Just a small scattering of science related news for the last month of 2015, and most of them are medical:

• I’ve probably written more about CRISPR-Cas9 more than any other science subject over the past year. It’s just that promising, scarily so even, but the major problem encountered so far is that it doesn’t seem to be very precise. This article talks about how a team modified it by changing just three of the around 1,400 amino acids that makes up the enzyme. This tiny change apparently reduced “off-target” edits to genome sequences to undetectable levels. I find this hard to believe but if true, this would probably kick off an explosion in the usage of this gene-editing method.
• Next up is this announcement of a discovery that may spell an end to pain for humans. Through a combination of blocking the sodium ion channel that helps generate electrical signals that travel through pain-related nerve cells and a very low dose of an opioid drug, a team of researchers managed to eliminate pain in mice. Interestingly, in human subjects they’ve managed to do the reverse: make people who have never before experienced pain due to a genetic mutation feel the unpleasant sensation. This may seem like insignificant news for some people but having seen terminal illness in a couple of my relatives, perfect pain management is a huge deal to me.
• Still on the subject of medical science, this cool new paper quantifies how important it is to follow your doctor’s advice exactly. Most people are probably rather lax about adhering to their doctor’s instructions about the dosage of medicines. The paper found that less than half of patients consumed the prescribed amount of medicines but those that did so lived 2.5 years longer than those who took less than 70% of the prescribed amount and 3.2 years longer than those took more than 130% of the prescribed amount. Yes, it means that overdosing is more dangerous than under-dosing.
• The Flynn Effect is the well known phenomenon in which the average intelligence of humans seems to be increasing over time but the causes for it are a matter of some dispute. This blog post highlights new research that correlates the effect with the size of humans similarly increasingly over time. There’s some discussion that better nutrition resulted in larger brain masses and hence improved intelligence.
• Finally just for your reading pleasure, here’s a very long article about the real reasons for the failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940. Ever since then its collapse has been the go-to example of the catastrophic effects of forced resonance and popularized the idea that any object can be destroyed if it is induced to resonate at its natural frequency. This article seeks to debunk that explanation once and for all and advances a much simpler reason: that the wind hitting the side of the bridge caused it to sway. It goes into plenty of detail about the design of the bridge and why so many people latched onto resonance as the explanation.