Ignoring the very recent developments on the covid-19 front which are too new and speculative to include here, not much of note this month. So I’m including some cool technology to fill in the blank so to speak.

• One really interesting paper however is the discovery about a novel phase of water they are calling superionic ice. This is of course in addition to the phases of liquid, solid and gas that we are more familiar with. Also nicknamed strange black ice, the team created it by subjected water to intense pressure in between two diamonds and then firing high-intensity x-rays at it. It naturally has very different mechanical properties than what we expect out of water and reminds us that there is so much more that we have yet to know even out of familiar things. Superionic ice is doubly important because it is thought to exist in nature, deep inside our planet for example, and might play a role in maintaining the Earth’s magnetic fields.
• Next is a fun paper about head tilting behavior in dogs. I’m sure everyone has seen dogs do this and notice how it seems like they’re being curious or puzzled. Surprisingly no one has tried to explain this behavior before now and this team guesses that dogs do this when they are paying particular attention to something and learning something new. In particular through tests they isolated a group of dogs they identified as being particularly good at learning things and determine these genius dogs were especially prone to tilt their heads when introduced to new toys and taught their names. This all seems very speculative to me but it is a start.
• Then we have this rather scary article about the so-called vulture bees, bees that rather than feed on nectar, eat meat instead. The existence of this species of bee has been known of for a while and others have noticed them look for rotting carcasses and leave a pheromone trail to summon nest mates to gorge on the flesh en masse. But now scientists have also confirmed that they possess radically different microbiomes to help them digest meat and even protect them from pathogens, similar to the bacteria found in actual vultures and hyenas.
• Plenty of phone screen protectors advertise about their being made of diamond glass but they’re not really diamonds. A team however has been published about their success at creating a glass material that is as close to diamond as you can get and what’s even cooler is that they used the well-known buckyball structure as their starting point. The result is a carbon structure with three-dimensional bonds that they claim is the hardest known glass so far and has the highest thermal conductivity as well. The applications in the electronics industry is of course endless, provided that they can make this at scale.
• Finally a technology that I wouldn’t mind having: a fabric made of engineered silk that can keep the skin much cooler than natural silk or cotton while under direct sunlight. It’s a little sparse on the technical details but this was apparently made by embedding silk fibers with aluminum oxide nanoparticiples with the result being that it can reflect ultraviolet light so well that under direct sunlight it is actually cooler than ambient air temperature. Compared to normal cotton, the claim is that it is cooler by as much as 12.5°C which sounds like the stuff of science-fiction.