This week’s biggest stories
Voles have almost perfected monogamy, which has made them perfect subjects for studying the neuroscience of love. With the help of rodent Romeos and Juliets, scientists have now pinpointed the specific patterns of brain activity that accompany romance. It’s an exciting development, but this next one blew me away: scientists have also now discovered how the brain recognises faces - effectively by reading the minds of monkeys. Yuh-huh. We’re through the looking glass, people. And on the other side of looking glass may well be the secrets of black holes and dark matter, now that Ligo has detected gravitational waves for the third time. This latests observation brings scientists closer to goal of using gravitational waves to see ancient events invisible to optical and radio telescopes. And from the stars, we looked back into history here on Earth – through ice, although the results have been a little disturbing. Ice cores and records from the era of the Black Death show lead entered the air from human activity – and scientists now think that there’s no such thing as a “natural background” level for lead. So essentially, as one researcher put it: “We have basically been poisoning ourselves for about 2,000 years.” Oops. This last piece of news makes up for it though – scientists have found a way to modify the already pretty magical antibiotic vancomycin so that it works in three ways, making it harder for bugs to develop resistance. This is truly the sort of development that could pull us back from the brink, so ladies and gents of the Scripps Research Institute, I tip my hat and raise my glass to you.
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Weird sea creature of the week
“It looks like two rear-ends on a fish, really,” said one of the researchers who rediscovered the “faceless” deep-sea fish in Australian waters. By golly, by gosh, he’s not wrong.
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Straight from the lab – top picks from our experts on the blog network
Trump science: homeopathy is definitely the best approach for CO2 levels | Brain flapping
Trump keeps saying he has “a very good brain” and is “one of the smartest people anywhere in the world”, so maybe we should take him at his word? He’s the president after all. Granted, nothing he’s done or said thus far supports his claim to be one of the smartest people alive, but when much of your campaign was based on anti-intellectualism, you can’t be seen doing or saying intelligent things. It’s quite smart if you think about it, briefly. So, maybe Trump knows something every other leader, scientist, industrialist and voter doesn’t. What could his logical and scientifically-valid reasons for withdrawing from the Paris accord be? He are a few possibilities.
Black holes swallow stars whole according to new study | Across the universe
Although most now accept that black holes must exist, there is no killer piece of evidence that proves them beyond doubt. This means that some researchers continue to wonder whether something unknown halts the collapse before the gravitational field becomes strong enough to create the black hole.
Researchers develop non-invasive deep brain stimulation method | Neurophilosophy
The new technique has obvious advantages over deep brain stimulation. It also has advantages over existing non-invasive brain stimulation methods, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). “With TMS and tDCS you can activate deep regions, but you also can activate overlying ones, and that could cause unwanted side effects,” says senior author Ed Boyden. “Targets for disorders such as depression, Alzheimer’s, PTSD, and so forth, are deep in the brain, and they might be more selectively stimulatable with our method.”
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Book of the week
Stephen Curry concludes there’s nothing inferior about Angela Saini’s new book on how science got women wrong and is still struggling to free itself from bias.
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Science Weekly podcast
Beaker folk! Not in any way related to the Muppet scientist (as far as we know – genetic discoveries are still being made), but potentially a bronze age people who swept across Europe, taking their bell-shaped pottery with them. Hannah Devlin talks to Ben Roberts, an archaeologist at the University of Durham, about ancient Europe, genetics and the mysterious Beaker folk.
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Eye on science – this week’s top video
Sharks, eh? Always jumping into boats, amirite?
