A little light on science news this month and we’re all preoccupied by political events here in Malaysia but also in the US and elsewhere.
This isn’t really a new scientific discovery but it earns its place here due to sheer coolness factor. It’s NASA interpreting the data coming from the Perseus black hole as sound audible to the human hearing range. As the team explains, while space is mostly vacuum and therefore cannot transmit sound, the clouds of gas around the supermassive black hole is dense enough that sound can propagate there. The sound is far too low in frequency to be audible to human ears and so must be processed and of course the data that we get comes from the x-rays it emits.
Next we have a paper by a team from China about genetic engineering rice to boost yield and reduce growth duration. This particular effort overexpressed a particular gene that they identified by its responsiveness to low light and low nitrogen. The plant that resulted seemed to be able to use nitrogen more efficiently and therefore grew faster. This is only one of many genetic engineering projects on crops but I wanted to highlight this as it is a project from China and if commercially distributed, would result in being able to produce the same amount of rice by using much less land and using less nitrogen fertilizer.
Then we have a huge study that serves as an update on an earlier one that made quite an impact when it was released back in 2000. It was about the erosion of social interaction between Americans who are mostly strangers to one another, calling this social capital. The new study mines Facebook for data, mapping the connections between millions of users. The findings seem to broadly agree with the previous study and found that the deterioration of ties across social classes makes it more difficult for those born in poorer families to improve their station in life.
Finally this just made the cut by appearing within the last few days of the month and I’m not sure what to make of it. It’s an announcement by a team from China that they have successfully created the world’s first mammal with fully reprogrammed genes. What this means is that they took the chromosomes of a mouse, broke them apart, stitched them back together and used it to birth live animals. To get the mice to survive, they had to shorten the chromosomes and use few numbers of them but it’s unknown how else the new mice have been changed. It seems mostly like an effort to develop and prove expertise in the application of genetic engineering techniques than anything else, but I’ll have to wait to see reactions from the rest of the scientific community to learn more.
Mostly articles about biology this month, except for the big release of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Note that one bit of news that has been circulating this month talks about how plankton levels in the Atlantic Ocean has dropped precipitously. I was going to include it but there has been pushback about how that paper wasn’t peer reviewed and in any case covers only one part of the ocean and not the whole ocean, so I dropped it. No doubt those claims will be examined more closely and will make the news again if it proves to be true.
The James Webb Space Telescope images are just that images and it will be some time before new scientific discoveries will come from it. Still they are of such high quality that they are exciting to look at and the first glimpse of the farthest away galaxies 13 billion light years away is quite something. You may wish to read up on the telescope’s potential and how much effort, including over-engineering, was made into ensuring that the launch went perfectly and that this very expensive investment would not be a failure.
I first wrote about a possible link between gum problems and Alzheimer’s disease three years ago and now another new study appears to offer more confirmation. This one actually covers a different type of oral bacteria than previous studies and is based on animal experiments only. Yet it does show that the bacteria causes an inflammatory response that subsequently leads to the symptoms of brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s getting worse.
This news came pretty late in the month but it’s too important to ignore and is also about Alzheimer’s disease. The claim is that a key study from 2006 about the main cause of the disease being sticky plaques in the brain formed by amyloid beta protein may be fraudulent as it used doctored images of the brain including such simple tricks like copying and pasting the same images. Given that the original basis was the foundation of a lot of research devoted to this approach of treating the disease, this revelation is a fairly big scandal in the scientific community and is still playing out.
Next here’s a study that follows up on previous findings that music seems to sooth pain. The new study involved playing different sounds and music to mice while testing their response to pain from an injection on their paws. They found that the type of sound or music doesn’t matter, even white noise works, but the key is that the volume of the sound is at a constantly level just above background noise. This successfully made the mice appear to feel less pain and they were even able to confirm the phenomenon by looking at the mice’s auditory cortex.
