August has been a terrible month for my stock portfolio but a fantastic one with regards to science news. Plenty of reading up ahead:

• The coolest (or is it hottest?) bit of science news is, of course, Elon Musk’s hyperloop proposal. This is sort of like an inter-city elevated train that runs inside a tube. Air is pumped out of the tube until is almost a vacuum. The idea is that the lack of air resistance enables the capsules to travel at a top speed of some 1,200 kmph while reducing the weight of the infrastructure required. The whole thing is driven by linear electric motors and costs is supposed to be kept low by building the track above existing highways. While this is a very science-fiction scenario, my take on this is skeptical. Cost is everything and despite the suggested optimizations, the proposed looks implausibly low to me as many others have already pointed out.
• In the US, recent political trends point towards white people being critical of affirmative action being black people remain strongly supportive. But are the whites truly in favour of meritocracy? This article points out a survey that does indeed find that white Californian adults are in favour of university admissions policies that prioritize standardized test scores and high school academic achievements. But when white people are reminded that Asian Americans are disproportionately represented inside the University of California system, because Asian Americans tend to do much better at standardized academic tests than other groups, they tend turned around and favoured a reduced role for test scores instead. This suggests that white people are in favour of policies that they perceive will help their own group rather than the principle of meritocracy.
• As we all know, evolution is a continuous process that is ongoing, for us as well as all other species that we share this planet with. This article suggests that as humans have prospered and changed the environment, the animals inhabiting that environment have evolved in response. Based on the observation of increasing skull sizes, various mammals species including mice, shrews, bats etc. seem to be evolving larger brains to successfully navigate this changed environment. In particular, the brains of small mammals in cities or suburbs seem larger those of the same species in rural areas.
• This next article requires some knowledge of black hole physics. For years now, it was thought that if someone were to fall into a black hole, he would be crushed by the awesome gravitational forces involved. This is now changing. Not that the person would die of course, just that he would first be killed by the so-called “firewall” of energy at the edge of the black hole. This is a relatively new concept stemming from the understanding that having information flow out of a black hole would be incompatible with the Einsteinian idea that the event horizon is smooth. Instead it is now thought that a discontinuity in the vacuum, manifesting as a wall of energetic particles, exists just inside the boundary of the black hole exist. Please read the full article for how this idea came about and the implications it has for physics.
• As someone who has some red-green colour blindness, this piece of news has personal significance. It’s essentially a review of a pair of expensive glasses that addresses red-green colour blindness. The lenses apparently contain filters that increase sensitivity to specific colour temperatures and there are specific pairs for specific types of colour blindness. Given the caveat that it works only with very bright light (so it mostly won’t work indoors and won’t work with computer monitors), the writer of the review pretty unequivocally states that it makes a tremendous and immediately noticeable difference to how he perceives the world. He was able to discern colours he had never noticed before and the colours of the world became richer and more saturated.
• Finally, here’s an article about research into how using Facebook and other social networks tend to make its users unhappy. After having controlled for the observation that those who tend to use Facebook are just unhappy in the first place, it finds that people demonstrably becomes unhappier after each Facebook session after an extended period of tracking. The reasoning is that such use arouses envy. Since those who post to Facebook tend to do so about the best things in their lives, whether they are their best photos, best moments or best lines, such moments are exaggerated and not at all representative of such people’s everyday life, forming an unhealthy point of comparison between different lifestyles.

Quite a few of these articles this month, so here goes:

•  Cloning animals is nothing new these days but, still, there is something symbolic about cloning one from a single drop of blood, as this article from BBC News covers.
• We all know that bats can navigate using ultrasound, but could prey make use of this fact as a defensive measure? This article from Popsci covers how hawk moths, found in the tropics, are able to respond to the ultrasounds emitted by bats hunting them by responding with ultrasound clicks of their own. It may be useful to just startle the moths or it could be part of an active jamming system to hamper the effectiveness of the bats’ echolocation abilities.
• Nearly a quarter of a century after its inception, a study into the crack babies phenomenon of the 1980s has finally ended. The term refers to an epidemic of babies born to mothers who were addicted to cocaine and were exposed to the substance while in-utero. Apocryphal stories at the time talked of babies with shrunken heads, poor muscle tone and troubling behavioural symptoms. Twenty-three years later this study found that there was no difference in IQ between such babies and those of a control group with no prenatal cocaine exposure. They did find that both groups had IQ scores that were markedly lower than the national average and attribute it to the effects of poverty.
• This next article is somewhat like the one above: conclusions that are “obvious” are not always correct. Pop quiz: which areas are safer to live in, for developed countries at least: urban areas or rural areas? As it turns out, this article from CNN explains how contrary to intuition, the risk of injury or death from violent crime and accidents are more than 20% higher in the countryside in the United States than in urban areas. We don’t know exactly why yet, but there are some educated guesses. In the US, rates of firearm ownership are higher in rural areas for example, and these residents tend to drive longer distances over more dangerous roads. Plus it’s easier and faster to get to a hospital in a city than in the countryside.
• Finally here’s a just for fun article about a couple of physics points from the Pacific Rim film in a Scientific American blog: specifically how much force is there in a rocket-assisted punch delivered by a giant robotic fist and can a giant monster with a huge wingspan fly its way into space? It’s just the first in a series of two such articles with maybe more to come so be sure to look out for more too.

Four articles this month, representing a fairly mixed bag of subjects. Here goes:

• Let’s start with a very simple but effective technological innovation that applies only to countries that have four seasons. Tech-On! features a report about a new type of glass that would block sunlight in the summer while letting it through in the winter. It relies on the simple fact that sunlight in summer and winter have different incidence angles and the invention consists of nothing more sophisticated that joining two sheets of glass together. This alters the refractive qualities of the joined sheet of glass and the researchers tuned this precisely to have the desired effects. What I don’t quite understand is whether or not the glass needs to be precisely tuned to the latitude of the place where it will be installed because presumably the incidence angle of sunlight depends on the latitude of the location.
• The next piece is not a science article but an extensive feature published in the New York Times about research on the outcomes to women and their babies who wanted abortions but were denied them. The key point is that the study manages to compare these women against similar women who wanted abortions and did get them. Not very surprisingly, the study found that these women have much poorer outcomes, with higher anxiety and depression levels, more likely to end up being poor and have poorer health. What is surprising is that despite these objectively poorer outcomes, most of these women still insisted that having that originally unwanted child was still the best thing that happened to them and significant numbers claimed years after the fact that they have never sought an abortion in the first place.
• Then here’s an article from The Conversation about how cheetahs actually use their fabled speed. One uneducated guess about cheetahs might be that because of their reputation as the fastest land speed animal on Earth, you might expect them to hunt best of all on flat ground where they can show off their top speed. This turns out not to be true because cheetahs hunt more successfully in dense forested cover than on open ground. This is because the true advantage cheetahs have is not absolute top speed but fantastic acceleration rates and even better deceleration rates. This allows them to manoeuvre much more effectively than the prey they chase.
• Bloomberg BusinessWeek has a very cool article about concrete, particularly the kind that the ancient Romans used. As we know from the copious amount of architectural works the ancient Romans left behind, they built a lot and a lot of it has lasted quite a long time. It turns out that ancient Roman concrete is significantly stronger than the modern variety we use today, commonly known as Portland cement. The precise formula for the kind the ancient Romans used was lost but researchers claim to have rediscovered by analysing their mineral content. By incorporating lyme and volcanic ash into their mixture, the Romans made more durable concrete than modern builders.