Again, lots of cool announcements this month, so much that I had to pick and choose among them.

• Probably the most shocking news headline this month, if you’ve been paying attention at least, is that the tilt of Earth’s orbit has changed due to how much groundwater has been pumped out. The angle of the planet’s rotational axis regularly shifts over time due to a variety of factors including the movement of molten rock, changes in atmospheric pressure, changes in the mass of glaciers and ice sheets and so on. This new study shows that extraction of groundwater over the past two decades, mostly in western North America and northwestern India, too has moved the tilt. It’s difficult to say exactly how this affects everything else but it’s a sobering reminder that the actions of humans have major unintended consequences.
• Another important announcement is the neuronal wiring of a female common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, has been fully mapped. That’s about 130,000 neurons and includes plenty of other information as well. The upshot is that scientists who want to conduct experiments on the brains of fruit flies can theoretically now do so on a fully digital, simulated version rather than a real, live fly. Already there are people using it to simulate a fly eating and there will no doubt be many more such projects. We shouldn’t expect this digital twin to perfectly simulate the real thing but it should be obvious what an incredible boon this will be to researchers.
• There’s so much news about AI lately and so little of it is about how it’s been put to use in practice. This news about how generative AI has been used to help develop a new drug to treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is therefore welcome. This is an Nvidia puff piece so there should be an appropriate amount of skepticism. Still it’s educational to read up on how the company’s suite of AI tools was used to search for molecules a drug could target, generate drug candidates based on those molecules and simulate how well the candidates would bind to the molecules. The next step is to move on to Phase 2 clinical trials, meaning human patients have already been administered the new drug to test how well it works.
• Next is an article about a wide-ranging survey of hunter-gatherer societies, seeking evidence about the longstanding belief that in such societies men usually do the hunting and women do the gathering. Searching through accounts from the 1800s to the 2010s and covering 63 forager groups throughout the world, the survey found that women participated in hunting activities in 80% of these groups. This puts paid to the old myth, still perpetuated in popular culture but mostly disdained by modern anthropologists, that men roamed far and wide in pursuit of prey while women stayed close to home.
• Then there’s this paper that comes to a rather obvious conclusion: how much a person favors or disfavors inequality corelates with whether they are high status or low status. Through simulated experiments with and without a veil of ignorance, the researchers found that those who landed in high status positions were happy with inequality and the opposite was true of those in low status positions. They also found that their opinions change in accordance to changes in their social status. It turns out that people are self-interested. Who knew?
• Finally here’s an article about a mysterious exoplanet with a very high albedo, that is it reflects 80 percent of the light from its star. The planet in question is known as LTT9779 b and its high albedo is especially surprising because its radius is slightly larger than Neptune, which in ordinary circumstances is so big that it would be considered a gas giant. Using data from the Cheops space telescope, astronomers now believe that the planet started out as a gas giant but has lost mass over time. Now it has atmosphere composed of a silica-like material and titanium. Just picture it, it’s a planet covered by clouds made of metal vapors. Even science-fiction authors couldn’t make this up.