Finally here’s a really cool article on how dolphins identify themselves to others of their kind through names, effectively whistling a melody specific to themselves. It goes into how different types of whistling are used in different habitats and population sizes of dolphins and how some may use a whistle copied from their mothers but altered to be unique to themselves. Some groups even have group whistles that identify the group as a whole while still retaining enough uniqueness to refer to specific individuals in the group.
Quite a wealth of important science-related announcements this month though as usual I fear many will pass unnoticed as the world grapples with multiple ongoing crises.
The announcement that received the most attention in the mainstream news this month is probably this one, described as a miracle cancer cure with a 100% success rate. I’m linking the original paper here for those interested. The sample size is small though I understand it has since been expanded and it is specifically about rectal cancer. The drug used is dostarlimab which is used to treat cancers due to mismatch repair deficiency (MMR). Effectively this means that the mechanism for repairing mistakes when copying DNA is broken, leading to many mutations. Since many more cancers than just rectal cancer is thought to be caused by MMR, this is understandably an exciting development but of course it isn’t a universal cancer cure.
Next is a paper on an important development in quantum mechanics but I’m not qualified to make any judgments about it. As I understand the team is announcing their success in transmitting for the first time quantum information over a network instead of just between two directly connected nodes. The paper describes in detail the physical processes this involves. This is important for actually using entangled qubits for communications but as always the value here is in encryption and it doesn’t mean that faster than light communications is possible.
Going back to the subject of cancers, here’s an article on a new finding that seems rather scary. Examining tumors from breast cancers, the researchers found that metastasis, when the tumors release cancerous cells into the blood stream is much more active at night. Moving on to doing tests on mice, they found that tumor cells extracted at night and injected into healthy mice leads to metastasis but those extracted during the day do not. In a way this isn’t too surprising since we know the immune system operates differently depending on whether it is day or night but I do find it surprising that no one noticed this phenomenon before this.
Moving on to lighter subjects, here is a paper claiming that chickens were first domesticated in, of all places, Thailand. Their finding is based on a comprehensive analysis of many types of data from more than 600 sites in 89 countries. The earliest site known with unambiguous evidence is at the Ban Non Wat site in central Thailand, dated to between 1650 to 1250 BCE. They further suggest that the spread of rice and millet cultivated helped attract red junglefowl to live alongside humans.
Also in agriculture, here’s a somewhat belated announcement that humanity has actually passed peak agricultural land, that is the amount of land that has been cleared for human agricultural activities. There is a lot of variance in the data but everyone seems to agree on this conclusion. Yet at the same time, our food production continues to increase, meaning that we’re improving yields and working the land more intensively as our knowledge and technology improves. This is good news of course but the caveat is that this conclusion applies on a global scale so in many countries around the world, land is still being cleared for agricultural use, destroying local ecosystems.
Finally I don’t post a lot economics papers, but this one is important enough that it should be more widely known about. Efficient markets mean that anomalies in the pricing of risk versus reward should eventually be arbitrated away. However one anomaly has persisted for a while now and no one understands why. This refers to the phenomenon when certain risky assets held overnight when markets are closed seems to yield a higher return compared to holding them over the course of the trading day. Market participants, except perhaps retail investors, are aware of the effect and exploit it, so the question is why does it still exist? The very existence of this effect represents a substantial challenge to the efficient market hypothesis that economists must address.
A few scattered articles this month even as the war in Ukraine rages and the world is embroiled in a food crisis. These really are extraordinarily tough times.
By far the most exciting announcement this month is the release of the very first image of Sagittarius A*, the colossal black hole at the center of the Milk Way galaxy. This isn’t a photograph of course but an image assembled from data collected by a set of 8 radio telescopes. Similarly we can’t see the black hole directly but we can perceive some of the matter that accretes around it so it looks like a bright, glowing doughnut. I’m not how much new scientific insight can be learned from this project but I’m suppose it’s enough of an achievement that it earns the public’s attention and fosters greater interest in astronomy.
