I’d thought it would be a quiet month on the science front due to the Nobel Prize announcements but there’s a decent mix of stuff.

• Probably the bit of news that has been most talked about this month in academic circles is the attempt to replicate the famous Sokal hoax. Three people collaborated on a year-long project to write 21 bogus papers and submitted them for publication. Seven of these were accepted. The papers were deliberately outlandish, such as one about dog on dog sexual assault, and the idea is to mock the preposterousness of some fields of humanities. Yet as this article that I chose to highlight lays out, the joke seems more on the three than the field in general and their political motivations are obvious, such that this needn’t be taken seriously at all.
• To balance out the above, next is a respectable paper on gender studies with a result that I find legitimate but may annoy some feminists. Based on survey data, the authors find that contrary to some predictions, the more that women have equal opportunities, the more skewed their participation in different occupations may be because they have more freedom to enter fields that they prefer. The data showed that the more developed the country, the more women expressed different preferences from men in their willingness to perform different jobs.
• Staying on the topic of gender but in a different way, how could I avoid covering the news about baby mice being born to two female parents. The team used the CRISPR technique to ensure that the full set of genes that comes from a female mouse are switched on and injected the edited stem cells into the egg of a second female mouse to form an embryo. The resulting animals were born healthy and were even able to have babies of their own in the normal way. Of course, this is an artificial, invasive technique so it’s not as if males are completely obsolete just yet.
• The next paper we cover has a pretty obscure title: voluntary arousing negative experiences (VANE) but its subtitle says it all: it purports to explain why people like to be scared. The researchers surveyed visitors to a “haunted” attraction and measured their EEG reactivity to cognitive and emotional tasks. They found that going through the scary experience improved the mood of the participants, especially if they were feeling tired, bored or stressed beforehand, and could help them cope with stress afterwards.
• Finally, here’s a longer read, a retrospective of the Spanish flu pandemic that the article argues was the worst catastrophe of the 20th century, killing at least 50 million people and perhaps as many as 100 million. Yet it is almost forgotten today except by historians and health experts. The article covers its history and notes that the virus could not have evolved as it did without the trench warfare conditions of the First World War that, due to so many young men forced to live so close together in unsanitary, dangerous conditions, made it the perfect incubation environment to create a uniquely virulent form of the flu.