A veritable wealth of science articles this month. Once again I stay away from covid-19 topics as there is so much noise there, except for one which is only tangentially related.
An easy one off the bat. Many people harbor suspicions that students who are academically accelerated, that is promoted to a more advanced class at an earlier age, develop psychological problems. This study which took place across 35 years tracking the academic histories and mental states of such students failed to find any such evidence and concluded that their overall psychological well-being was above average.
Here is a paper positing that one of the possible causes of depression is low neural plasticity in the hippocampus, meaning that there is a loss of connectivity in the neural tissue and inability to form new connections. The paper, using data from mice, argues that ketamine acts to reset the system and restore plasticity. Before this, scientists already knew that ketamine has an anti-depressive effect but there was no mechanism to explain how it worked.
Next is a paper showing that fish can spread from isolated bodies of water by having ducks eat their eggs. As expected, the vast majority of the eggs are digested and a small number survive and are viable.
Can philosophical arguments actually change people’s minds? This seems impossible to answer but a small group of philosophers decided to organize a contest to find out. They challenged philosophers, economists and psychologists to write their best arguments that would persuade people to donate more money and then put those to the test. They found that indeed some submissions worked much better than others in getting people to donate more and the winning entry was co-written by famous moral philosopher Peter Singer. Unfortunately that entry basically amounts to an emotional appeal even though the rules explicit forbid that by vividly describing the effects of trachoma and how it can be easily treated at a very low cost.
Finally the one covid-19 related article is actually about some unintended effects of many parts of the world being under an extended lockdown. This article talks about how a quantum computing laboratory kept on producing work during the lockdown with the people involved interacting with the equipment remotely. With no one at all in the lab and no vibrations or other minute disturbances, the lab produced some of the highest quality data they had ever seen. From what I understand, this is most obvious in quantum computing as the equipment is so sensitive, but other fields have also had similar experiences when experiments are run with absolutely no one around.
Here’s another round of science news, once again staying away from the fast evolving covid-19 topics.
We start with a couple of economics papers. The first one is just a reaffirmation of an already widely held theory that societies that historically have jointly practiced irrigation tend to more collectivist even today. More controversial is the assertion that the descendants of such societies, even after they have moved away from their ancestral homelands, tend to be less innovative and to be more engaged in routine-intensive occupations.
Next we have a paper arguing that participation in the financial markets shifts people’s perspective on various issues to be effectively more right leaning. The scientists performed an experiment in which they gave money to people over time to invest in stocks and tracked their social and political attitudes. The resulting rightward shift in attitudes encompassed issues such as redistribution, economic fairness and inequality. Again, nothing very surprising, buth worth confirming.
Then we have easily the coolest bit of science news this month, the announcement that scientists have observed the so-called fifth state of matter, Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs), for the first time in space. This observation was made as a result of an experiment on board the International Space Station. What’s significant about this is that the BSEs thus made in microgravity lasts for over a second compared to the milliseconds that they can be made to last on Earth.
Finally a fun read about how Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is spiralling away far faster than previously thought. Of course rapidly is a relative thing so don’t expect Titan to break orbit anytime soon and the same phenomenon holds true for the other moons in our Solar System. Our own Moon for example moves a few centimeters away from the Earth each year. The reason for this is the interaction between the gravitational force exerted by the moons on the planets they orbit and the rotation of the planets, causing a tidal bulge that helps push the moons further away.
Not too many articles this month, especially as I’m avoiding covid-19 topics as there is way too much noise and things are moving so fast on that front.
This paper is a little old but I hadn’t seen it before so here it is. Based on US data, it examines the relationship between the temperature and the ability of students to learn, finding that hot days reduce test scores with extremely hot days being the most disruptive. As you can expect, providing air-conditioning to schools makes a big impact. Plus this is about the US so think about how much more difficult it is in poorer hot countries.
Next here’s an article about a new comprehensive review of the fossil record of the Kem Kem region in eastern Morocco which paleontologists have playfully called the most dangerous place on Earth. This is because they have discovered it to have been populated by an unusually high preponderance of large carnivores in the past, based on the region’s fossil record. Scientists have known about this for a long time so it even has a name, Stromer’s Riddle, in honor of the German scientist who in 1912 first identified the phenomenon of how it seems to have so many fossils of carnivorous dinosaurs compared to herbivorous ones.
