A bunch of cool science stuff this month, all of which stem from biology but touch upon different topics.

• The simplest and most directly beneficial of these announcements is the US approving a twice-a-year shot that will completely prevent HIV. This doesn’t quite count as a vaccine as it does need to be taken twice a year but it is the longest lasting protection against HIV yet. In its original form, it’s probably too expensive for widespread use in developing countries but generic copies will eventually become available and that could well mean the end of AIDS.
• Ever since it was first identified in the 1980s, the Flynn effect has invited endless speculation on the cause of the increase in intelligence and whether the trend will continue. This new paper uses data from the Norwegian Armed Forces which has administered a general mental ability test on recruits since 1954. It argues that while some types of skills improved over time, notably non-verbal reasoning ability, word reasoning and numerical reasoning abilities decreased over the same period. This suggests that it might not be accurate to say that intelligence in general has increased over time.
• Next we have a paper that claims to advance our understanding on how sperm whales communicate. It argues that their codas, the series of clicks that they use to communicate, not only resemble human vowels acoustically but also appears in patterns similar to human language. These findings are used to construct a case that these codas are intentionally controlled and constitute a type of language that we could one day unlock.
• Finally here’s a paper that attempts to do the seemingly impossible, study the phenomenon of qualia itself. The team purports to answer the age-old question of whether your ‘red’ is the same as my ‘red’ by doing the following: collect detailed reports about the relations between sensory experiences of various participants; construct what they call qualia structures from the data, meaning embeddings of qualia that represent the similarity or lack thereof of the participants’ judgment of what they have experienced; compares two individuals’ qualia structures in what they call an unsupervised alignment method which doesn’t assume that there are particular correspondences between the structures. The upshot is that the team could align the structures of color-neurotypical group, meaning those who are not color blind and self-report seeing colors normally. They could also align the structures of the color-atypical group despite differences in the type of color blindness within that group. But they could not align the structures between the color-neurotypical and color-atypical group meaning that those structures are too different. It’s hard to say what we can conclude from these results, perhaps that it might be possible to prove that those who experience colors in the same way do actually share the same qualia. But the ambition behind the project is something I can certainly get behind.