It’s been a particularly rich month for science with some really cool articles. Here goes:

• Due to my own interest in computer science, I couldn’t not include this. This Popular Mechanics article explains how a computer program created a model of the inner workings of a flatworm. The scientists were interested in how the worm’s genes regulate the organism’s impressive regenerative ability. The program essentially took a brute force approach to the problem, randomly making guesses and matching the results to the available data and refining its guesses until it ended up with a model that is a perfect match. This is the kind of work that would take human researches ages to do manually even if humans can explore the search space more intelligently and it’s likely that we’re going to see more and more of this kind of science.
• It’s been said again and again that science is a work in progress and we’re constantly revising what we know. But one of the areas that everyone has long thought is settled science are the structures of the human body. It turns out we were wrong when we thought we’d thoroughly mapped every part of the body because scientists have discovered a lymphatic network that links the brain and the immune system as this Neuroscience News article explains. Needless to say this is a huge bit of news that has implications for every brain disease in existence and all of the medical textbooks will need to be revised.
• Staying on the subject of the brain, this article from Hacked talks about how a team has managed to build what is in effect an artificial neuron. They claim that it is made of organic bioelectronics with no living parts but is capable of mimicking the function of a normal organic neuron in every way. Since the device is currently the size of a fingertip, it’s not going to be implantable into a real brain any time soon but you can bet that miniaturization is on the cards.
• Finally here is yet another paper on the favorite thought experiment of quantum physicists, Schrödinger’s cat. This article from Nature covers a new, purely theoretical finding that quantum superpositions would collapse in the presence of gravity. As such the classical setup of the cat would only work in deep, interstellar space far from any planet.