Light on anything noteworthy that I’ve seen this month. Perhaps I’ve just missed things.

• One thing that did grab my attention is this paper is this one that tries to test what is well known as Bergman’s rule: the hypothesis that animals in colder regions adapt by becoming larger in size while those in warmer place become smaller. This paper examines human fossils to determine if this holds in humans and determines that it is indeed broadly true. They were however unable to find correlations between temperature and brain sizes.
• Next is a paper giving us even more reason to care about clean air, as if it weren’t enough that we all need clean air to breathe. It argues that cleaner air has contributed to improved yield gains of maize and soybean in the US. This is based on measurements of four different pollutants, ozone, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide.
• Then we have a paper that combines economics with biology. It’s about the nematode worm which biologists love to study because of how simple it is, with a nervous system of just 302 neurons. Yet that is enough complexity for it to seek out food, and the researchers have found that it does so according to the Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preference, a classical measure of utility maximization in economics.
• Finally the last paper is hardly a surprising result but it doesn’t bode well either. Basically they had groups of people put together to solve some tasks represented by a game and then later interviewed them to ask who they would consider the leaders of the group. The result was those who spent the most time talking were considered the leaders. Even the person designated by the organizers to be the one to operate the user interface of the game were not more likely to be considered the leaders, nor those who have more experience from prior sessions of the game, nor those who scored more highly at cognitive tasks. The factor that matters most of all is simply being eager and willing to speak up the most.