Still a little light on science news this month. Even I am more concerned about economic and war-related news right now.

• We’ll start with the COVID-19 news first as it’s still relevant even if we’re at the tail end of the pandemic. Pretty much everybody will have wondered why some people remain uninfected even after being exposed multiple times while others get infected only through casual contact. According to the preprint of a new study, it seems that around 1 in 10 carry a genetic mutation, called HLA B 1501, that led them to mount a more effective immune response against COVID-19 using T cells generated from common colds. They still get infected but they are usually asymptomatic as their immune system fights it off so quickly. Note that this study still needs to be peer reviewed however and no doubt it will receive plenty of attention.
• Next is a study that has major implications on our understanding of how air pollution leads to cancer. The conventional view was that many of the carcinogenic substances that constitute the polluting particles in air directly damaged cells, leading to cancer. The team found however that many such substances don’t seem to directly damage cells at all. Instead, their presence activates an alarm signal in the lungs and when already damaged cells receive that signal, they may become cancerous. This raises the potential of taking drugs that block this alarm signal for people who live in particularly polluted areas to prevent damaged lung cells from actually becoming cancerous.
• Finally a more speculative paper examining what causes some sub-regions of countries to want to secede. They determine this by applying a large dataset of 173 countries into a model of the political economy, which is always a little subjective but perhaps better than nothing. The upshot is that regions mainly want to secede not because of economic reasons but because the people of the region hold to an identity different from that of the wider country.

Finally here’s the video of NASA’s DART mission to attempt to redirect an asteroid by crashing a spacecraft into it just because it’s so cool. It’s just a test and so far there’s no word yet on how much they have managed to alter the asteroid’s trajectory with such a small spacecraft but it is undoubtedly cool and the stuff of science-fiction turned reality.