A bit of a slow month for science news but we do have some very interesting announcements.

• Most people should know that memories in our brains are stored n the way that our neurons connect with each other via synapses. However this is usually how short-term memories are formed. A team has reported a mechanism which forms long-term memories that involves our DNA. In an experiment with mice, they found that breakage of DNA in the hippocampus helps store memories. When they deleted a gene encoding a protein known as TLR9 which has a role in detecting DNA breakage, they found that the mice remembering a chamber that they had previously learned is dangerous. As TLR9 is also involved in the body’s immune response to DNA fragments from invading bacteria, this means that untangling how exactly our memories is much harder than previously thought.
• One theory about development holds that paddy rice farming leads to more collectivist societies while wheat farming leads to more individualism. A new paper uses China’s Cultural Revolution to test this theory as the government then randomly assigned people including decommissioned soldiers and urban youths to either rice or wheat farms. The team tested psychological traits of farmers at two such farms that are only 56 kilometers from one another. They indeed found that the rice farmers were less individualistic, engaging in self-inflation less and being more loyal to the community than wheat farmers.
• Next is a technological development that is billed as brain-like computers but that’s really getting ahead of ourselves. What they actually made is an artificial synapse that works based on a solution of salt and water. The creators named their device an iontronic memristor that is in effect a microchannel filled with the solution. When it receives electrical impulses, ions within the solution migrate through the channel, mimicking how a biological synapse works. This is still a very long way from any kind of biological computer but it is a necessary first step.
• This last bit isn’t quite science news but it’s adjacent. Time standards are of course arbitrary yet they’re necessary and this article talks about why the moon needs its own Coordinated Lunar Time. As Einstein taught us, there is no absolute measure of time and so time passes differently on the moon compared to the Earth. The difference is miniscule in the case of the moon, amounting to about 1 second across 5 years. Yet as human activity on the moon becomes more intensive and the precision of coordinating these activities becomes more important, the need to have a standard time on the moon becomes more evident. This is something that can be achieved only through international agreement and cooperation.