We have a lot of science stuff to get through this month and even a couple that are not biology!

• Let’s get through the non-biology stuff first. The title for this new physics paper is difficult to parse and the abstract isn’t much better. What it is really saying in simple language is that the team succeeded in making the electromagnetic counterpart of an “air vortex cannon“. We’re all familiar with the electromagnetic waves that underpin so much of our communications infrastructure. This team however has proven the ability to create an antenna that transmits electromagnetic pulses that have toroidal shapes. As the paper notes, there are all kinds of possible applications in communications, remote sensing, positioning and so on. What it doesn’t say is that it probably will be useful as a weapons technology as well.
• The other one is this economics paper that is being widely talked about, offering a conclusion that is intuitively obvious and yet apparently original. It examines the issue of why workers so viscerally dislike inflation when in theory wages gains should match the increase in prices. The authors explain it in very simple terms. In times of inflation, workers must engage in conflict behavior with their employers to demand higher wages or risk settling for wages that are declining in real terms. It’s not surprising that many workers are uneasy or unwilling to engage in such conflict behavior and so they hate inflation above and beyond what we would expect.
• Next we have a simple paper that lays out a plausible explanation for the long COVID affliction that some patients experience. They find that fibrinogen, the central component of blood clots, is abundant in the lungs and brains of COVID-19 patients and is a predictive biomarker for post-COVID-19 cognitive deficits. They posit that antibodies that target fibrin may be an effective treatment for the condition.
• Then we have this study about transgender men given testosterone supplements that is sure to add to the ongoing debates around trans issues. They found that these transgender men who were assigned female at birth underwent changes in their immune systems that made them more closely resemble that of cisgender men. That is their immune responses to the type 1 interferon proteins, used as a proxy for the strength of their response to viral infections, decreased, while their responses to a signaling pathway that is typically associated with inflammation increased. The sample size is small so this is just a start but the changes seem startling after a course of testosterone supplements of only three months.
• Another paper that is sure to spark widespread debate is this one that finds evidence of human evolution in ancient DNA. They compared DNA of ancient humans with that of contemporary people and conclude that there are many loci that were likely altered as a result of selective pressure. They claim for example that there is evidence that the predisposition to store energy during food scarcity has changed after the advent of farming and that there are other changes such as lighter skin color, lower risk for schizophrenia and bipolar disease, slower health decline and many more. In short, they claim that changes in human DNA has accelerated in response to civilization. I expect a lot more noise on this paper in the near future.
• Finally here’s a strange discovery that feels like it could be science-fiction but actually makes sense upon reflection. The researchers found that applying a commonly used food coloring to the skin of mice effectively makes it transparent. Specifically they used the food dye tartrazine which was was found to absorb light in the near ultraviolet and blue part of the spectrum and allowed red and orange light to penetrate deeper into the tissue of mice. This allowed them to watch neurons tagged with fluorescent markers in real time without doing anything else. The medical applications of this is obvious though it isn’t immediately possible to use this on humans as our skin is much thicker and the dye would have to completely saturate our skin tissue. It does make one wonder why this wasn’t tried earlier.