A dearth of scientific news this month as the whole world’s attention is on the new coronavirus. As the science on that is still being worked on and is in flux, I’m not posting anything on that subject. Indeed, many scientists working on other areas have chosen to work on the new virus which has caused some rumbles of discord as that means funding and grants originally intended for one purpose is being used for another purpose entirely. How that plays out will be interesting to watch.

• Meanwhile let’s just go with what grabbed my attention this month.Starting with a simple one, here is one about studying the effects of sleep on the urban poor in India. It found that attempts to increase sleep quantity didn’t improve sleep quality. However offering naps in the workplace during the daytime resulted in increased productivity, cognition and psychological well being. Of course, this could well be only because it is difficult to get peace and quiet throughout the night for the urban poor in Chennai where the study took place.

• Next is a study that tries to understand how anti-immigration sentiment arises from increase immigration. What makes this particular study interesting to me is that it uses data from the so-called Age of Mass Migration in the late 19th century to the early 20th century, consisting of mainly Europeans moving to the United States. That’s far enough removed from the present day and we can look upon on it with some emotional detachment and few people today now regard the descendants of those immigrants as not being Americans. The study found that immigration actually economically benefited native workers yet still aroused anti-immigrant sentiment. It found a relationship between the intensity of the rejection and the cultural distance between immigrants and natives.

• The rise of AI and machine learning has led to some speculation about so-called digital socialism, the dream that computers can efficiently allocate resources in a complex economy so as to do away with the market. This paper argues that the problem with resource allocation isn’t merely due to a lack of computational capacity but that information in an economy is distributed across all players in the market and everyone has no incentive to fully disclose that information. Any computer or network of computers that purports to stand in for the market as a whole must somehow obtain all of the information that is known to all of the participants in the market and that seems pretty impossible.

• Finally, just for fun here is a paper that studies the kinematics of the wok tossing techniques that is the basis of fried rice in Chinese cuisine. This involves a very high speed movement that slides the rice along the wok and then tosses it in the air. Both are necessary in order to expose the rice to temperatures of 1,200°C without burning it but is suspected of causing chronic shoulder injuries among chefs in Chinese restaurants due to the rapid movements and the weight of the wok. By working out the precise kinematics of these movements, the authors hope to help chefs improve their technique and perhaps develop robots that would be capable of replicating these actions.