Our usual monthly feature cannot help but include one of the most hyped up announcements in years. Unfortunately I think they hyped it up too much especially with all of the intrigue behind a press embargo and when the official announcement came out, it didn’t actually make much of a splash with the general public.

• This refers of course to the detection of phosphine gas in the atmosphere of Venus. This matters because phosphorus in gas form would be highly reactive and would be expected to exist primarily in oxidized forms. This means that some process on the planet must be continuously producing the gas and yet there are no known production routes that do not involve biological processes. So the upshot is that this is being as a very tentative sign of life on the planet. Still, it’s so speculative that it’s no wonder the general public isn’t very excited and there’s still a decent chance that the gas is produced by some abiotic process that is as yet unknown to us.
• Our next article is also in the realm of astrophysics and again, it’s more about the excitement of a huge event than any new science being discovered. This is the detection of a merger between two massive black holes some seven billion years ago using laser interferometer instruments to listen to vibrations in space-time. It’s somewhat interesting to get evidence that such intermediate black holes massing between 65 and 120 solar masses can exist and that fuels the theory that black holes can become bigger by merging with one another. But it’s probably more exciting to think that we can, today, observe an event that occurred so far back in the past.
• Moving on the biological sciences, here is a paper studying how mothers who rear their own offspring can confer lasting advantages. To me, it is especially convincing in that the subject of the study are actually Rhesus monkeys which I am guessing would result in cleaner, less controversial data. The result is that monkeys who are reared by their own mothers exclusively compared to those who are reared by humans for the first 40 days of their lives and then assigned to other adult monkeys have significantly better health and social rank outcomes. This might seem like an obvious finding but it’s an important one to make and we can derive lessons from it also for the bringing up of human children.
• The last article is about the study of dreams in a scientific manner. The problem with this is that you need to collect a lot of data and the only way to do this is from the dreamer’s own recollection. But then the written reports need to be assessed by someone and that adds another layer of subjectivity. So this project instead uses a language processing algorithm to assess the dreams and from there draw conclusions. The actual results are almost less interesting than the methodology but broadly confirm that the content of dreams do match the quotidien experiences of the dreamers.