A real wealth of science stuff this month and that’s coming off of the slew of science writing related to the Nobel Prize announcements earlier. Hope you’re prepared to do a lot of reading.

• We’ll get the big headline-grabbing bit of news out of the way first though I’m personally not so sure that it makes much of a difference. This is of course the discovery of the world’s first superconductor that works at room temperature. This is of course a staple of science-fiction and a technology that would revolutionize everything if works reliably and cheaply enough to be widely deployed. However in this case, it relies on squeezing hydrogen, carbon and sulfur together at a pressure of about 2.6 million times that of Earth’s atmosphere. As such this discovery is interesting in that opens up new pathways to explore but it’s not in any way a practical technology.
• Next is an article that I actually find interesting because it reminds me even when we think we already know everything, there still may be things that we have missed. After all what can be more settled science than human anatomy and yet this team announced that they have found a heretofore unnoticed set of salivary glands in the human nasopharynx, the upper part of the throat behind the nose. The existence of these glands was suspected because radiotherapy for cancer patients in this region brings unexpected side effects and their presence was then confirmed with PET/CT scans. This is effectively a discovery of a new organ, albeit a very small one, of the human body.
• Still on the subject of humans, I like this neat little experiment about measuring how well we form a mental map of our environment. In a setup that resembles one we usually use for mice and the like, participants were tasked to navigate a path through a space in which different types of food were placed. They were then asked to recall the locations of each food and predictably they were much better at remembering the locations of high calorie foods like brownies and potato chips than low calorie ones like fruit, regardless of their individual personal diets. It’s an obvious result but it’s nice to have the confirmation.
• Next is my favorite science article this month. This isn’t a report of a single new discovery but rather a broad overview about how the the scientific understanding of hybrid species and their role in evolution has changed over time. Previously hybrids were mostly thought of as being evolutionary dead ends that are either sterile or less well adapted than their parents. Growing evidence however has emerged that some hybrids can inherit combined traits from their parents that leave them better off and that there are mechanisms which prevent them from being absorbed back into the parent species. Furthermore such hybridisation seems to be much more common than previously thought and can result in an explosive growth of new species in a short amount time, overturning the old understanding of evolution by mutation as a slow process. The result is that the old picture of evolution as a tree is hopelessly outdated and evolution looks more like a tangled web that keeps criss-crossing back and forth. It took a long time to convince biologists to change their thinking of evolution and it will take longer yet for this to filter down to the general public.
• Then we have this paper that purports to show the support given to Trump in the 2016 election stems not from those who were economically left behind but instead from groups who felt that their previously high status were being threatened by future developments, including those anxious over the perceived erosion of US dominance in the world. The claim here is that the difference between these two causes is established by a set of carefully crafted surveys but this is always tricky to prove. Still I include it here because it makes for interesting reading.
• Finally here is the last one which I can only classify into the I don’t know what to make of it category but it sure seems important. It’s about time crystals interacting with one another. This is a strange form of matter that has the ability to repeat motions through time, with no external force being applied, apparently indefinitely, in a way that doesn’t violate the laws of thermodynamics. The claim is that scientists have now observed two time crystals interacting with one another in a controlled fashion and this is an important step in using them for any practical purpose but I won’t pretend I actually understand what is going on here.