Not much of note this month. We’ll start with the exciting space news and no, it’s not the one about the tourist going for Elon Musk’s moonshot.

• Instead, it’s the strangely under-reported announcement by JAXA, Japan’s Space Agency that two rovers launched by its Hayabusa2 spacecraft have successfully landed on an asteroid named Ryugu. The rovers themselves are only 18 cm in diameter each and Ryugu is a rock with a diameter of about 1 km Yet the interception took place about 300 million km away from Earth and to do so Hayabusa2 made a circuitous journey of over 3,200 million km over four years, making this an incredible achievement in precision and control.
• As always, drawing general conclusions about life outcomes from data should always be seen with a skeptical eye but this study about predicting income is sure made for the headlines. Crunching through a trove of data that covers nearly three thousand participants, it purports to show that delay discounting predicts income better than other factors such as age, ethnicity or height. This refers to the ability to delay immediate gratification in exchange for a bigger future reward. The result is as expected but I notice that this ability in the present and not when the participants were children so I’m not sure if it means that much.
• The last article is a very speculative one about a new take on the well known Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. Instead of a cat, this scenario uses two physicists, each of whom performs an experiment on a friend that they keep in a box. One friend in a box can toss a coin and send a message to the other friend in a box who can then guess the result of the toss. Each experimenter can then open each box to conclude which side the coin landed on and yet in some circumstances the results will be inconsistent, meaning that the model is wrong or reality itself is somehow inconsistent. Apparently the physics community is still divided over what to make of this experiment though it is currently impossible to actually carry it out.