The war in Ukraine continues to dominate the world’s attention and I’ve probably been spending too much time reading up on it than is healthy. I’ve still been keeping up with science news and there are a few really interesting announcements over the past month.

• For pretty much everywhere in the world apart from China, the covid-19 pandemic is just about over. But even as China engages in silly security-theatre by spraying large clouds of sanitizer liquids, not enough attention is being paid to area-effect measures that actually seem to work. This paper talks about lamps that emit far-UVC light and shows that rooms that are exposed to light of this wavelength have greatly reduced viral loads over extended periods. But note that the common so-called UV light disinfection devices on the market are fake ones. Far-UVC light is certainly not visible to the human eye and far-UVC wavelengths are achieved by using krypton chloride excimer lamps that are not commonly available.

• A really scary announcement this month uses light at the other end of the spectrum, infrared. A team of researchers outfitted specific neurons in the mouse brain with a heat-sensitive molecule called TRP1. They could then later stimulate these areas of the brain with infrared light to alter the behavior of the mice, tickling the dopamine neurons to make them addicted to the light and want to go where the light is for example. In other words, by carefully treating a brain in advance, the team could then later control that brain later with infrared light, which is why this finding has been hailed with the alarmist cries of being a form of mind control over infrared.

• Next up is a summary of some the latest findings on Alzheimer’s disease as more and more effort is focused on it. Previously it was not thought that the brain had a system to flush out dead cells and other organic waste as the lymphatic system does not extend there. Later it was found that the cerebrospinal fluid in the brain does perform this role and this is now called the glymphatic system. This system apparently helps flush out the  amyloid-beta and tau proteins that lead to Alzheimer’s and a lack of sleep earlier in life is thought to contribute the problem by depriving the brain of this power wash effect. New drugs and other treatments to boost this glymphatic clearance effect are also appearing including drugs that promote sleep and devices that aim to directly stimulate this effect.

• Research on Alzheimer’s matters because as this next bit of news notes, the leading cause of death among the elderly is increasingly some form of dementia. About half of those aged 67 or more now have dementia as a cause, up from about 35% in 2004.

• That’s it for the biological stuff. We go big with this announcement that the Hubble Space Telescope has recorded observing the farthest star ever seen in the universe. Now nicknamed Earendel, it is 12.9 billion years away from us, meaning the light is showing us a past that dates only a few hundred million years after the creation of the universe.

• Finally this last news item has the most far reaching implications of all even if most people haven’t heard of it. It’s about how the measured mass of a sub-atomic particle known as the W boson is not what it should be according to theory. The difference, around maybe 0.1%, is small but it’s enough to prove that something in the theory is wrong. Given that this theory is the current Standard Model of physics, that is huge. At this point, it could mean anything including the existence of a previously undiscovered fifth force of nature. But it’s also possible that it could be a measurement error with this one experiment. Needless to say, this is stuff upon which great careers in physics are forged.