Last month was incredible in terms of new discoveries. This month less so. Instead we have mostly feature articles rather than new findings.

• First we have this cool little paper that talks about how most of the text in international treaties are actually copy-pasted from previous treaties and agreements. Textual analysis of preferential trade agreements indicate up to 95% of the text is copy-pasted. That isn’t truly surprising and it makes sense since they would want consistency across many types of documents. But I like how it gives us a little window into the kind of work that trade negotiators actually do.
• One exciting announcement we do have is this one about how scientists in China have edited the DNA of a germ that enables it to harvest free electrons as an energy source. I consider this super speculative and not really credible, especially when it’s published by such grandiose claims as potentially opening the door to granting humans superpowers as various cells are supercharged. Nonetheless it’s not completely implausible and the germ in question that has been engineered is the lowly E coli. I am however not very sure what “70% improved performance” in E coli translates to physically.
• Colors, that is pigments and paints of specific physical colors, are such a simple thing that we often don’t appreciate the difficulty that creating them involve. This article talks about how hard it is to create bright, vivid reds that don’t involve toxic metals or require harvesting them from an animal. This search led a team to experiment with crystals and semiconductors to find suitable materials from which to make the desired shade of color. I found it to be a look into an interesting corner of industrial science that most people take for granted.
• Finally for gamers, here’s a detailed and refreshingly honest post-mortem by a scientist with a PhD in experimental psychology who was hired to advise on the design of the videogame Halo 2. Specifically he advised that players should be given the maximum amount of control when it came to multiplayer options and he based it on feedback that he received from players themselves. As he now admits, he was wrong as the success of the actual design that was implemented in which a matchmaking algorithm automatically assigns players to game sessions has proven to be so successful that it is now the industry standard. The problem was that the opinions of the players at the time were wrong as they had never experienced automatic matchmaking and so said that they hated it. Once they did try it, it turned out that they liked it.