A good variety of stuff for this month:

• I would be remiss if I didn’t include the biggest scientific news of the month but honestly, there’s so little information here that it’s barely worth getting excited about. This refers to the announcement that astronomers have found a planet within the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri, which being 4.2 light years away, is the closest star to our own system. Here’s a decent article about it. The most important thing to remember is that the planet being in the habitable zone doesn’t actually mean that it’s habitable. It just means that it’s right distance away from its star such that water can exist there in its liquid state. In particular, because Proxima Centauri is such a cool star, the newly discovered star orbits really close to it, which means that it must be bathing in radiation and any potential life on the planet must be subject to a host of other similarly hostile conditions.
• This CBC article talks about how the common wisdom that turtles are the longest lived animals may be wrong. A recent study found that the Greenland shark may have a lifespan of 400 years. This determination was difficult to make as obviously this far exceeds the duration of any scientific study and the scientists must use estimates based on dating how old the animals are. In this case, they used radiocarbon dating techniques on the lenses of the sharks’ eyes and found that their average ages are well over 200 years. It is also thought that they only reach sexual maturity between the ages of 130 and 170.
• Next, there’s this report about Japan about how a woman was successfully diagnosed that she is suffering from a rare form of leukemia using IBM’s famous Watson system. The patient was initially diagnosed by doctors of having a different form of the disease but the doctors were stumped when she failed to respond as expected to the treatment. The AI however was able to sift through much more data than human doctors can handle to point the doctors in the correct direction. This comes on the heels of many other recent announcements of AI being used in unconventional ways, including recommending sentences for criminal uses to judges and helping teachers to create customized learning plans for individual students.
• Finally The Economist covers an intriguing discovery that men may be better than women at making up after a conflict. The study focuses on athletes. Competitors in many sports are expected to make peaceful physical contact after an event, shaking hands for example or embracing. The scientists found that such making up activities seemed more genuine in men than in women. The men would grasp hands for longer, even pat shoulders or touch arms after the initial contact. Women on the other hand seemed to do the minimum that was required by convention and no more. The speculation is that men may be better conditioned than women to regard conflicts as being nothing personal and not to hold grudges after a winner has been determined.