A few scattered articles this month even as the war in Ukraine rages and the world is embroiled in a food crisis. These really are extraordinarily tough times.
By far the most exciting announcement this month is the release of the very first image of Sagittarius A*, the colossal black hole at the center of the Milk Way galaxy. This isn’t a photograph of course but an image assembled from data collected by a set of 8 radio telescopes. Similarly we can’t see the black hole directly but we can perceive some of the matter that accretes around it so it looks like a bright, glowing doughnut. I’m not how much new scientific insight can be learned from this project but I’m suppose it’s enough of an achievement that it earns the public’s attention and fosters greater interest in astronomy.
Another really import finding also concerns space by way of the meteorites that fall on Earth. It’s an announcement that all five of the nucleobases that constitute DNA have now been found in meteorites. Some of the bases have been detected as far back as the 1960s but it is only recently with the refinement of new techniques to increase the sensitivity of detection methods that all of the bases have been found. It’s not definitive proof of anything but it helps lend credence to the old theory that life on Earth was originally seeded from meteorites.
Next we have an intriguing and highly speculative paper on how some insect colonies may possess cultural transmission of knowledge and engage in cognition on a social level. It’s a review of other studies rather than new research and it calls attention to findings such as how wasps able to recognize one another’s faces and memorize information about each other, how bumblebees can observe others use techniques and learn them and mate preferences of female fruit flies seem to be culturally transmitted over generations. The purpose is to underline how much we still don’t know about how cognition works in such seemingly simple animals and that far from being hardwired by evolution, so much of their behavior may be learned and transmitted from one generation to the next.
Finally a really scary article about the self-destructive behavior of octopus mothers as their eggs get close to hatching. The new finding is really about working out the specific biochemical processes that occur in these octopuses, beginning from their optic glands, to prompt the behavior. But the results that have long been known about is that they might beat themselves against rocks, tear at themselves or even eat themselves when the time of hatching draws near. It’s still exactly clear why this occurs but the best guess is that octopuses are cannibals so this kind of programmed suicide protects babies from being eaten by their own mothers once they are hatched.
The war in Ukraine continues to dominate the world’s attention and I’ve probably been spending too much time reading up on it than is healthy. I’ve still been keeping up with science news and there are a few really interesting announcements over the past month.
For pretty much everywhere in the world apart from China, the covid-19 pandemic is just about over. But even as China engages in silly security-theatre by spraying large clouds of sanitizer liquids, not enough attention is being paid to area-effect measures that actually seem to work. This paper talks about lamps that emit far-UVC light and shows that rooms that are exposed to light of this wavelength have greatly reduced viral loads over extended periods. But note that the common so-called UV light disinfection devices on the market are fake ones. Far-UVC light is certainly not visible to the human eye and far-UVC wavelengths are achieved by using krypton chloride excimer lamps that are not commonly available.
A really scary announcement this month uses light at the other end of the spectrum, infrared. A team of researchers outfitted specific neurons in the mouse brain with a heat-sensitive molecule called TRP1. They could then later stimulate these areas of the brain with infrared light to alter the behavior of the mice, tickling the dopamine neurons to make them addicted to the light and want to go where the light is for example. In other words, by carefully treating a brain in advance, the team could then later control that brain later with infrared light, which is why this finding has been hailed with the alarmist cries of being a form of mind control over infrared.
Next up is a summary of some the latest findings on Alzheimer’s disease as more and more effort is focused on it. Previously it was not thought that the brain had a system to flush out dead cells and other organic waste as the lymphatic system does not extend there. Later it was found that the cerebrospinal fluid in the brain does perform this role and this is now called the glymphatic system. This system apparently helps flush out the amyloid-beta and tau proteins that lead to Alzheimer’s and a lack of sleep earlier in life is thought to contribute the problem by depriving the brain of this power wash effect. New drugs and other treatments to boost this glymphatic clearance effect are also appearing including drugs that promote sleep and devices that aim to directly stimulate this effect.
Research on Alzheimer’s matters because as this next bit of news notes, the leading cause of death among the elderly is increasingly some form of dementia. About half of those aged 67 or more now have dementia as a cause, up from about 35% in 2004.
That’s it for the biological stuff. We go big with this announcement that the Hubble Space Telescope has recorded observing the farthest star ever seen in the universe. Now nicknamed Earendel, it is 12.9 billion years away from us, meaning the light is showing us a past that dates only a few hundred million years after the creation of the universe.
Finally this last news item has the most far reaching implications of all even if most people haven’t heard of it. It’s about how the measured mass of a sub-atomic particle known as the W boson is not what it should be according to theory. The difference, around maybe 0.1%, is small but it’s enough to prove that something in the theory is wrong. Given that this theory is the current Standard Model of physics, that is huge. At this point, it could mean anything including the existence of a previously undiscovered fifth force of nature. But it’s also possible that it could be a measurement error with this one experiment. Needless to say, this is stuff upon which great careers in physics are forged.
Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine dominates the news and deservedly so. It will also have major repercussions on the scientific world as cooperation with Russia in many fields has stopped, leading to a lot of research work being lost including projects in Ukraine and on the International Space Station. But scientific work in other countries goes on.
