This week in science

Happy Wednesday morning! Thanks for joining in for another week. This is round 2 of This Week in Science and I’ve picked out 5 cool pieces for you. We’ve got:

1. Accidentally raising the ocean temperature while trying to fight pollution.

2. Controlling sepsis with a protein therapy.

3. Speeding up science by changing how it’s funded.

4. Gravitational waves.

5. Reading people’s minds by listening to Pink Floyd.

Enjoy! And let me know what you think by taking the polls at the bottom and/or sending me an email with your thoughts.

Climate change is slowly but steadily making the ocean hotter. And unfortunately, we accidentally sped things up while trying to cut back on ship pollution. Historically, ships emit a lot of sulfur which is bad for a variety of reasons (greenhouse gas, acid rain, etc).

Recently, the United Nations mandated cutting ship pollution, leading to large drops in sulfur emissions. This had some unintended consequences. Namely, it greatly reduced the number of “ship tracks”, or low-lying clouds that form after a ship passes (just like airplanes).

Turns out these ship tracks were disguising just how hot we’ve made the ocean. The low-lying clouds reflect sunlight and kept the ocean cooler. Without them, the ocean is significantly hotter, leading to this year being a record high ocean temperature.

Sepsis happens during extreme infections and triggers widespread inflammation while also paralyzing the immune system. This is a terrible combo and often results in death. The combination of high inflammation with immunoparalysis is rare and particularly hard to treat.

The authors of this study used targeted delivery of the protein therapy IL-4 to simultaneously awaken the immune system while treating the inflammation.

Science funding is *slow*. For example, I just applied for a Fellowship through the National Institute of Health that even if I got, would take at least ~6-9 months for me to get any of the money. My research group recently applied for several grants that have up to 20 months of wait time.

What happens if you run out of money? There’s truly not a good way of getting more money fast in science. Or even moderately fast. The only option is slow. Have a great idea and want to try it out? Either use the money you got for something else or wait a year. This slows down science and limits how creative researchers can be.

Gravitational waves were recently detected, validating part of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. This is a little primer on them, what we know, and where the field is going.

This is pretty much what it sounds like. Using small recording devices implanted in people’s brains to monitor for seizures, scientists were able to decode brain activity and figure out what the people were listening to. They did this by using machine learning to interpret the signals (no, not ChatGPT).

They quite literally read these people’s minds just to hear a Pink Floyd song. A little anticlimactic, but still pretty cool.

See you next week for more science,

Neil

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