Mostly articles about biology this month, except for the big release of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Note that one bit of news that has been circulating this month talks about how plankton levels in the Atlantic Ocean has dropped precipitously. I was going to include it but there has been pushback about how that paper wasn’t peer reviewed and in any case covers only one part of the ocean and not the whole ocean, so I dropped it. No doubt those claims will be examined more closely and will make the news again if it proves to be true.

• The James Webb Space Telescope images are just that images and it will be some time before new scientific discoveries will come from it. Still they are of such high quality that they are exciting to look at and the first glimpse of the farthest away galaxies 13 billion light years away is quite something. You may wish to read up on the telescope’s potential and how much effort, including over-engineering, was made into ensuring that the launch went perfectly and that this very expensive investment would not be a failure.
• I first wrote about a possible link between gum problems and Alzheimer’s disease three years ago and now another new study appears to offer more confirmation. This one actually covers a different type of oral bacteria than previous studies and is based on animal experiments only. Yet it does show that the bacteria causes an inflammatory response that subsequently leads to the symptoms of brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s getting worse.
• This news came pretty late in the month but it’s too important to ignore and is also about Alzheimer’s disease. The claim is that a key study from 2006 about the main cause of the disease being sticky plaques in the brain formed by amyloid beta protein may be fraudulent as it used doctored images of the brain including such simple tricks like copying and pasting the same images. Given that the original basis was the foundation of a lot of research devoted to this approach of treating the disease, this revelation is a fairly big scandal in the scientific community and is still playing out.
• Next here’s a study that follows up on previous findings that music seems to sooth pain. The new study involved playing different sounds and music to mice while testing their response to pain from an injection on their paws. They found that the type of sound or music doesn’t matter, even white noise works, but the key is that the volume of the sound is at a constantly level just above background noise. This successfully made the mice appear to feel less pain and they were even able to confirm the phenomenon by looking at the mice’s auditory cortex.
• Finally here’s a really cool article on how dolphins identify themselves to others of their kind through names, effectively whistling a melody specific to themselves. It goes into how different types of whistling are used in different habitats and population sizes of dolphins and how some may use a whistle copied from their mothers but altered to be unique to themselves. Some groups even have group whistles that identify the group as a whole while still retaining enough uniqueness to refer to specific individuals in the group.