Fewer news articles this month but that is also because I have decided not to highlight some of the more overrated and salacious articles that have gone viral recently including the claim of obtaining net energy from a fusion reaction and the paper that female snakes are discovered to have clitorises.

• The easier to understand bit of news I have this month is this paper about progress being made towards the development of a universal flu vaccine. As most people should know, existing flu vaccines are seasonal as doctors have to observe which particular strain of flu is currently most widespread and choose the appropriate vaccine. So it makes sense to try to use the new mRNA technology to create a vaccine that encodes antigens from all 20 known influenza A subtypes and influenza B lineages. Testing on mice and ferrets showed that it worked to generate the desired subtype-specific antibodies when challenged by different viral strains.
• The next article is too difficult for me to really understand, let alone summarize in any reasonably accurate manner. Doing my best, I will simply say that one of the most important problems in pure mathematics is the Riemann Hypothesis which claims that the distribution of prime numbers is not completely arbitrary. The news is that a Chinese-American mathematician Yitang Zhang has made progress in this topic. To be fair, he only claims to have disproven a weak version of a conjecture that serves as a counterexample to the hypothesis. Nevertheless if proven correct, this does represent progress and given how important prime numbers are, in modern cryptography for example, should be considered a huge deal.
• I usually skip over particular inventions but I like this one. It’s a new way to stop condensation forming on glass surfaces like spectacle lenses and windows that doesn’t require an outside electricity supply. It’s actually a thin layer of gold in between layers of titanium oxide. This absorbs solar radiation and heats up the glass enough to get rid of condensation. Unfortunately it doesn’t work at night and while you might be concerned about the cost of gold, so little is used that the cost is actually quite low. This is one invention that I’m confident will make it to the market almost immediately.
• ChatGPT has been making waves lately and I’ve been playing with it myself. However there’s is no one definitive article I can link to for now as everyone is still experimenting and learning. In general this year has been the big breakout year for AI and one of my favorite examples is the development of a bot that can play the boardgame Diplomacy. This article summarizes the rules well enough. The upshot is that it’s a wargame set in Europe but the rules are simplified and the game emphasizes communication between the players. They must make deals with one another to survive and there are inevitable betrayals. The bot is able to convincingly act like a human including talking to the human player in plain text messages, making deals, relating what is being said to what is happening on the board and making plans. I just love this YouTube video of what it feels like to play against the bot.