More cool stuff this month after a slow February. Pretty all of it is biology though.

• Possibly the coolest bit of news I’ve read this month is this one about the massive scale of China’s experiments in agriculture though it isn’t about any novel discoveries. The individual innovations are seemingly minor ones like determining how densely rice should be packed and they apply only to smallholders, but the sheer scale of the experiments involving up to 21 million farmers means that an incredible wealth of scientific data and massive gains. Of course, this was possible only due to China’s command and control bureaucracy and isn’t something that other countries can easily replicate.
• Also in agriculture is this article about how herbicides can indeed change both the taste and the nutritional content of crops. This sounds like bad news but it appears that they caused the kernels of sweetcorn being studied to store more protein and minerals. Of course we still need to be wary of them affecting crops in adverse ways but it’s intriguing to think that the nutritional profile of crops can be shaped in this manner.
• Next there’s this paper studying how genetics and the environment affect human lifespans. Delving into records of birth dates, death dates and crowdsourced data from very large family trees, the researchers wanted to know if closely related people have similar lifespans. They found however that heredity only explained about 16% of the differences in lifespans meaning that the environment might have more influence than genes on how long a person lives.
• In space news, this article talks about NASA’s twin astronauts Scott Kelly and Mark Kelly. NASA deliberately had Scott spend 340 days in space aboard the International Space Station while Mark remained on Earth  in order to observe how the extended stay in space would change an astronaut’s body. Some changes like increased height and decreased mass soon reverted after Scott’s return to Earth, genes that were activated during the trip stayed changed, meaning that Scott is no longer genetically identical to his twin brother. They apparently affect his immune system, bone formation, eyesight, other processes and it isn’t yet known what the long term consequences are.
• Finally, to end with a bit of lighthearted fluff, here’s an article about how dogs seem to be more responsive to so-called dog baby talk. This is the simple, dog-directed speech that dog owners instinctively know and is similar to baby talk. The study found that dogs do pay more attention when you talk to them in this manner and this helps strengthen their bond with their owners.