Only a handful of news items this months but they’re all really critical ones.

• The most important science event of the month is of course the announcement of the supposed room-temperature superconductor LK-99. This article serves as a good overview of what happened, beginning with the claim made by a team led by a pair of Korean scientists that they had discovered such a material. Specifically they claim that a form of lead apatite, modified according to a formula that they provided, could conduct electricity without resistance at ambient pressure and temperatures. Such a material would be the stuff of science-fiction with the potential to revolutionize countless fields. After the initial burst of enthusiasm however the consensus is now that the material doesn’t have the desired properties as efforts to replicate it have failed. There are plausible explanations for the observations made by the original team, including that it may be diamagnetic instead. Novel science might still arise from further study of the material but it seems this will not change the course of human development.
• Anyone reading this will have seen the reports of how this is the hottest year on record ever and the spate of disasters a hotter climate has been causing all over the planet. Apart from the usual, one reason might be the end of an unintended form of geoengineering that helped reduce the planet’s temperature. It used to be that the fuel used in ocean-going ships contained sulfur but since 2020 regulations have cut sulfur pollution and improved air quality. However the sulfate particles also used to create reflective clouds that follow in the wake of ships and these helped to reflect sunlight and thereby cool the planet. The regulations therefore amount to a natural yet unintended experiment in geoengineering to prove that seeding clouds using sulfate particles does help counteract global warming even if it comes with other costs that we dislike.
• Resistance to antibiotics in bacteria is another long-term problem that the world has to struggle with. While people intuitively understand how chance mutations can cause a bacterium to be more resistant to particular drugs, bacteria seem to be evolving resistance faster than this mechanism would imply. This article talks about another mechanism via the viruses that infect bacteria. It goes into detail about how this works in several different ways that I won’t repeat but the upshot is that bacteriophages can transfer the genes of one bacterium to another or even integrate their own genomes into that of their prey. This causes the genetics of the bacterial population to change faster than expected and explain why bacteria seem to evolve resistance to antibiotics so quickly.
• Next we have a paper discussing how latent diffusion models actually work. These are the AI models that create images and just like the large language models that are used to generate text, researchers aren’t quite sure what’s happening internally within the models. This paper claims that the models, as part of the process of being trained, actually create internal representations of the geometry of scenes. This is despite the fact that the images they are given as training data contain no depth information at all.
• Finally as a bit of more lighthearted science news, this talks about how scientists assigned to the remote outpost of Antarctica have developed a subtle yet unique accent of their own. The interesting part is that the scientists assigned there change all the time yet there is still enough carry over from group to group to create an accent as the isolated population there influence one another as they speak while having less interaction with the rest of the world.