A slower month and more emphasis on the softer sciences this time around:

• The one research paper that has gotten the most attention over the past month is the one that shows a startling increase in mortality rates among middle-aged white Americans. Certainly one factor in its fame is that one of its co-authors Angus Deaton won the Nobel Prize in economics this year. But the main factor must be the sheer surprise of its findings, exacerbated by the fact that this spike in deaths isn’t mirrored in the statistics of other high-income countries. Obviously any explanation of this anomaly will be politically charged. Personally I like this article on Vox which discusses some theories with the gist being that a certain group of white Americans can no longer look forward to the kind of prosperity and social status that they’d been led to expect and this despondency has led to a marked increase in substance abuse.
• In more hopeful news, here’s a bit about how gene editing may have been used to save a person’s life for the first time. The patient is a one-year-old girl suffering from leukemia and conventional chemotherapy had already failed. The doctors therefore pioneered a new technique using T-cells from a donor to attack the cancerous cells. However since the patient’s own immune system would ordinarily also attack the foreign T-cells, these cells had to be edited first to remove the markers that would make them targets. This isn’t quite bespoke medicine yet as it’s a pretty general technique but it’s a clear example of the way forward.
• I confess that I included this next article because of its extremely disturbing title. It covers an experiment in which scientists have been able to induce a species of flatworm to grow the heads and brains of another species of flatworm only by manipulating the electrical synapses within their bodies. In particular as they did not touch the worms’ genome at all, it makes for a fascinating demonstration of how much morphology can be manipulated through means other than genetic engineering.
• Finally here’s a longer-form piece on multi-model sensory experiences. In particular, it focuses on the work of Charles Spence who discovered among other things that the noise made by a Pringles chip when you bite into it affects your perception of how fresh it is, how the color of a cup influences the intensity of the taste of coffee and how merely listening to different types of music alters the perceived taste of an alcoholic beverage. Naturally this has hugely influenced the design of the packaging for many products. This seems especially pertinent after learning about the McGurk effect in the Philosophy and the Sciences course recently.