Another month, another one of these posts. Somewhat embarrassingly, two of these are from The Economist, the only publication I have a regular subscription to.

• The most important finding of the month, though it can hardly be called news, is just how hot the month of February 2016 had been. This article from The Guardian talks about how NASA data shows that the average global surface temperature for the month was 1.35C warmer than the average for 1951 to 1980. The result was shocking enough that some scientists have wondered whether or not average temperatures might have already broken past the maximum limit of a 2C increase that is generally agreed to be catastrophic. If it hasn’t breached the limit yet, my opinion is that it’s probably inevitable at this point.
• The next article is probably an exercise in self-indulgence for myself. It’s from The Washington Post and covers how happiness is correlated with a variety of factors. There are some unsurprising results, for example that people who live in very high density areas report less happiness, but the newsworthy bit is that people with higher intelligence report a negative correlation between happiness and frequency of social interaction. In other words, most people report that social contact increases their happiness, but people with higher intelligence scores report that more social contact instead makes them unhappy.
• Moving onto health-related discoveries, we’ll start with this article from The Economist that discusses the link between exercise and cancer. The research takes quite a few twists and turns and I won’t go into that but the upshot is that physical exertion seems to be associated with an increase in the levels of the hormone epinephrine and the molecule interleukin-6, both of which help the immune system to target tumor cells. In fact, they found that by directly exposing mice to these two substances, the mice developed resistance to cancer just as if they exercised.
• Mice are also the test subjects in this next article which is intriguingly about the retrieval of lost memories. The experiment involved using a virus to introduce a light sensitive protein into the brains of mice engineered to develop Alzheimer’s disease. Normal ice are able to remember areas where they receive an electric shock but mice with the disease do not. But such mice do seem to remember once blue light is used to stimulate a part of their brains called the dentate gyrus after they have been treated with the protein. This suggests that perhaps Alzheimer’s disease does not remove memories but instead damages the ability of the brain to retrieve them, meaning that a technique may one day be developed to repair the memory retrieval mechanism.
• Finally on a lighter note here’s a Bloomberg article weighing in on the issue of whether or not having a habit of regularly consuming alcohol is good for your health. The conventional wisdom in this regard is that moderate consumption of alcohol seems to do some good but this analysis of 87 studies done on the subject concludes that no significant health benefits can be found for even moderate drinkers compared to lifetime abstainers.