We’re back to having more science news than I can reasonably cover. Hopefully this represents a decent selection of the most significant announcements.

• Starting with the easier to grasp and happier pieces of news, we have the welcome success of lab-grown blood transfused into a human. Stem cells are extracted from a normal donation of blood, encouraged to grow and then guided to become complete red blood cells. This effectively creates a larger usable supply from small donated amounts. So far the trial uses only very small amounts to determine safety and the process is too expensive for widespread use. It may be a viable means to help with extremely rare blood types however.
• Another piece of good news talks about some unexpected benefits of protected marine sanctuaries where fishing is banned. The normal benefit is that population numbers of valuable species inside the protected area boom and overspill into outside areas where fishing is allowed. A study in Norway however also found that lobsters inside the protected grow larger and exhibit bolder behaviors. In effect, as laws ban the harvesting of lobsters below a certain size, lobsters have grown smaller and become more timid to avoid being caught in traps. The existence of the protected areas counteract that, which improves the quality of the fishing just outside of them as well as the quantity.
• In less happy news, a set of studies examined whether or not cannabis use can somehow promote creativity. Using outside evaluators to assess the quality of creative work, the studies found cannabis use didn’t significantly improve the creativity of users. But it did make them happier and made them believe themselves that they were more creative. But as the article notes, it’s still possible that cannabis use boosts cognitive abilities that weren’t measured or that already creative people are simply more likely to use cannabis in the first place.
• The next paper is from the field of macroeconomics and discusses dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. These models are the predominant framework of macroeconomic analyses. The authors of this paper subject a version of this model to some statistical tests, effectively testing if the model can predict its own simulation. They also test how well the model fits nonsense data. Even with centuries of data, the forecasting error is very high and swapping in nonsense data might actually yield better results. I don’t know enough about how these models work and about statistics to judge the validity of this paper for myself but it seems like a serious challenge that the field of macroeconomics must answer.
• Finally my favorite of the announcements this month is about a novel way to measure time. It involves pumping atoms with lasers such that they enter a high-energy state called a Rydberg state. The movements of electrons under such conditions are subject to quantum effects and are described as a Rydberg wave packet. More than one such wave packet interfere with one another and this interference can be used as a measurement of time. The interesting part is that there is no need to predefine a starting time so scientists can measure any event they want to observe and compare it to the signature of interfering Rydberg states to note how long it lasts. Plus this measurement of time is entirely self-contained and does not rely on some other measured quantity.