Another really import finding also concerns space by way of the meteorites that fall on Earth. It’s an announcement that all five of the nucleobases that constitute DNA have now been found in meteorites. Some of the bases have been detected as far back as the 1960s but it is only recently with the refinement of new techniques to increase the sensitivity of detection methods that all of the bases have been found. It’s not definitive proof of anything but it helps lend credence to the old theory that life on Earth was originally seeded from meteorites.
Next we have an intriguing and highly speculative paper on how some insect colonies may possess cultural transmission of knowledge and engage in cognition on a social level. It’s a review of other studies rather than new research and it calls attention to findings such as how wasps able to recognize one another’s faces and memorize information about each other, how bumblebees can observe others use techniques and learn them and mate preferences of female fruit flies seem to be culturally transmitted over generations. The purpose is to underline how much we still don’t know about how cognition works in such seemingly simple animals and that far from being hardwired by evolution, so much of their behavior may be learned and transmitted from one generation to the next.
Finally a really scary article about the self-destructive behavior of octopus mothers as their eggs get close to hatching. The new finding is really about working out the specific biochemical processes that occur in these octopuses, beginning from their optic glands, to prompt the behavior. But the results that have long been known about is that they might beat themselves against rocks, tear at themselves or even eat themselves when the time of hatching draws near. It’s still exactly clear why this occurs but the best guess is that octopuses are cannibals so this kind of programmed suicide protects babies from being eaten by their own mothers once they are hatched.
The war in Ukraine continues to dominate the world’s attention and I’ve probably been spending too much time reading up on it than is healthy. I’ve still been keeping up with science news and there are a few really interesting announcements over the past month.
For pretty much everywhere in the world apart from China, the covid-19 pandemic is just about over. But even as China engages in silly security-theatre by spraying large clouds of sanitizer liquids, not enough attention is being paid to area-effect measures that actually seem to work. This paper talks about lamps that emit far-UVC light and shows that rooms that are exposed to light of this wavelength have greatly reduced viral loads over extended periods. But note that the common so-called UV light disinfection devices on the market are fake ones. Far-UVC light is certainly not visible to the human eye and far-UVC wavelengths are achieved by using krypton chloride excimer lamps that are not commonly available.
A really scary announcement this month uses light at the other end of the spectrum, infrared. A team of researchers outfitted specific neurons in the mouse brain with a heat-sensitive molecule called TRP1. They could then later stimulate these areas of the brain with infrared light to alter the behavior of the mice, tickling the dopamine neurons to make them addicted to the light and want to go where the light is for example. In other words, by carefully treating a brain in advance, the team could then later control that brain later with infrared light, which is why this finding has been hailed with the alarmist cries of being a form of mind control over infrared.
Next up is a summary of some the latest findings on Alzheimer’s disease as more and more effort is focused on it. Previously it was not thought that the brain had a system to flush out dead cells and other organic waste as the lymphatic system does not extend there. Later it was found that the cerebrospinal fluid in the brain does perform this role and this is now called the glymphatic system. This system apparently helps flush out the amyloid-beta and tau proteins that lead to Alzheimer’s and a lack of sleep earlier in life is thought to contribute the problem by depriving the brain of this power wash effect. New drugs and other treatments to boost this glymphatic clearance effect are also appearing including drugs that promote sleep and devices that aim to directly stimulate this effect.
Research on Alzheimer’s matters because as this next bit of news notes, the leading cause of death among the elderly is increasingly some form of dementia. About half of those aged 67 or more now have dementia as a cause, up from about 35% in 2004.
That’s it for the biological stuff. We go big with this announcement that the Hubble Space Telescope has recorded observing the farthest star ever seen in the universe. Now nicknamed Earendel, it is 12.9 billion years away from us, meaning the light is showing us a past that dates only a few hundred million years after the creation of the universe.
Finally this last news item has the most far reaching implications of all even if most people haven’t heard of it. It’s about how the measured mass of a sub-atomic particle known as the W boson is not what it should be according to theory. The difference, around maybe 0.1%, is small but it’s enough to prove that something in the theory is wrong. Given that this theory is the current Standard Model of physics, that is huge. At this point, it could mean anything including the existence of a previously undiscovered fifth force of nature. But it’s also possible that it could be a measurement error with this one experiment. Needless to say, this is stuff upon which great careers in physics are forged.
Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine dominates the news and deservedly so. It will also have major repercussions on the scientific world as cooperation with Russia in many fields has stopped, leading to a lot of research work being lost including projects in Ukraine and on the International Space Station. But scientific work in other countries goes on.
The scariest and most widely shared bit of news this month is surely the announcement of how easily AI technologies used to generate promising molecule candidates can be turned towards making biochemical weapons. Normally the machine learning software searches for molecule candidates that score well on whatever bioactivity they are targeting while minimizing toxicity. It was a simple matter then to invert the parameters to search for molecules with high predicted toxicity and very quickly the model came up with the already known nerve agent VX as well new molecules that aren’t known to exist yet but are predicted to be even more toxic. Of course all this is in simulation so it may not even be possible to synthesize these molecules and the researchers aren’t releasing their data to the public, but this was done using open-source software and publicly available datasets of toxicity and so should be easy to replicate.
One of my favorite science stories this month is the invention of a device to detect Parkinson’s disease early. What is fascinating is how this came to be. A retired nurse in Scotland claimed to be able to smell a distinctive odor emitted by people with the disease, beginning when her own husband developed it. This ability was confirmed when she met more patients with the disease in the support groups her husband went to. A team of researchers then built a device to detect the same organic compounds that this woman could smell in the natural oils produced by the skin of patients and found that it worked. However the woman’s nose still has significantly highly accuracy.
Next we cast our eyes to far larger objects and events in this article discussing how two supermassive black holes will collide about 10,000 years from now. They are some 9 billion years away from us of course so even if the collision is expected to cause warps in the fabric of space and time, we only detect them as ripples and the real story here is the process by which astronomers figured out what is going on.
Finally here’s an older paper published in a journal about religious studies which I usually avoid but this one is interesting enough to be worth noting. The subject is Turkey and the decades long effort to Islamize the country. They found that such metrics as mosque attendance, trust in clergy and so forth have actually declined, probably because by associating the state so closely with the religion, the failures of the state also become the failures of religion. I believe that this is an important finding in examining repressive states which attempt to use religion to legitimize their rule.
Not too much of note this month on the science front and even I have been mostly preoccupied following up on events in Ukraine. Still I’ve seen some announcements of medical advancements that sound very exciting.
The bit of news that has been shared around the most widely is the announcement of how a man with a complete spinal cord injury is able to walk again with the help of an implant. This sort of paralysis is very common in fiction so we all know that such people are unable to walk because the nerve signals sent down the signal cord are unable to reach the lower body and legs. The experimental implant bridges the damaged area with electrodes that target the dormant nerves beyond that area to amplify the signals coming from the brain. The most surprising finding is that the participants in the study were able to stand up and walk almost immediately after the surgery had healed without much training at all. Note that this is still not full recovery as they still need to be supported by a walking frame and the device must be specifically programmed to accommodate different types of movements but this really is science-fiction technology come to life.
The invention that is more likely to be of help to most people however is synthetic enamel than promises to be harder and stronger than the real thing. As you may already know, we can’t ever regrow tooth enamel that has been lost, the best we can do is remineralize the enamel that we do still have but over time this inevitably wears down. So that’s why this announcement of a synthetic version that replicates the natural version even on multiple microscopic scales is an exciting development.
Finally we end with a speculative article based on a study that I must warn uses very few participants. The claim is that by inserting electrodes into the temporal lobe of the brain, the researchers are able to determine exactly which neurons fire up during specific tasks. In doing so, they noticed that specific groups of neurons fire up when doing different mathematical operations. This is specific enough that an addition operation activates a different group of neurons than a subtraction operation, suggesting that the brain contains highly specialized circuits for specific operations. This accords well with improved understanding of how the brain works in that it is not an all purpose general computing machine but consists of many circuits, each highly specialized in different tasks but the circuity can be retrained when needed. But of course this is all highly speculative at the moment.