Another good mix of articles for this month, and for the first time, one is a video instead of an article.

• Two of these articles about antibiotics and one of them is from a home-grown source. This article discusses how a Malaysian PhD student in Australia is a key contributor to the development of a nano-engineered protein molecule that is meant to rip apart bacteria. The molecule is made of peptide polymers is supposed to be able to destroy the cell walls of bacteria without harming healthy tissue, which would make it a valuable tool against antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
• This video from Harvard Medical School nicely lets you visualize exactly how quickly bacteria can evolve resistance to antibiotics. Even after they up the dosage of the antibiotics to insane levels, the bacteria still manages to find a way to thrive.

• Next up is a study that tries to estimate the health effects of the annual haze in Southeast Asia caused by fires in Indonesia. The study covers only the health effects on adults and limits itself to damage caused fine particulate matter, widely known as PM2.5. Even so its averaged result is there will be approximately a hundred thousand premature deaths due to these fires, of which around ninety percent will be in Indonesia itself. Studies like this are based on statistical analysis of models so they’re always dicey. But they’re still useful as a starting point to quantify the effects and therefore the economic damage caused by the fires, giving governments better ammunition to counter the positive economic effects of allowing these land clearing fires in the first place.
• Finally, because I can never get enough of cool findings about dog cognition, here is an article that talks about how dogs can capable of understanding both vocabulary and intonation in human speech. The researchers used an fMRI to observe the brains of dogs as they listened to human speech and they found that similar areas of their brains light up as in humans, showing that they are capable of recognizing individual words. They are also similar to humans that a separate part of their brains process the intonation of the speech, allowing them to gain an understanding that encompasses both the meaning of the spoken words and the intonation with which they were spoken.