Here’s another round of science news, once again staying away from the fast evolving covid-19 topics.

• We start with a couple of economics papers. The first one is just a reaffirmation of an already widely held theory that societies that historically have jointly practiced irrigation tend to more collectivist even today. More controversial is the assertion that the descendants of such societies, even after they have moved away from their ancestral homelands, tend to be less innovative and to be more engaged in routine-intensive occupations.
• Next we have a paper arguing that participation in the financial markets shifts people’s perspective on various issues to be effectively more right leaning. The scientists performed an experiment in which they gave money to people over time to invest in stocks and tracked their social and political attitudes. The resulting rightward shift in attitudes encompassed issues such as redistribution, economic fairness and inequality. Again, nothing very surprising, buth worth confirming.
• Then we have easily the coolest bit of science news this month, the announcement that scientists have observed the so-called fifth state of matter, Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs), for the first time in space. This observation was made as a result of an experiment on board the International Space Station. What’s significant about this is that the BSEs thus made in microgravity lasts for over a second compared to the milliseconds that they can be made to last on Earth.
• Finally a fun read about how Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is spiralling away far faster than previously thought. Of course rapidly is a relative thing so don’t expect Titan to break orbit anytime soon and the same phenomenon holds true for the other moons in our Solar System. Our own Moon for example moves a few centimeters away from the Earth each year. The reason for this is the interaction between the gravitational force exerted by the moons on the planets they orbit and the rotation of the planets, causing a tidal bulge that helps push the moons further away.