Due to being away, I’ve had fairly minimal Internet access over the past month. As such, I’d expected to come across fewer science-related news articles. Strangely, this didn’t turn out to be the case as there have been more than enough news to satisfy my curiosity.

• The biggest science news this month is obviously the confirmation that scientists have successfully detected gravity waves for the first time. There are many articles about this but I’ve picked this one from one of my favorite science-related websites, Ask a Mathematician, for how comprehensive it is. As this site points out, the interesting part about this isn’t the actual confirmation. Our indirect evidence of the existence of gravity waves was already so strong that direct detection doesn’t really add much to our picture of the universe. Rather, what’s interesting is the astounding technical precision needed for this achievement due to how tiny the effect is. Of course, it helped in this case that the phenomenon that caused these gravity waves were immense: the merging of two black holes about 1.3 billion light years away. The ripples in spacetime caused by this merger even results in a signal that is within the hearing range of human ears and you can listen to it for yourself here.
• Due to my family history with the disease, I always pay special attention to research about schizophrenia. That it has a genetic component has always been obvious but so many genes seem to play some part in it that it has always been difficult to pin down exactly what causes it. This article from The Economist highlights a claim that it has something to do with a particular gene known as C4. This gene produces a protein that has a role in the brain’s synaptic pruning, a process in which unnecessary neural connections are eliminated from childhood to early adulthood. Early adulthood is of course when the symptoms of schizophrenia are most commonly identified in patients and it’s easy to imagine that the delusions often experienced by patients may have something to do with having too many synaptic connections. While schizophrenia can currently be controlled using medications, it can’t be cured because researchers have little idea of what causes it. This development however suggests that a pathway to a more permanent cure might one day exist.
• Staying on the subject of medical science and especially mental health, here’s an interesting new paper that will no doubt delight my wife. Drawing data from a wide-ranging survey on the cardiovascular risk factors and cognitive functioning of a sample of 968 adults, it found a positive correlation between the consumption of chocolate and cognitive functions. There’s no suggestion of what the mechanics of the effect may be, just a hint that regular consumption of chocolate seems to be good for the brain and may protect against normal age-related cognitive decline.
• Finally here’s a cool article on how police in the Netherlands have developed methods to take down trespassing drones. As everyone knows, they’re ubiquitous now and pose a real security threat but there’s currently no consensus on how best to safely take down drones that are flying where they’re not supposed to be. This article describes how Dutch police have trained eagles to chase down and physically grab drones out of the air.

This month instead of scientific discoveries we have mostly news that is relevant to science:

• By now, most people will have heard of the Zika virus. There are many articles about it obviously so this is one such. It’s a mosquito-borne disease that is wrecking havoc in South America, especially Brazil and while it hasn’t reached Southeast Asia yet, it could as it can be carried by Aedes mosquitos. Most of the infected have no symptoms and it does not seem to be particularly dangerous even to those who do develop symptoms. But researchers suspect that when pregnant women are infected, it can cause a neurological condition known as microcephaly in infants, which shows up in the form of visibly and horribly smaller heads.
• Next up is yet another bit of news about CRISPR, though an unfortunate one. This article describes how credit for its discovery is being disputed by various parties, something that is particularly important in light of how lucrative the patent rights for it will be. In particular a recent piece detailing its history diminishes the role of key women who involved and has been criticized as the latest in a long line of such instances that diminish the importance of women in major discoveries in favor of male colleagues.
• This one is a follow-up to an earlier news posting about the strange behavior of the star KIC 8462852 whose cyclical pattern of dimming has stumped astronomers and prompted one of them to suggest that it may be evidence of an alien-built megastructure. Now a team has gone through old photographs of the star in question and discovered that it has been steadily dimming over the past century or so, which would seem to preclude comets passing between the star and us as the explanation for our observation.
• Then for bona fide scientific discoveries, this article talks about how sugar seems to be an important factor in the growth of cancerous tumors. So far this finding is based only on animal studies but the experiments show that mice who had been fed a diet dominated by sugars were more likely to develop tumors. Moreover, the more sugar they fed the mice, the faster the tumors grew. Interestingly while all sugars had this effect, fructose had a markedly stronger effect than glucose.
• Finally an announcement about artificial intelligence that has been making the rounds is about how a computer built by DeepMind, now a subsidiary of Google, is capable of beating a human champion of the ancient Chinese game of Go. This is considered one of the most complex games ever invented by mankind due to its vast problem space. As far as I can tell however while this is an important result, DeepMind hasn’t done anything truly stunning as they’ve used familiar Monte Carlo techniques to prune the problem space and threw a staggering amount of computing power at the problem. 1202 CPUs and 176 GPUs is nothing to sneeze at, plus they beat someone who is ranked as being around the 600th best player in the world.