Some very important discoveries this month including a big one that may well be the most important finding for decades, if it doesn’t turn out to be a fluke.

• The big news is that an experiment conducted at Fermilab observed muons behaving in a manner not consistent with the Standard Model of physics. After checking the math, the conclusion is that the model is wrong and there well may be a fifth, heretofore unknown, fundamental force in nature that would be needed to account for the behavior. For now, even though it is statistically unlikely to be a fluke, the Standard Model is so well established that no one is going to throw it out based on just this one result and certainly no one knows what is going to come next. But we can be sure that theoretical physicists are up all night trying to make sense of this.
• Another important announcement, if it eventually proves to work on humans, is the discovery of a method of regrowing lost teeth. It uses an antibody to suppress one particular gene, USAG-1, and that was enough to stimulate tooth growth in mice and ferrets. There’s a long way to go before it would be even considered for testing on humans but if it works this certainly counts as a discovery that would make a big impact on everyone’s lives.
• Next is a review of collected research to suggest that a strategy of promoting bilingualism, even if that means teaching a second language to the elderly or strengthening long unused language skills, is useful to delay the onset of dementia. It seems that even Cantonese and Mandarin spoken bilingualism is sufficient to have measurable effects on the onset of dementia. Since has no effect on Malaysians as we speak multiple languages already but it is interesting to see language learning being promoted as a healthcare measure.
• Everyone knows how amazing it is that the world has been able to develop multiple effective COVID-19 vaccines in so short a time to address the ongoing pandemic. This paper argues that this has been possible partly because of the many lessons learned about vaccines across the decades spent trying to develop one for HIV. That effort was met with failure after failure but the argument is that it built up the necessary vaccine expertise to quickly develop one for COVID-19 and so research funds for vaccine development are never wasted.
• Finally here’s some fascinating reading material about a particular species of ant known as the Indian jumping ant. As we all know, each ant colony only has a single queen. So what happens when the queen dies? In the case of this type of ant in particular, the surviving females compete to become the new queen and to do this their bodies transform into an intermediate form known as a gamergate to fight each one another with shrunken brains. Eventually a winner will emerge to become the queen but then the losers who survive the fight will transform back into normal ants, which involves their brains growing back again. And yes, queen ants don’t need big brains because all they do is pump out babies.