A whole slew of articles to close out the year and I’m even excluding some important news items because they have yet to fully play out at the time of writing, such as the launch of the James Webb telescope.

• I’m waiting until the Webb telescope is actually used to make any new discoveries before posting anything about it but that doesn’t mean there is isn’t anything else of comparable interest in the field of astronomy. This month NASA also announced that its Parker Solar Probe flew through the corona of the Sun for the first time, gathering valuable data on the switchbacks, disturbances in the solar wind that can move around. This is effectively the weather on the surface of the Sun. To do that the probe has to survive temperatures of up to 1,377 degrees Celsius and move at similarly ridiculous speeds. Please look up the video images of the mission if you can, they’re well worth your while.
• One article that particularly intrigued me was this one about the benefits of physical exercise in ways that still quite mysterious to us. Some of the innumerable benefits includes reduced inflammation and increased plasticity within the hippocampus and this experiment shows that exercise changes something in the plasma that induces these effects. The researchers took blood plasma from mice which had engaged in exercise and infused it into mice that had not and found that the benefits were transferable but we still don’t know why.
• By now everyone knows about the dangers of plastics, in particular that they are not biodegradable and hence persist in the environment but as a famous, fictional scientist would say, “life finds a way”. This article talks about microbes in oceans and soils around the world are evolving to eat plastics. They found this by noting the emergence of previously unknown enzymes that are capable of breaking down plastic, with particularly high concentrations in areas with more plastics. This is unsurprising of course as plastics are just hydrocarbon chains engineered by humans and therefore did not previously exist. Now they are abundant, it is normal for microbes to evolve to consume them as a food source. While this seems like good news, we should still be wary of unexpected consequences from such developments.
• Taking a break from all these articles about biology, we make a foray into sociology. One phenomenon that we all know is slowing population growth in many countries around the world. However this happened in France much earlier than anywhere else and this paper links the change to the secularization process in France, arguing that as religiosity declined in particular départements in France and even particular family lines as traced through the data, so too does family sizes.
• A lighter article would be this one about an attempt to survey the average number of words and phrases that dogs with owners know and recognize. Using a methodology similar to that used to assess infant’s understanding of early language ability, they found that the average number about 89, though there is of course wide disparities for individual dogs. The smartest one could recognize over 200 words while the dumbest one only recognized 15.
• Finally for a longer read, here is an overview about how one should not underestimate the sophistication of the minds of insects. Growing evidence and scientific consensus suggests that insects are not autonomic beings that react and behave mindlessly to stimuli but do have internal mental states of their own, and this includes feeling their equivalent of primal emotions like pain or being frightened.