Just four articles for the last month of December 2012 and one of them isn’t a science article at all but is a retrospective on the year with a perspective that I hope more people would share.

• The first one is on a subject that Hiew actually forwarded to me earlier in the month. It’s about how it may be possible to know whether or not the universe that we currently exist in is actually a simulation run on some unimaginably powerful computer. The idea is that if our universe is simulated using an evenly-spaced three-dimensional lattice then the structure of that lattice itself imposes fundamental limits on the energy levels that any particles within the system can possess. And according to the team behind the paper, our universe does indeed have this kind of cut off in the spectrum of high energy particles. Personally I’m leery about this approach because it makes unfounded assumptions about the structure of the simulation. For example, instead of a fixed, regularly-spaced lattice, one could easily imagine a flexible system which could be as dense or as sparse as required to track the particles that are present locally. In any case, for a look at a fictional scenario of this, check out the novella True Names by Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow.
• The next link is not an article but rather a letter written in response to an earlier article. The original thesis made two complementary claims: 1) that humanity as a species is becoming less intelligent over time due to the  accumulation of mutations that have deleterious effects on intelligence and 2) that if this is so the question of why we managed to evolve intelligence at all in the first place is because modern society shelter humans from the full effects of natural selection. Hunter-gatherer societies it is claimed have greater use for intelligence while in our time even relatively stupid people may thrive and live long enough to procreate. This letter argues against these conclusions stating that mutations occur in individuals and not the entire population as a whole while intelligence is correlated with the number of surviving children in modern societies.
• Then we have this article from Smithsonian.com about why humans blink so frequently. As the article states, some blinking is obviously necessary to lubricate the eyeballs, but we seem to blink more often than necessary for these basic functions. It turns out that another reason for blinking is to temporarily shut out the world to give ourselves a moment for introspective thinking. In effect, our minds shift to an altered mental state more conducive to thought at the moment when we blink.
• Finally our non-science article is this optimistic retrospective of 2012 from The Spectator. One of my personal pet peeves is people being unreasonably pessimistic about the present and like to view the past through rose-tinted glasses. But as this article reminds us 2012 has really been the best year ever for humanity as a whole. Poverty has never been lower. On a global scale, inequality is down too. Far fewer people die from violence or disease. And despite doomsayers’ repeated proclamations of peak oil, we live in an age of energy abundance not scarcity. So here’s looking forward to 2013 being an even better year!