a key study from 2006 about the main cause of the disease being sticky plaques in the brain formed by amyloid beta protein may be fraudulent as it used doctored images of the brain including such simple tricks like copying and pasting the same images. Given that the original basis was the foundation of a lot of research devoted to this approach of treating the disease, this revelation is a fairly big scandal in the scientific community and is still playing out.
• Next here’s a study that follows up on previous findings that music seems to sooth pain. The new study involved playing different sounds and music to mice while testing their response to pain from an injection on their paws. They found that the type of sound or music doesn’t matter, even white noise works, but the key is that the volume of the sound is at a constantly level just above background noise. This successfully made the mice appear to feel less pain and they were even able to confirm the phenomenon by looking at the mice’s auditory cortex.
• Finally here’s a really cool article on how dolphins identify themselves to others of their kind through names, effectively whistling a melody specific to themselves. It goes into how different types of whistling are used in different habitats and population sizes of dolphins and how some may use a whistle copied from their mothers but altered to be unique to themselves. Some groups even have group whistles that identify the group as a whole while still retaining enough uniqueness to refer to specific individuals in the group.

Quite a wealth of important science-related announcements this month though as usual I fear many will pass unnoticed as the world grapples with multiple ongoing crises.

• The announcement that received the most attention in the mainstream news this month is probably this one, described as a miracle cancer cure with a 100% success rate. I’m linking the original paper here for those interested. The sample size is small though I understand it has since been expanded and it is specifically about rectal cancer. The drug used is dostarlimab which is used to treat cancers due to mismatch repair deficiency (MMR). Effectively this means that the mechanism for repairing mistakes when copying DNA is broken, leading to many mutations. Since many more cancers than just rectal cancer is thought to be caused by MMR, this is understandably an exciting development but of course it isn’t a universal cancer cure.
• Next is a paper on an important development in quantum mechanics but I’m not qualified to make any judgments about it. As I understand the team is announcing their success in transmitting for the first time quantum information over a network instead of just between two directly connected nodes. The paper describes in detail the physical processes this involves. This is important for actually using entangled qubits for communications but as always the value here is in encryption and it doesn’t mean that faster than light communications is possible.
• Going back to the subject of cancers, here’s an article on a new finding that seems rather scary. Examining tumors from breast cancers, the researchers found that metastasis, when the tumors release cancerous cells into the blood stream is much more active at night. Moving on to doing tests on mice, they found that tumor cells extracted at night and injected into healthy mice leads to metastasis but those extracted during the day do not. In a way this isn’t too surprising since we know the immune system operates differently depending on whether it is day or night but I do find it surprising that no one noticed this phenomenon before this.
• Moving on to lighter subjects, here is a paper claiming that chickens were first domesticated in, of all places, Thailand. Their finding is based on a comprehensive analysis of many types of data from more than 600 sites in 89 countries. The earliest site known with unambiguous evidence is at the Ban Non Wat site in central Thailand, dated to between 1650 to 1250 BCE. They further suggest that the spread of rice and millet cultivated helped attract red junglefowl to live alongside humans.
• Also in agriculture, here’s a somewhat belated announcement that humanity has actually passed peak agricultural land, that is the amount of land that has been cleared for human agricultural activities. There is a lot of variance in the data but everyone seems to agree on this conclusion. Yet at the same time, our food production continues to increase, meaning that we’re improving yields and working the land more intensively as our knowledge and technology improves. This is good news of course but the caveat is that this conclusion applies on a global scale so in many countries around the world, land is still being cleared for agricultural use, destroying local ecosystems.
• Finally I don’t post a lot economics papers, but this one is important enough that it should be more widely known about. Efficient markets mean that anomalies in the pricing of risk versus reward should eventually be arbitrated away. However one anomaly has persisted for a while now and no one understands why. This refers to the phenomenon when certain risky assets held overnight when markets are closed seems to yield a higher return compared to holding them over the course of the trading day. Market participants, except perhaps retail investors, are aware of the effect and exploit it, so the question is why does it still exist? The very existence of this effect represents a substantial challenge to the efficient market hypothesis that economists must address.