This has been a fairly explosive month in terms of science news because one particularly talked about paper. But that’s not the only thing we have this month.

• That paper presents a massive study of ancient DNA from nearly 16,000 people across more than 10,000 years with a view towards identifying instances of directional selection. That is, a type of natural selection in which a gene confers a trait strongly enough that it makes a difference in survival and reproduction. The obvious example given is lactose intolerance after infancy. The dataset and the methods they developed are itself scientifically valuable but commentators have focused on the results so far. Many have assumed that natural selection has more or less stopped in the modern era as our technology and mastery of the environment has improved. This paper shows that natural selection has accelerated after the introduction of farming. Some seem logical such as immunity to HIV infection. Others seem counterintuitive, such as gluten intolerance spiking after wheat farming became widespread. This is just a starting point as this dataset only covers West Eurasia but it’s understandable why this one paper has led to so such heated discussion and debate.
• A more depressing and yet completely predictable finding is the paper claiming that perhaps half of all results published even in reputable journals in the social sciences can’t be replicated by independent analysis. It’s another nail in the coffin of the reproducibility crisis. What’s even more depressing is that they’re not actually redoing entire experiments. Just reanalyzing the supplied data to confirm the results. If they actually start collecting fresh data for themselves, I’d bet even few papers will be replicated.
• The next paper is personally fascinating to me. It provides evidence that depressed people have a pessimistic bias against future positive events. I found this result validating because they usually claim that they’re just being realistic and see the world more accurately. The methodology they used is brilliant too. They asked the participants to predict what would happen to them in their personal lives in the near future, then checked back later to see how their predictions held up. Interestingly the depressed could be convinced that they were wrong and adjust their attitudes but this new optimism was fragile and they tended to return to their previous pessimism soon.
• Moving beyond human concerns, here’s a cool paper that tries to nail down some details of the communication of sperm whales. It adds to the growing body of knowledge that not only do the codas, or series of clicks that they use to communicate, resemble human vowels acoustically, their patterns also seem to parallel the phonetics and phonology of human languages. We’re not yet at the stage where we can understand what it is that they are saying to each other but that we might be able to one day is scary enough.
• We end with a fun bit of science news that is not biology. CERN recently carried out an experiment that involved transporting antiprotons in a truck across their site. The extremely volatile material is stabilized in a portable cryogenic trap and the distance involved is short but it does let them claim to be a world first in achieving such a feat. It’s a bit of news that would excite science-fiction fans as this is after all antimatter that annihilates on contact with ordinary matter which would happen if the trap fails. But as there are only 92 antiprotons involved, the theoretical energy released would only be about that of a small static electricity spark.