I’m massively late this month due to having to make an extended stay in Kuala Lumpur to handle some personal issues and hence having no access to my regular computer. I’m now back however, so here are the five articles for this month:

• The first article I have isn’t an announcement of a new discovery as most of my posts tend to be. Instead, it’s an exploration, published in The New Yorker, about what it is like for a person who is blind from birth to be able to see for the first time. In particular, if a blind person can differentiate shapes using touch, can he or she tend recognize the same objects upon seeing them for the first time? It turns out that it is incredibly difficult to make sense of what you see when you are doing it for the first time, so it is a skill that needs to be developed over time based on building up an internal database of “visual memories”.
• The coolest bit of news all month is easily the discovery of the largest dinosaur yet found, and hence the largest terrestrial animal known. Newly named as the “dreadnoughtus”, it is calculated to weight about 65 tons, heavier than a Boeing 737 jet. Its size was extrapolated based on fossil remains found in Argentina, as reported in this Washington Post article.
• This next article from Scientific American isn’t about a new discovery either but it is highly topical. Instead, it talks about using a tried and true method to attempt to treat victims of the current outbreak of ebola. Since new drugs for the disease are still largely unavailable, doctors are proposing to transfuse patients with the blood of survivors of the disease in the hopes that the blood already contains effective antibodies. This is in fact vaccination in its oldest form.
• The next article is for coffee lovers, including my wife. Publishes in The New York Times, it’s a cool look into how caffeine evolved in coffee plants. Some highlights include how coffee plants evolved the molecule differently from other plants that also contain coffee like cacao and how the plant uses it as a toxin to prevent other plants from germinating in the soil near it.
• Finally this article from The Guardian talks about how the nerve endings on finger tips actually process the touch sensations it receives before sending the results to the brain. It’s a finding that lends extra credence to theories that state that the mind is effectively what the entire body, or at least the nervous system distributed throughout the entire body, does as opposed to merely the brain.