Due to being away, I’ve had fairly minimal Internet access over the past month. As such, I’d expected to come across fewer science-related news articles. Strangely, this didn’t turn out to be the case as there have been more than enough news to satisfy my curiosity.

• The biggest science news this month is obviously the confirmation that scientists have successfully detected gravity waves for the first time. There are many articles about this but I’ve picked this one from one of my favorite science-related websites, Ask a Mathematician, for how comprehensive it is. As this site points out, the interesting part about this isn’t the actual confirmation. Our indirect evidence of the existence of gravity waves was already so strong that direct detection doesn’t really add much to our picture of the universe. Rather, what’s interesting is the astounding technical precision needed for this achievement due to how tiny the effect is. Of course, it helped in this case that the phenomenon that caused these gravity waves were immense: the merging of two black holes about 1.3 billion light years away. The ripples in spacetime caused by this merger even results in a signal that is within the hearing range of human ears and you can listen to it for yourself here.
• Due to my family history with the disease, I always pay special attention to research about schizophrenia. That it has a genetic component has always been obvious but so many genes seem to play some part in it that it has always been difficult to pin down exactly what causes it. This article from The Economist highlights a claim that it has something to do with a particular gene known as C4. This gene produces a protein that has a role in the brain’s synaptic pruning, a process in which unnecessary neural connections are eliminated from childhood to early adulthood. Early adulthood is of course when the symptoms of schizophrenia are most commonly identified in patients and it’s easy to imagine that the delusions often experienced by patients may have something to do with having too many synaptic connections. While schizophrenia can currently be controlled using medications, it can’t be cured because researchers have little idea of what causes it. This development however suggests that a pathway to a more permanent cure might one day exist.
• Staying on the subject of medical science and especially mental health, here’s an interesting new paper that will no doubt delight my wife. Drawing data from a wide-ranging survey on the cardiovascular risk factors and cognitive functioning of a sample of 968 adults, it found a positive correlation between the consumption of chocolate and cognitive functions. There’s no suggestion of what the mechanics of the effect may be, just a hint that regular consumption of chocolate seems to be good for the brain and may protect against normal age-related cognitive decline.
• Finally here’s a cool article on how police in the Netherlands have developed methods to take down trespassing drones. As everyone knows, they’re ubiquitous now and pose a real security threat but there’s currently no consensus on how best to safely take down drones that are flying where they’re not supposed to be. This article describes how Dutch police have trained eagles to chase down and physically grab drones out of the air.