Lots of cool stuff this month and I’m even cutting off breaking news that I’ll try to include next month.

• I like to start off these posts with the news item that manages to hit the mainstream every month. This time it’s the news of a possible human population bottleneck about 900,000 years ago. This was achieved by projecting current human genetic variation backward in time to estimate past population sizes. This is understandably not a very reliable or precise technique but their estimate that the human population was reduced to around 1,300 breeding individuals at one point has enough shock value to made headlines around the world. Probably the more interesting discovery that the period coincides with a severe cooling phase in the planet’s climate, making it a salutary lesson on how critical it is for us to intelligently manage climate change today.
• Using drugs to control obesity is the next big thing in medicine and there’s no doubting the impact that it could have on human health. This paper adds to the knowledge in that area, demonstrating how a specific group of neurons, GABRA5-positive neurons, in the lateral hypothalamic area of the brain help regulate food intake and thereby weight gain. By activating or suppressing these neurons, the researchers were able to control weight gain in model mice without affecting food intake. There’s understandably still a lot of reluctance against relying on drugs to control the obesity epidemic but I have no doubt that this will be mainstream soon.
• We’re all familiar with the adage about opposites attracting and those mature enough should already know how untrue it is. This paper is a systematic review of peer-reviewed studies of male-female partners and their traits. The data shows that partners generally have high correlations in their personal traits whether in terms of political and religious attitudes, educational attainments and others, suggesting that such partnerships are more common and more stable.
• Next here is a paper about intuition, specifically intuitive responses to problems that are wrong and yet are prove to be extremely difficult to correct. It discusses the bat and ball problem which involves calculating the costs of the two objects. The problem has an obvious, intuitive answer which is wrong and the correct answer must be arrived at through reflection. Despite increasingly severe warnings and even an explicit instruction that the obvious answer is wrong, many people still end up inputting the wrong answer.
• Finally this paper discusses correlations between being patient and educational success. This by itself isn’t that revelatory but the technique the team used to determine patience seems novel. What they did was to mine data from social media to determine which types of interests are popular in different places and made their findings based on which interests are associated with the virtue of patience.