I’ve been swamped by the number of cool science stuff. It’s been a great month for some amazing announcements and studies.

• We start with what is really more of a wake-up call than a new finding and that’s about improvements in the CRISPR technique that I’ve talked about so often here. This comes from a team in China which claims to have tripled the efficiency of the technique and greatly reduced errors. This means it will soon be safe enough to deployed on a mass scale even though the ethical and legal debate about it is far from being resolved.
• Most people who are born with extra fingers on their hands have non-functional digits. A rare few have fully developed extra fingers with working muscles and nerves but most still have them amputated as they considered undesirable. This study examined how they work when allowed to grow and develop normally, It found that the subjects were indeed capable of more complex manipulation with their hands than normal people and that their nervous system is able to accomodate them without loss of control to any other fingers. In effect they have a kind of superpower and it has interesting consequences when it comes to adding future bionic implants that need to interface with the human nervous system.
• We all know by now how worries about the causes of autism has led to all manner of bad practices. New studies, backed by evidence, now claim that it may be caused by differences in the population of bacteria present in the gut. Experimental treatments which consist of transplanting faecal bacteria from healthy people to those diagnosed with autism have been able to alleviate symptoms and similar findings have also been made with mice that given transplanted bacteria from both normal humans and those with autism symptoms. Indeed, mice given bacteria from autistic humans began showing autistic symptoms themselves.
• Next is a fascinating study about how some chimpanzees in Guinea practise crab-fishing. It is apparently the first known instance of a non-human primate being shown to habitually catch and eat aquatic crabs. Also interesting that populations who ate crabs more, ate ants less. I always think it’s cool to learn when animals have a wider range of behaviors than we expect.
• One widely shared bit of science news this month has been a social experiment on civic honesty. The team deliberately dropped wallets containing identifying documents, some including money and some not, then waited to see how many would be returned. This was done in 40 countries and 355 cities around the world so the data is good. The unsurprising find that the return rate is highest in countries like Switzerland and the Scandinavian nations, lowest in African and Asian countries. The surprising find is that it is higher when the wallets actually contain cash.
• This is a little old by now and it’s so widely talked about that I had to share it. It’s a primer on the Baumol Effect, the name given to the phenomenon whereby prices rise inexorably in industries that don’t increase in productivity. This explanation is not new, being named after the economist William Baumol but as it’s not widely understood, this primer is timely and very digestible even to laymen. I’m not summarizing it here so read it for yourself.
• Finally for fun reading here’s a physics paper describing how lightsabers are physically possible in theory but implausible in practice due to the extreme energy densities required. The key challenge they wanted to solve was how to get light interact with itself in a vacuum. However in quantum mechanics, the vacuum is not fully empty but instead filled with virtual particles. The passage of an electromagnetic wave can polarize the quantum vacuum. allowing two lightsaber blades to interact with one another. However the energy required is immense and even the most efficient theoretically possible energy production methods would result in a ridiculously large and heavy lightsaber.