August has been a terrible month for my stock portfolio but a fantastic one with regards to science news. Plenty of reading up ahead:

• The coolest (or is it hottest?) bit of science news is, of course, Elon Musk’s hyperloop proposal. This is sort of like an inter-city elevated train that runs inside a tube. Air is pumped out of the tube until is almost a vacuum. The idea is that the lack of air resistance enables the capsules to travel at a top speed of some 1,200 kmph while reducing the weight of the infrastructure required. The whole thing is driven by linear electric motors and costs is supposed to be kept low by building the track above existing highways. While this is a very science-fiction scenario, my take on this is skeptical. Cost is everything and despite the suggested optimizations, the proposed looks implausibly low to me as many others have already pointed out.
• In the US, recent political trends point towards white people being critical of affirmative action being black people remain strongly supportive. But are the whites truly in favour of meritocracy? This article points out a survey that does indeed find that white Californian adults are in favour of university admissions policies that prioritize standardized test scores and high school academic achievements. But when white people are reminded that Asian Americans are disproportionately represented inside the University of California system, because Asian Americans tend to do much better at standardized academic tests than other groups, they tend turned around and favoured a reduced role for test scores instead. This suggests that white people are in favour of policies that they perceive will help their own group rather than the principle of meritocracy.
• As we all know, evolution is a continuous process that is ongoing, for us as well as all other species that we share this planet with. This article suggests that as humans have prospered and changed the environment, the animals inhabiting that environment have evolved in response. Based on the observation of increasing skull sizes, various mammals species including mice, shrews, bats etc. seem to be evolving larger brains to successfully navigate this changed environment. In particular, the brains of small mammals in cities or suburbs seem larger those of the same species in rural areas.
• This next article requires some knowledge of black hole physics. For years now, it was thought that if someone were to fall into a black hole, he would be crushed by the awesome gravitational forces involved. This is now changing. Not that the person would die of course, just that he would first be killed by the so-called “firewall” of energy at the edge of the black hole. This is a relatively new concept stemming from the understanding that having information flow out of a black hole would be incompatible with the Einsteinian idea that the event horizon is smooth. Instead it is now thought that a discontinuity in the vacuum, manifesting as a wall of energetic particles, exists just inside the boundary of the black hole exist. Please read the full article for how this idea came about and the implications it has for physics.
• As someone who has some red-green colour blindness, this piece of news has personal significance. It’s essentially a review of a pair of expensive glasses that addresses red-green colour blindness. The lenses apparently contain filters that increase sensitivity to specific colour temperatures and there are specific pairs for specific types of colour blindness. Given the caveat that it works only with very bright light (so it mostly won’t work indoors and won’t work with computer monitors), the writer of the review pretty unequivocally states that it makes a tremendous and immediately noticeable difference to how he perceives the world. He was able to discern colours he had never noticed before and the colours of the world became richer and more saturated.
• Finally, here’s an article about research into how using Facebook and other social networks tend to make its users unhappy. After having controlled for the observation that those who tend to use Facebook are just unhappy in the first place, it finds that people demonstrably becomes unhappier after each Facebook session after an extended period of tracking. The reasoning is that such use arouses envy. Since those who post to Facebook tend to do so about the best things in their lives, whether they are their best photos, best moments or best lines, such moments are exaggerated and not at all representative of such people’s everyday life, forming an unhealthy point of comparison between different lifestyles.