A little bit of everything this month and no less than five articles, so let’s get to it.

•  You’ve probably heard about scientists making robots based on insects and small animals as models. This article with links and accompanying video is all about skipping the robot part and taking direct control of a live cockroach to perform tasks. It’s wireless too. I guess cockroaches are okay for this but I predict serious ethical concerns if they scale it up to larger animals.
• The next article comes with the predictable still image from Planet of the Apes. It’s about scientists who trained a bunch of monkeys in a simple pattern matching exercise. They then selectively impaired the monkeys’ performance with cocaine and used a brain implant to restore their original performance. When this worked, they also tested the implant without the influence of cocaine and found improved performance beyond the original baseline. They’re lauding it as a primitive sort of implant to boost cognition, but I’m skeptical. The implant seems tailor designed just to stimulate the right parts of the brain needed for that specific part. It’s hard to see it as an device that can be generalized.
• This one is even more deserving of skepticism, being firmly in the realm of pure theory, but it is all about a plausible way to create faster than light warp drives, so that’s enough to get it featured here. In principle, one way to cheat around the light speed limit would be not to move objects faster than light through spacetime, but to alter the geometry of spacetime itself around the objects we want to move. This is the famous warp bubble that we know of all the way back from Star Trek. But even apart from not knowing how to generate them, scientists have long calculated that the energy costs involved would be impossibly high. This latest finding claims that altering the shape of the ring around the spacecraft that generates the bubble would bring the energy costs down to a manageable level and allowing the intensity of the warping effect to oscillate would make it cheaper still.
• So surgeons can transplant just about anything these days. The latest record broken is the transplant of the uterus from a mother to her daughter by a team of Swedish doctors to allow the recipient to become pregnant.
• Finally a link to a research paper whose results any male could confirm for you for free. The Dutch team found that not only is the cognitive performance of heterosexual men impaired after an interaction with someone of the opposite sex, but mere anticipation of such interaction is sufficient to make males dumber. Furthermore these effects occur even when the males have no idea whether or not the women they believe they will be interacting with are physically attractive.