Here’s the October 2013 instalment of my regular feature:

•  Recently a lot of attention was paid to news about a new breakthrough towards the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. Rather than link to the more mainstream accounts of the research involved however, here is a fairly detailed explanation of what was actually discovered. The idea is that when brain cells are invaded by a virus, misfolded prion proteins build up causing a defence mechanism to kick in that dramatically reduces the production of new proteins. But in the case of prion diseases, this backfires and actually causes even more misfolded prion proteins to accumulate. The new research then covers the usage of a new molecule that inhibits this defence mechanism, called unfolded protein response. In trials involving mice, they found that by the time all of the untreated infected mice reached critical stages of disease, the treated ones were still free of symptoms. Unfortunately as this blog post points out, the mice were not monitored for longer than that because the treated mice developed prediabetic symptoms that included increased blood glucose and weight loss. Animal welfare rules in the institution required that these mice be sacrificed rather than prolong the study, so it is unknown if the drug can successfully prevent the development of prion disease for a longer period than what was observed and it is equally unclear that it is even possible to develop a viable treatment without such debilitating side effects. Personally, I find this blog post especially interesting as an example of how to look past at the hype and exaggerations in the mainstream media that initially reported and actually look at the real facts.
• Next here’s a lighter piece about the discovery of a so-called free-floating planet in space, that is a planet-sized object that is not a star and yet does not seem to orbit any star. The object which has been dubbed PSO J318.5-22 is located about 80 light years from Earth (which is probably why we were able to detect it given its cool temperature) and has a mass of six times that of Jupiter. Large for a planet, but far too small to be a star. It is the only such object found so far.
• This article talks about how a team managed to get photons to interact with each other, a feat that has not previously been achieved. Essentially they fired single photons into a cloud of extremely cold rubidium atoms. As the photons move through the cloud, it excites the rubidium atoms causing the photon itself to lose energy and slow down. The team then found that two photons that were fired into the cloud, exited the medium together as a single bound molecule, representing a new form of matter that has been theorized to exist but never before observed.