A veritable wealth of science articles this month. Once again I stay away from covid-19 topics as there is so much noise there, except for one which is only tangentially related.

• An easy one off the bat. Many people harbor suspicions that students who are academically accelerated, that is promoted to a more advanced class at an earlier age, develop psychological problems. This study which took place across 35 years tracking the academic histories and mental states of such students failed to find any such evidence and concluded that their overall psychological well-being was above average.
• Here is a paper positing that one of the possible causes of depression is low neural plasticity in the hippocampus, meaning that there is a loss of connectivity in the neural tissue and inability to form new connections. The paper, using data from mice, argues that ketamine acts to reset the system and restore plasticity. Before this, scientists already knew that ketamine has an anti-depressive effect but there was no mechanism to explain how it worked.
• Next is a paper showing that fish can spread from isolated bodies of water by having ducks eat their eggs. As expected, the vast majority of the eggs are digested and a small number survive and are viable.
• Can philosophical arguments actually change people’s minds? This seems impossible to answer but a small group of philosophers decided to organize a contest to find out. They challenged philosophers, economists and psychologists to write their best arguments that would persuade people to donate more money and then put those to the test. They found that indeed some submissions worked much better than others in getting people to donate more and the winning entry was co-written by famous moral philosopher Peter Singer. Unfortunately that entry basically amounts to an emotional appeal even though the rules explicit forbid that by vividly describing the effects of trachoma and how it can be easily treated at a very low cost.
• Finally the one covid-19 related article is actually about some unintended effects of many parts of the world being under an extended lockdown. This article talks about how a quantum computing laboratory kept on producing work during the lockdown with the people involved interacting with the equipment remotely. With no one at all in the lab and no vibrations or other minute disturbances, the lab produced some of the highest quality data they had ever seen. From what I understand, this is most obvious in quantum computing as the equipment is so sensitive, but other fields have also had similar experiences when experiments are run with absolutely no one around.