Many articles this month, ranging from genuinely exciting stuff to just cool news.

• This most significant piece of news comes late, being a claim of the first human gene-edited babies being born. As this comes from China there are plenty of skeptics but it seems sound enough. The claim is that fertilized embryos were edited to disable a gene known as CCR5 which can act as a protein pathway for HIV infection. The idea is that this can help to improve resistance to the disease. The most important bit seems to me is that the edited embryos were implanted back into the mother and successfully carried to term. The science isn’t that new but the ethical implications are more important.
• Next up is another piece of news that is also more interesting due to how it came about than the actual result. In this case, a deep learning algorithm was used to analyze images of the retina, and it found a correlation between the images and cardiovascular risk factors. In essence, it might be possible to predict such risks by looking at patients’ retinas, an association that most likely would not occur to doctors and could not have been found using means other than an AI trawling through a huge trove of data.
• Next is a depressing finding about how mobs nominate members of a group to be victims. They discovered from a simulated mobbing game that even in exchange for very modest gains, members will not only single out individuals to be victimized but will coordinate with one another to ensure that only a single person is targeted at a time as per the rules. There is no sense of pity as the group will repeatedly target the same victim if that is what the group agrees on and fear of being the next victim does not seem to dissuade the group.
• Moving on to lighter stuff, here’s a cool post speculating about how the unknown interstellar object that has entered our solar system could be a piece of a solar sail from an alien civilization. The object called Oumuamua is thought to be more than just a piece of space rock because its movement shows signs of acceleration that is not due to gravitational forces plus it has no signs of emitting a tail that would indicate a chemical reaction creating that acceleration. Since it doesn’t appear to be a comet, it may be that the acceleration is due to solar radiation, suggesting that it may be a piece of solar sail due to having the right physical properties. Of course, it’s all pure speculation but it’s fun to think about.
• Finally here’s an article about how science-fiction author Greg Egan contributed a partial solution to a mathematics puzzle. It’s an entertaining read because apart from Egan’s minor celebrity status there’s the fact that the puzzle are originally posed in 2011 as a question of the ordering of episodes of a television show. Shortly after that an anonymous poster submitted a lower bound to the solution but it was until recently that Egan offered an upper bound. The puzzle and the solution itself, part of something that Egan calls superpermutations, is of interest only to mathematicians, but I love the whole story of how this came about.