The next article is here mainly as an example of bad science writing. The phenomenon is question is real enough. Scientists trying to find particles coming from space in Antarctica were surprised to find high-energy neutrinos instead coming from the ground. This seems impossible as the Earth itself should be blocking them. They have been hunting for a good explanation for a years now and as the more conventional ideas have panned out, are reaching for more exotic ones. The latest idea is that the particles are somehow coming from a parallel universe in which time runs opposite of ours. Naturally this lead to a lot of excited news coverage. But it remains a very implausible explanation, offered only because we have thus far found nothing else and the math checks out. It’s not impossible but we should be properly skeptical of such wild claims.
As with last month, the world’s scientists are all focusing on covid-19 producing so many papers, most of them without peer review, that it’s impossible to keep track of them all. I’ll limit myself to only one of these this month and offer some other stuff that is also happening at the same time.
The one covid-19 article is this comprehensive overview of exactly how the app-based contact tracing framework developed by Apple and Google works. The upshot is that each phone with the app installed will be constantly broadcasting an id and listening for such ids from other phones. The app will be storing the record of what it hears privately but if a user tests positive for the virus, a trusted central authority can send an order to search through the whole network to discover who has been in contact with that person on the days that are deemed infectious. Of course, this also means that each country must implement its own version of the app.
We’ve all watched Jurassic Park and so know all about ancient dinosaur DNA. But the truth is that DNA decays beginning from death, so it is extremely difficult to recover usable sequences of DNA from so long ago. This article talks about how one team has claimed to be able to recover at least degraded remnants of genes and another team has found genetic traces of microbes that lived inside dinosaurs.
I’ve covered this before but the continuing phenomenon of insect populations dropping propitiously is worrying enough to talk about it again. This article covers how virtually all surveys from around the world confirm the trend and the cause is still unknown. The implications for the stability of planet’s ecosystem is very serious indeed.
Finally, here’s one paper that is not directly connected with covid-19 but is relevant all the same. It’s about why primates seem to touch their own faces so frequently and the reason they propose that it’s due to an instinctive need to smell ourselves. As anyone who owns a dog or a cat knows, our pets do frequently smell themselves and this may be the human equivalent. Bringing our hands close to our faces lets us smell our hands, which brings information not only about our own smell but also the smell of what we have touched recently. As to why we might need to smell ourselves, well, read the paper to find out.
So obviously the whole world is facing what looks like the crisis of a lifetime and the science there is moving far too quickly for a mere blog like this to keep up with. I’ll only post a link to a single good overview of the coronavirus and stick with some other interesting science stuff still going on this month even if some of them feel a bit out of place given the current situation.
So far the best broad overview of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is this one which covers the history of coronaviruses, their anatomy and how they work as well as the most promising treatments currently in development and which mechanisms they target. Note that while everyone is most excited about vaccines, those are still at least over a year away while effective medication might be deployed in a matter of months.
We’ve all had anecdotal evidence that people who drive expensive cars are more likely to be jerks on the road, and now here’s a study confirming that hunch. This particular study used pedestrians wanting to cross a street to check to see which cars were willing to give way, concluding that the most expensive cars were the least likely to do so.
Are young people or middle-aged people most responsible for founding successful fast growing firms? Popular culture suggests the former but this study indicates that the mean age for a successful entrepreneur is 45.
As everyone knows, physical beauty matters and numerous studies have proven that attractiveness impacts lifetime earnings. This study examines college admissions and finds that there is a correlation between beauty and admission rates of white men to highly ranked colleges. However there does not seem to be a beauty premium for women, minorities of either gender or for colleges in China in general. Draw your own conclusions.
Finally, an amusing bit of news that made the rounds recently is the discovery of a tree in Sabah, Malaysia that is able to soak up nickel from the soil and accumulate it within itself. This raises the possibility of mining such trees for the metal, which is apparently done by collecting its sap every once in a while, hence why it’s now known as the metal-bleeding tree. I have doubts over how feasible this is on a commercial scale but the news itself seems real enough.
A dearth of scientific news this month as the whole world’s attention is on the new coronavirus. As the science on that is still being worked on and is in flux, I’m not posting anything on that subject. Indeed, many scientists working on other areas have chosen to work on the new virus which has caused some rumbles of discord as that means funding and grants originally intended for one purpose is being used for another purpose entirely. How that plays out will be interesting to watch.
Meanwhile let’s just go with what grabbed my attention this month.Starting with a simple one, here is one about studying the effects of sleep on the urban poor in India. It found that attempts to increase sleep quantity didn’t improve sleep quality. However offering naps in the workplace during the daytime resulted in increased productivity, cognition and psychological well being. Of course, this could well be only because it is difficult to get peace and quiet throughout the night for the urban poor in Chennai where the study took place.
