This month we have both a good number of science announcements interesting enough to be included here and they are also so important that everyone should know about them.

• Let’s start with the one that will raise the most hackles. It’s a study of studies aimed at measuring the accuracy of gender stereotypes. The impolitic yet unsurprising finding is that they are mostly true in that people are generally accurate at assessing whether men or women were higher on some given trait or characteristic. That said, they underestimate gender differences in cognitive abilities and academic performance and overestimate them in personality traits and behaviors. Also worth noting that individuals were less accurate at these judgments than the group as a whole, a finding that is in line with similar studies.
• Next is a paper that seems especially relevant to us in Malaysia given recent news about health insurance costs. It discusses the rise of genetic testing and how the data thus obtained can be used to predict health outcomes. Yet many jurisdictions around the world have banned insurers from pricing their products using genetic data. This creates a mismatch between individuals who have undergone genetic testing and insurers that will only grow worse as genetic testing becomes more pervasive and more accurate. It is difficult to see how health insurance markets would continue to operate under such conditions.
• The major medical news this month has to be the so-called ‘tumor to pork’ announcement. It’s about a Chinese team inserting a pig gene into a virus and using it to infect cancerous cells. This then causes the body’s own immune system to treat the cancer as a foreign entity and attack it. The virus used, the Newcastle disease virus, is thought to be relatively harmless to humans though it is deadly to birds. The team used the technique to treat a variety of untreatable cancers including liver, ovarian, cervical etc. with excellent results.
• Finally a major discovery in the field of cosmology. Data from the James Webb Space Telescope reveals that around two-thirds of observable galaxies spin in one direction while remainder spin in the other. This contradicts the existing model of a homogenous universe in which more or less equal numbers of galaxies should spin in the opposite directions. One explanation that has caused excitement is that our own universe exists within a black hole and therefore was itself born rotating. This carries the implication that every black hole in our universe is a doorway to another baby universe. The less exciting explanation is that our own perception is skewed by the rotation of the Milky Way galaxy. I like the exciting explanation but in cases like this it’s usually the mundane one that holds true over the long term.