The last entry for the year is again dominated by the life sciences but I like how they’re broad findings. Feels like a neat way to summarize the year.

• What better way to show this than with a large, comprehensive study on the effects of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines? Harping on the subject feels like a beating a dead horse yet it’s still needed due to widespread public skepticism and misinformation. This is a French study covering 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals over a period of 45 months. They found that vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and no increased risk of all-cause mortality. As the authors note, this doesn’t eliminate all possible risks but it should be enough to address most reasonable ones and put an end to vaccine hesitation. But we all know that it won’t.
• Next is another large-scale project which will only slowly yield dividends over time. It’s an effort to map the genetic landscape across 14 psychiatric disorders to find the genomic factors that they might have in common using data from over a million patients. The team found that there is pervasive genetic overlap across these disorders. They also found that schizophrenia and bipolar disorders have high levels of polygenic overlap. Other distinct groupings are compulsive disorders, internalizing disorders such as major depression, anxiety and PTSD, substance use disorders and neurodevelopment issues such as autism and ADHD. This suggests that rather than relying solely on symptoms to diagnose psychiatric disorders, it may be possible in the future to investigate the shared biological roots of these issues.
• We do have one bit of science news this month that is space-based and it too comes down to the biological sciences. The findings are from analysis of samples taken from the Bennu asteroid delivered to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Among the discoveries made five-carbon sugar ribose and six-carbon glucose. Along with the lack of deoxyribose, it suggests that the buildings blocks of biological molecules were widespread throughout the solar system and that the first forms of life relied on RNA. Other findings include a strange, gum-like substance and abundant supernova dust from the asteroid. The latter indicates that the parent body of the asteroid formed in a region enriched in the dust of dying stars.
• We end with an article that updates our understanding of how dogs developed their close relationship with humans. One finding leverages data from the dog and wolf skulls spanning the past 50,000 years to determine that the distinctive shape of dog skulls first emerged about 11,000 years ago and that there was a large diversity in the shapes of dog skulls from that period. This suggests that the wide range of shapes and sizes dogs have today isn’t solely a product of the human-led selective breeding programs. The second finding focuses on humans and dogs in Eastern Eurasia, using genomic data to match shifts in the ancestry of dogs with the movement of specific human groups. They found that while the dogs of different human cultural groups moved together with them, there was also evidence that the humans traded their dogs with one another, leading to a shift in the ancestries of the dogs with them.