The scariest and most widely shared bit of news this month is surely the announcement of how easily AI technologies used to generate promising molecule candidates can be turned towards making biochemical weapons. Normally the machine learning software searches for molecule candidates that score well on whatever bioactivity they are targeting while minimizing toxicity. It was a simple matter then to invert the parameters to search for molecules with high predicted toxicity and very quickly the model came up with the already known nerve agent VX as well new molecules that aren’t known to exist yet but are predicted to be even more toxic. Of course all this is in simulation so it may not even be possible to synthesize these molecules and the researchers aren’t releasing their data to the public, but this was done using open-source software and publicly available datasets of toxicity and so should be easy to replicate.
One of my favorite science stories this month is the invention of a device to detect Parkinson’s disease early. What is fascinating is how this came to be. A retired nurse in Scotland claimed to be able to smell a distinctive odor emitted by people with the disease, beginning when her own husband developed it. This ability was confirmed when she met more patients with the disease in the support groups her husband went to. A team of researchers then built a device to detect the same organic compounds that this woman could smell in the natural oils produced by the skin of patients and found that it worked. However the woman’s nose still has significantly highly accuracy.
Next we cast our eyes to far larger objects and events in this article discussing how two supermassive black holes will collide about 10,000 years from now. They are some 9 billion years away from us of course so even if the collision is expected to cause warps in the fabric of space and time, we only detect them as ripples and the real story here is the process by which astronomers figured out what is going on.
Finally here’s an older paper published in a journal about religious studies which I usually avoid but this one is interesting enough to be worth noting. The subject is Turkey and the decades long effort to Islamize the country. They found that such metrics as mosque attendance, trust in clergy and so forth have actually declined, probably because by associating the state so closely with the religion, the failures of the state also become the failures of religion. I believe that this is an important finding in examining repressive states which attempt to use religion to legitimize their rule.
Not too much of note this month on the science front and even I have been mostly preoccupied following up on events in Ukraine. Still I’ve seen some announcements of medical advancements that sound very exciting.
The bit of news that has been shared around the most widely is the announcement of how a man with a complete spinal cord injury is able to walk again with the help of an implant. This sort of paralysis is very common in fiction so we all know that such people are unable to walk because the nerve signals sent down the signal cord are unable to reach the lower body and legs. The experimental implant bridges the damaged area with electrodes that target the dormant nerves beyond that area to amplify the signals coming from the brain. The most surprising finding is that the participants in the study were able to stand up and walk almost immediately after the surgery had healed without much training at all. Note that this is still not full recovery as they still need to be supported by a walking frame and the device must be specifically programmed to accommodate different types of movements but this really is science-fiction technology come to life.
The invention that is more likely to be of help to most people however is synthetic enamel than promises to be harder and stronger than the real thing. As you may already know, we can’t ever regrow tooth enamel that has been lost, the best we can do is remineralize the enamel that we do still have but over time this inevitably wears down. So that’s why this announcement of a synthetic version that replicates the natural version even on multiple microscopic scales is an exciting development.
Finally we end with a speculative article based on a study that I must warn uses very few participants. The claim is that by inserting electrodes into the temporal lobe of the brain, the researchers are able to determine exactly which neurons fire up during specific tasks. In doing so, they noticed that specific groups of neurons fire up when doing different mathematical operations. This is specific enough that an addition operation activates a different group of neurons than a subtraction operation, suggesting that the brain contains highly specialized circuits for specific operations. This accords well with improved understanding of how the brain works in that it is not an all purpose general computing machine but consists of many circuits, each highly specialized in different tasks but the circuity can be retrained when needed. But of course this is all highly speculative at the moment.
A lighter load of articles this month and just as well as I am very busy! Almost all of this is medical related as well especially as I have started paying more attention to potential health issues.
We may as well start with the news that everyone most likely has heard already, about a man in US being the first recipient of a heart transplant from a genetically-modified pig. The genes needed to be modified to reduce the risk of organ rejection due to the presence of foreign proteins and even after all that work this is understandably still a huge gamble. It is an incredible milestone to reach of course and even if the transplant fails in this particular instance, there will most certainly be many more attempts.
A very common ailment as one ages is arthritis caused by wear and tear of the cartilage protecting our joints. The only treatment possible right now are artificial implants or transplants of healthy cartilage from elsewhere which makes for a very scary surgery as someone I know had to go through this recently. So this announcement about success in inducing cartilage to regrow is promising. This experiment was performed on a rabbit and they stimulated the cartilage to regrow by constructing a tissue scaffold that generates a weak electrical field. This induces cells to colonize the scaffold and grow into cartilage and the scaffold itself is made of a biodegradable polymer that doesn’t have to be removed afterwards.
Next up is the discovery of a possible explanation for what actually causes multiple sclerosis. To the uninitiated, this is a horrifying condition in which your own immune system attacks your neurons but why this happens has always been unclear. By searching through extensive blood samples drawn from every serving member of the US armed forces, researchers showed that diagnosis of multiple sclerosis is preceded by infection by the Epstein-Barr virus, one of the most common viruses in humans. We still don’t know why only a small subset of those infected by this virus goes on to develop the condition but this finding may be enough to prompt more effort to develop a vaccine against the virus, which currently does not exist.
Finally here is a cool article about how astronomers watched a red supergiant star go supernova for the first time. Of course the star in question is located in the NGC 5731 galaxy about 120 million years away so this happened a long time ago and this still marks the first time that astronomers were able to observe the day before it went supernova and kept observing it when they detected unusual activity 130 days before the violent event.
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.