On top of the Nobel Prize announcements this month, there’s been plenty of cool new science news as well, so let’s get to them.

• My favorite of the lot is the recent breakthrough in reading papyrus scrolls recovered from the ruins of a Roman villa in Campania. The villa was destroyed by the famous Mount Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD and was actually discovered back in the 1750s. Researchers back then tried to unroll the carbonized scrolls but ended up destroying many of them. Flash forward to the present day and we can now virtually unroll the scrolls by scanning them, layer by layer, with a computerised tomography x-ray machine. The latest twist is using machine learning to decipher the resulting images and iterating until recognizable letters can be read from them. This marks only the beginning of what will undoubtedly be a massive effort to read the more than 500 scrolls that still survive and will provide new primary sources for classicists to pore over for decades to come.
• More controversial is a new paper discussing the causes of the decline in the mental health of children. The central idea is that the decline is caused by a corresponding decline in children having unsupervised, independent activity of their own, that is playing by themselves or with friends, or even doing part-time jobs without the involvement of family members. It seems indisputable that children did have more independent activity in the past and that their mental health is declining but the evidence that one causes causes the other seems circumstantial. It does make for a good story and that’s why so many people are talking about this paper so be on the lookout for new developments in this area.
• On a lighter note, here’s an article about how coin tosses aren’t exactly 50/5 after all. The issue is that when a coin is tossed by a human hand into the air, there is always a tiny wobble in it. Due to this, the coin has slightly better odds of landing on the same side it started. The difference is small, from a sample of 350,757 coin flips, 50.8% of them ended up on the same side, and it depends on the individual. Given that coin tosses are sometimes used for some significant events, such as in sports, this may actually be an important finding.
• Finally here’s a broad overview on assembly theory, a neat idea that has been making the rounds. It really is an idea more than a theory as it doesn’t exactly offer testable predictions. The core of it comes from wondering why complex molecules exist and persist. They must have been made by some repeatable process and allows them to replicate. We’re all familiar with Darwinian selection but these processes take place on an even more fundamental scale without anything resembling DNA or RNA. They’ve come up with a way of calculating the complexity of objects based on the minimum number of steps that are needed to create it from its constituent parts which they call the Assembly Index. This could be useful to detect the presence of life which aren’t based on the same chemical building blocks as Earth-based life. Again, I don’t think this is science but it’s cool to learn and think about.

Last year, everyone expected the prize for physiology or medicine to a specific winner but that prediction failed to pan out. That is rectified this year as the prize goes to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that make mRNA vaccines possible. Such vaccines are an obvious idea but it proved difficult to be made in practice as the production of mRNA without cell culture, called in vitro transcription led to mRNA that causes inflammatory responses.

Karikó and Weissman knew that the bases in RNA from mammalian cells are frequently chemically modified while in vitro transcribed mRNA is not. So they produced different variants of mRNA with unique chemical alterations in their bases and discovered that this change did indeed almost completely abolish the unwanted inflammatory response, making mRNA vaccines viable.

The physics prize is for attosecond physics and is pretty easy to understand as well. An attosecond is a billionth of a billionth of a second and this is the scale that we need to use to examine the movements and reactions of electrons. The prize goes to Anne L’Huillier, Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz. L’Huillier discovered that when an infrared laser passes through a noble gas, the laser imparts energy to the atoms that is then released as light. The light waves interact with one another so that when their peaks coincide, they would become more intense.

Agostini and Krausz, working independently, both turned this insight into workable technology to create pulses of light in the hundreds of attoseconds range. Today this has been further improved down to the dozens of attoseconds range and this is what allows us to see electrons in the same way that very fast camera shutters allows us to capture fast moving objects.

The prize for chemistry is for quantum dots and who would have thought that the marketing blurb for expensive televisions isn’t just bunk. Every high school student who has studied chemistry knows that the properties of an element are determined by how many electrons it has. However on a very small scale, the properties may be governed by quantum phenomena instead and this includes their colors which can vary depending on their size.

The prize goes to Alexei Ekimov, Louis Brus and Moungi Bawendi for making that knowledge work in practice. Ekimov first demonstrated the effect in colored glass, using nanoparticles of copper chloride. Brus later did it with particles floating freely in a fluid and Bawendi improved the process to produce the quantum dots to make it more reliable. The result that quantum dots today are a real thing that are used in computer monitors, television screens and many other applications.

Finally the prize for economics goes to Claudia Goldin for her work in investigating female participation in the labor market and explaining the gender gap in earnings. Trawling through 200 years of data, she showed that female labor did not have a continuously upward trend but instead forms a U-shape. Married women were heavily involved in labor in agrarian societies but worked less during the transition to an industrial society. With the rise of the service economy, female work is trending upwards again.

She also demonstrated how factors like women’s education levels, the invention of the contraceptive pill and having control over when a woman has her first child affect women’s earnings. One particularly interesting finding is in so-called greedy professions like the legal or financial industry which rewards those willing to put in extremely long and unpredictable hours with high pay. In many cases, families maximize their earnings by having the husband specialize in his career leaving the wife with all of the childcare duties while forsaking her own career.