Yep, getting this done early again to stick with the “one post every couple of days” routine I’ve established. There is quite a bit of science stuff to cover this month too.

• As usual I start with the biggest news of the month. It’s been widely reported everywhere but this one is an article on Bloomberg about the new paper. The popular conception is that it talks about how cancer is mostly caused by random mutations of stem cells, making incidences of the disease primarily a matter of luck. But as others have pointed out, this paper restricts itself to only some types of cancers while ignoring others and it does not argue that lifestyle choices and genetics have no effect on lifetime risks of developing cancers, merely that chance has a large effect.

• The next one is in the medical sciences as well and covers the development of a new kind of antibiotic as this New York Times article explains. It’s called teixobactine and it’s unusual because it was extracted from microbes that do not grow under the usual laboratory conditions. It will be a while yet before it can become commercially available but it’s great news in light of how many of the current antibiotics we use are steadily losing their effectiveness.
• We move next to computer science in which this Nature article talks about how a specific variant of poker has been essentially solved. It’s interesting because poker is a large game with imperfect information, i.e. the algorithm doesn’t know what cards opponents holds and what future card draws will be. It also incorporates bluffing into its strategy, resulting in a program that is said to play this specific version of poker as perfectly as possible.
• Last month I had a link talking about how much attention car engineers pay to the sound of car doors closing. This month, here is a Washington Post article talking about how, unsurprisingly, car engine sounds also matter a great deal. This even extends to creating digital sound files of what the engines should sound like and playing it at the appropriate times when the engine is revved. Apparently recent moves towards fuel efficiency have resulted in modern engines becoming much quieter than in the past, and in the case of electric cars completely silent, so the car makers find it necessary to artificially recreate the aural experience that buyers expect to persuade them that they are buying cars with powerful engines.
• Next is the article that is most interesting to me due to Gamergate and how important sexism is as a topic of discussion on Broken Forum. It’s an article from The Economist covering a new paper that claims that low female enrollment rates in some academic subjects may be due to the prejudice of the existing professors in those fields. From surveys, they found that the more professors believe that students in their field need some innate talent beyond hard work and intelligence, the lower enrollment rates are for women who are stereotyped to lack such talent. They also claim that the finding also extends to black students are are similarly under-represented in many fields of study.
• Finally, here is a feature length article from The Verge about how sophisticated spying malware has become. Focusing on a product called FinFisher, it discusses how the government of Bahrain uses it to spy on and discredit activists, going to the extent of taking over their social network accounts and posing as them even after they had fled to the United Kingdom.