Plenty of science news this month but I’ve avoided talking about AI. Things are moving too fast in that space and with everything still up in the air, it seems unwise to tout early findings and announcements before things have settled down.

• Almost all of the stuff I have this month are about biology so we’ll start with the ones that aren’t. This article talks about reliable methods to detect when someone is lying. Obviously there are all kinds of devices that purport to do so with dubious efficacy and law enforcement officers are trained to look for telltale signals. This group of researchers posit that it is necessary to look for only one type of signal: the level of detail in the story the person is telling. They even tested this by separating groups of students who really did an activity and who were told to simply lie about it. Those who actually did were able to provide much more detail in their account and that in turn is a more reliable method of telling who is lying and who isn’t.
• Next we have a paper about a particular Mayan calendar which had stumped researchers for a long time. The calendar is known for having a 819-day cycle and researchers had difficulty synchronizing it to the movements of the visible planets. This paper shows that by increasing the length of the calendar to 20 periods of 819-days, it is possible to create a pattern that matches with the synodic periods of all of the planets visible to the Mayan civilization. What blows my mind is that this is effectively a 45-year calendar proving just how long the Mayans must have watched the skies to learn and understand the larger cycle.
• Moving on to biology, we have a paper that discusses how plants emit ultrasonic sounds when under stress. The experiments they conduct confirm that plants do emit airborne sound that can recorded using microphones but that machine learning models that differentiate between the sounds to tell when the plants are stressed by drought, cut or normal. To be fair, this doesn’t mean that plants are sentient as they lack a nervous system and the sounds that are being emitted are most likely a physiological consequence of the different conditions they are subjected. But as the authors note, this is still information that can be used, either by humans or other plants and animals in the vicinity.
• Next we have two articles that are vaguely related. First is further news about the discovery of fungi that can consume plastics, specifically polypropylene that is used in takeaway containers and cling film. The fungi are already naturally present in plants and soil so there is no fear of them being dangerous. It still takes a great deal of time to fully degrade the plastics though the process is accelerated by ultraviolet light and heat. But if it could be scaled up, this could be very useful way of breaking down plastic waste so that it won’t stay forever in the environment.
• In what makes for a great example of the familiar ‘life finds a way’ tagline, researchers have discovered that coastal creatures have made the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch their home. This is the well known concentration of plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean that most people will have already heard of. The researchers found that many species of coastal organisms, meaning crabs and anemones that usually live in coastal areas and not in the middle of the ocean, are colonizing the plastic waste and forming communities there. Of course the garbage patch remains a problem but it serves as a powerful reminder to us that life adapts and goes on in spite of what humans do.
• Finally on a lighter note, here’s an article about how pet parrots were taught to use touchscreens to make video calls. They found that the parrots were indeed able to make such calls to other birds and seemed to enjoy socializing with each other through the screen. The project is too small in scale to draw firm conclusions but as parrots are usually kept as solitary pets while they live in flocks in the wild, this may actually be a useful way to help alleviate the psychological issues that many pet birds develop.