A little light on science news this month and we’re all preoccupied by political events here in Malaysia but also in the US and elsewhere.

• This isn’t really a new scientific discovery but it earns its place here due to sheer coolness factor. It’s NASA interpreting the data coming from the Perseus black hole as sound audible to the human hearing range. As the team explains, while space is mostly vacuum and therefore cannot transmit sound, the clouds of gas around the supermassive black hole is dense enough that sound can propagate there. The sound is far too low in frequency to be audible to human ears and so must be processed and of course the data that we get comes from the x-rays it emits.
• Next we have a paper by a team from China about genetic engineering rice to boost yield and reduce growth duration. This particular effort overexpressed a particular gene that they identified by its responsiveness to low light and low nitrogen. The plant that resulted seemed to be able to use nitrogen more efficiently and therefore grew faster. This is only one of many genetic engineering projects on crops but I wanted to highlight this as it is a project from China and if commercially distributed, would result in being able to produce the same amount of rice by using much less land and using less nitrogen fertilizer.
• Then we have a huge study that serves as an update on an earlier one that made quite an impact when it was released back in 2000. It was about the erosion of social interaction between Americans who are mostly strangers to one another, calling this social capital. The new study mines Facebook for data, mapping the connections between millions of users. The findings seem to broadly agree with the previous study and found that the deterioration of ties across social classes makes it more difficult for those born in poorer families to improve their station in life.
• Finally this just made the cut by appearing within the last few days of the month and I’m not sure what to make of it. It’s an announcement by a team from China that they have successfully created the world’s first mammal with fully reprogrammed genes. What this means is that they took the chromosomes of a mouse, broke them apart, stitched them back together and used it to birth live animals. To get the mice to survive, they had to shorten the chromosomes and use few numbers of them but it’s unknown how else the new mice have been changed. It seems mostly like an effort to develop and prove expertise in the application of genetic engineering techniques than anything else, but I’ll have to wait to see reactions from the rest of the scientific community to learn more.