A relative paucity of science news this month including one excitable announcement that turned out to be much ado over nothing much.

• We start with something from the business world, an article about finding empirical evidence of the Peter’s Principle: people are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. This particular study examined salespersons who were promoted to managerial positions. They found that outstanding salespersons were indeed much more likely to be promoted to become managers and yet their pre-promotion sales performance is negatively correlated with how much value they contribute as a manager. By contrast, employees with more experience in teamwork make better managers but are less likely to be promoted.
• Next is a paper that revisits the claim made in 2001 that helped make Steven Levitt famous. The original claim was that the legalization of abortion contributed to crime rates dropping in the 1990s. However the paper also predicted the effect would be even greater roughly twenty years in the future. Now in 2019, this new paper finds that indeed the prediction held true. No doubt there will be plenty of detractors and rebuttals but it’s cool that it held up as well as it seems to have.
• The announcement that was briefly exciting is a claim by someone that he had managed to decrypt the famous Voynich manuscript, a famous document from the 15th century handwritten in an indecipherable alphabet and featuring weird drawings and symbols. But as this article such claims are a veritable cottage industry and this newest attempt doesn’t pass the muster of peer review. The university that made the widely circulated press release has since retracted it.
• Finally on a light note, here’s a study that found a correlation between incidences of having pimples in middle and high school and subsequent academic and labor market outcomes. Essentially it confirms the stereotype that nerds have pimples but do well in school and at work.