Next is a study that tries to understand how anti-immigration sentiment arises from increase immigration. What makes this particular study interesting to me is that it uses data from the so-called Age of Mass Migration in the late 19th century to the early 20th century, consisting of mainly Europeans moving to the United States. That’s far enough removed from the present day and we can look upon on it with some emotional detachment and few people today now regard the descendants of those immigrants as not being Americans. The study found that immigration actually economically benefited native workers yet still aroused anti-immigrant sentiment. It found a relationship between the intensity of the rejection and the cultural distance between immigrants and natives.
The rise of AI and machine learning has led to some speculation about so-called digital socialism, the dream that computers can efficiently allocate resources in a complex economy so as to do away with the market. This paper argues that the problem with resource allocation isn’t merely due to a lack of computational capacity but that information in an economy is distributed across all players in the market and everyone has no incentive to fully disclose that information. Any computer or network of computers that purports to stand in for the market as a whole must somehow obtain all of the information that is known to all of the participants in the market and that seems pretty impossible.
Finally, just for fun here is a paper that studies the kinematics of the wok tossing techniques that is the basis of fried rice in Chinese cuisine. This involves a very high speed movement that slides the rice along the wok and then tosses it in the air. Both are necessary in order to expose the rice to temperatures of 1,200°C without burning it but is suspected of causing chronic shoulder injuries among chefs in Chinese restaurants due to the rapid movements and the weight of the wok. By working out the precise kinematics of these movements, the authors hope to help chefs improve their technique and perhaps develop robots that would be capable of replicating these actions.
Absolutely swamped by science articles including feature-length ones. Unfortunately none of them are about the coranavirus which is still too new.
Getting the really hard stuff out of the way first, here is a long and highly speculative piece about how there may some kind of deep connection between the fabric of space-time as described by quantum mechanics and the error correction codes developed for use in quantum computers. These codes are necessary for physical quantum computers to be built at all as any physical implementations of qubits are prone to be randomly flipped by an uncountable array of causes and so these errors must be caught and corrected by an algorithm. Mathematicians and physicists however have noticed that these codes are essentially identical to a particular quantum mechanical construct called an anti-de Sitter space. This is not the same as our real universe but it does raise the exciting possibility that the fabric of our own space-time can be represented by these error correction algorithms.
Next is another highly speculative article about organic robots made by stitching together stem cells of a species of African frog. They are not capable of much more than moving and pushing pellets around in a Petri dish but that is already astounding so long as they can be programmed. Still these aren’t true organisms as each of them has to be handmade by surgeons and they are not capable of reproducing nor indeed do they possess any means of replenishing the energy stores within their cells. Still once this technology has been improved, it’s obvious enough that the applications are endless.
Everyone knows that normal body temperature in humans is 37°C but this study shows that this standard was established in the 19th century and the mean recorded temperature recorded now is lower. It seems that body temperatures have been steadily dropping over time and that has important ramifications on human physiology. The reasons are unknown but they could be due to people being more subject to inflammation due to diseases or evan a byproduct of modern humans having greater body mass.
Next is a study with results that shouldn’t surprise anyone. The authors attempt to dissect what leads to people becoming atheists, what they call the origins of disbelief, and concludes that by far the most important determinant is simply being raised in an environment with few cultural cues that point towards religious belief.
Moving on to economics, what has everyone all abuzz is this paper arguing that real interest rates have been in steady decline since the 14th century, roughly the beginning of capitalism. The paper doesn’t attempt to offer explanations but it is obvious to everyone that this has important implications on the ongoing debate over inequality centered as it is today on the historical return on capital as well as the urgent issue of interest rates today entering unprecedented negative territory. The suggestion is that while everyone currently expects this to be a temporary aberration that will eventually revert to the mean, this may well be a permanent change.
This next article isn’t included for the sake of the scientific discovery itself but for the insight that will profoundly reshape all study of human behavior. As everyone knows surveillance cameras are now ubiquitous and are used primarily to fight crime. But what happens when you open access to researchers of human behavior to see what people actually do instead of what they say they do? The article notes that the well-known phenomenon of the bystander effect doesn’t actually seem to exist after observing plenty of CCTV footage of emergency situations as bystanders do seem to readily intervene. This represents a treasure trove of data that will no doubt revolutionize the study of psychology though of course the usual concerns about privacy apply.
Finally here is a long but fascinating article on how modern television shows for children are crafted. It shows how through decades of experience, producers have finely honed their understanding of exactly what works for children of various ages and deliberately target different shows for different age groups. Collaborating with child psychologists, everything from the design of the characters, the types of plots, the length of camera cuts and so on are taken into account. That’s why shows that seem like complete nonsense to adults are meant to impart specific types of knowledge to the target children that the producers know works due to extensive trial and error.