A slow start to the year in terms of science news even the world is being rocked on the geopolitics front.

• Maybe it’s just me but I’ve been noticing that people have been focusing more on aging healthily, perhaps due to a new breed of activists such as Bryan Johnson. They should take heart in this new development about a potential treatment for cartilage loss. It works by blocking the 15-PGDH protein which becomes more abundant in the body as we age which is thought to inhibit the regeneration of cartilage. In mice, they found that it led to thicker knee cartilage in the older animals they tried in on and there are ongoing trials in humans in humans. The hope is that this will successfully treat osteoarthritis without having to rely on injecting stem cell.
• Next is a paper that will likely be of interest only to computer science nerds but is a clear sign that Chinese scientists are now very much state of the art. It presents a new algorithm to find the shortest path from a source to every other vertex in a graph. For over 60 years, the best possible algorithm to solve this fundamental graph problem was Dijkstra’s algorithm and it was thought to be optimal. Now this team presents a new way to solve the problem without having to sort the entire set of vertex distances in advance. It’s a huge deal in the world of computer science as such algorithms are widely used in all sorts of networks and even the smallest of optimizations can scale up.
• Finally here’s the results of an experiment about creating the largest ever superposition yet. Instead of mere electrons or even single atoms, the team assembled clusters of around 7,000 atoms of sodium atoms and directed them through the equivalent of slits constructed with laser beams. They proved that rather than behaving as a single object, each cluster behaved like a wave, spreading out into a superposition and interfering to form a pattern. The results are identical to that of the famous double-slit experiment with tiny particles and suggest that there truly is no limit to how big a superposition can be, provided it can isolated enough, as predicted by quantum theory.