First month of the year and there is already plenty of cool science stuff.

• We start with the bit of science news that has been shared the most this month. Many tourists who have visited Bali would know about how the long-tailed macaques there are notorious about stealing items from tourists. A new paper however asserts that the monkeys have even learned how valuable different objects are to humans. Not only are they able to steal objects that have no inherent value to them such as wallets and hats in order to exchange them with things that they do want such as food, but they have learned the relative value of different objects and will only exchange objects of higher value with food that is more desirable. Furthermore they have determined that this is a learned behavior as adult monkeys are the best able to make such valuation judgments while juvenile ones make no such distinctions.
• By now everyone will have heard of mRNA vaccines, an approach to making vaccines that is completely different from inactivated vaccines. But this technique is being used to treat more than just covid-19 as this paper talks about a promising vaccine for experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis. This is an extremely scary condition in which the immune system acts up and starts attacking your own nervous system and for which no treatment currently exists. The news about this jumped out at me immediately because my wife and I actually know someone who has this condition.
• Next is an article about how even the simplest of organisms, in this case, non-photosynthetic bacteria have internal clocks that align with the Earth’s 24-hour cycle. Scientists already knew that photosynthetic bacteria have such clocks, because they rely on the light of sun to make energy, This time they have found similar cycles of gene activity in a soil bacterium that does not use photosynthesis and that such cycles even in an environment that is always dark. This suggests that this is an essential feature of all life on Earth even if we don’t why or how it is achieved.
• Finally for fun, here is an article about how the complete genome of the platypus has just been released. Just as you might expect from this weird hybrid animal, its genes are part bird, part mammal and part reptile. This gives intriguing information about its evolutionary history. For example, the platypus lays eggs like birds but produces milk for its young like mammals. Accordingly while birds and reptiles have three genes that encodes for egg proteins, the platypus have only one and humans are zero. Yet the platypus does have most of the milk genes possessed by other mammals. Meanwhile it has also lost all four genes that encode for tooth development in mammals and as such grinds up its food with horn-like plates.