Not much of note this month. Hopefully it’ll pick up later.

• We start with a social science finding from South Africa about racial and gender biases in student evaluations of teachers. The experiment involved having students watch short video lecture using the same script and slides, varying only the race and gender of the lecturer. After having the students rate the lecturers, they found a positive bias in favor of female lecturers and a negative bias against black lecturers, with the surprising result that black students were even more biased in their assessment.
• Next is a paper building off of Jared Diamond’s famous Guns, Germs, and Steel, examining the claim that technology spread more slowly on the north-south axis compared to the west-east axis. This paper tries to track the diffusion of technologies across geographical space and time and finds that the claim is generally true.
• Still on the subject of the humanities, this intriguing article talks about the relationship between big gods, that is powerful, omniscient gods who are aware of everything that humans do, and big societies. The proposal is that big societies, large enough that everyone can’t know everyone else, need big gods to enforce order as a sort of supernatural policeman. The researchers found that big gods indeed are a consequence of big societies by first assembling and then querying a database of 400 societies, examining many variables and trying to work out when they moved on to worshipping big gods.
• Then we have another biological modification experiment out of China. It involved injecting nanoparticles that are attached to retinal photoreceptors into mice in order to give them the ability to see into the near-infrared wavelengths. The mice were able to distinguish patterns perceptible only in near-infrared which normal mammals are unable to do. Effectively this injection gave the mice a superpower.
• Finally here’s an article about a quantum physics experiment that I don’t fully understand but which implies that there is no such thing as an objective reality. This is real attempt to test what was previously only a thought experiment: the Wigner’s Friend. It involved using multiple entangled photons to create two scenarios which are mutually incompatible: in one case, an observer measures the polarization of a photon and stores the result and in the other case, an interference measurement in made to determine if the photons are in a superposition. The two truths are irreconcilable yet that is indeed what both observers see.