Things started out pretty slow in the new year and I despaired at coming across anything cool. Thankfully, the scientists picked up the pace towards the end of the month. Once again, it’s almost all in biology and psychology.

• Let’s start with one that’s easy to understand and sympathize with. It’s a study that asked respondents to install special software on their computer to track their social media activity and particularly what content they chose to share. They found that elderly Internet users above the age of 65 were particularly likely to share fake news and hoaxes, and this remained true regardless of the person’s party affiliation or ideology.
• One exciting finding in medical science has been a long sought for answer to what actually causes Alzheimer’s disease. We’ve known that the disease is associated with malformed proteins protein present in the brain but how the proteins came to me. Now it seems that it may be due to the same bacteria responsible for gum diseases that eventually invades the brain. The bacteria uses a toxic enzyme to feed on human tissue and blocking the mechanism of this enzyme might be an effective treatment for the disease.
• Next is an update on a previous effort to create organisms with extra DNA letters not found in nature. The idea now is to make new proteins that could not otherwise have existed and one candidate is a synthetic version of interleukin. This is a cancer drug which can promote an immune system response to tumours but in the original form also has side effects which kill the patient. The new version, made with extra DNA letters, binds only to some parts of lymphocytes and not others, thus keeping the desired anti-tumour effects without the toxicity.
• Then we have this bit of news that I absolutely don’t understand why it isn’t all over the headlines. It’s about a project that is attempting of improve on natural photosynthesis by simplifying the pathways that plants use to build sugars out of carbon dioxide. It turns that the natural process works but is inefficient and occasionally makes a mistake by using oxygen instead of carbon dioxide, resulting in a toxic by-product. The researchers engineered new versions in tobacco plants with higher productivity and increased biomass. The implications for this is huge if this is allowed to be used for other crops.
• Finally we end with a speculative and sure to be strongly disputed paper in economics. It uses tax data to try to determine if the highest earning people in the US, whose income is mainly non-wage income as expected, are the idle rich or the working rich involved in their own private businesses. Their conclusion is that the top earners segment is dominated by the working rich.