This week in science

Happy Wednesday morning! Thanks to everyone who filled out last week’s polls. It’s super helpful and will inform some changes coming shortly to Science Simplified.

Here’s 5 interesting articles I came across this week, hope you like them.

I mean really, where’d the tails go? At some point, our ape ancestors and us lost our tails. This article discovers a possible genetic mechanism behind the tail loss, pointing to a specific “genetic element” that could be the culprit. A little lame if you ask me. I feel like I’d have better balance with a tail.

Science drives progress. Science helps society. Science is a foundation of the US. But most of all, Science takes money. And unfortunately, Congress isn’t interested in providing it and hasn’t been for some time.

This is entirely unsurprising given that half of US politics is stoutly anti-science, but it’s disappointing and frightening for the future of US science regardless.

Don’t get me wrong, we still spend a lot of money on science as a country, but we’ve long stopped keeping up with inflation and are now even cutting budgets.

A cool new paper on a creative way to deliver drugs to the stomach by drinking hydrogel precursors. Hydrogels are a common way to deliver drugs that lets them last for longer and survive in harsh environments, like the stomach. The problem is, it can be difficult to get a gel to the stomach.

You can’t chew it, or the drug will get released/destroyed early. You can’t drink it, it’s a solid (imagine trying to drink jello). You can’t inject it or implant it directly in the stomach, it’s a huge pain.

So what can you do? These authors designed a simple hydrogel system consisting of two main parts that you drink back-to-back. After drinking, the parts end up in the stomach and react together to form the gel. Creative, simple, and effective!

Cool pics! Always a staple in This Week in Science. They include a huge solar flare (featured above), neon neurons, space shuttles, sharks, and more.

See you next week for more science,

Neil

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