In the UK I’m used to seeing stories about how cunning squirrels manage to defeat every trick humans can come up with and succeed, yet again, in stealing food put out in gardens for birds. But squirrels are cunning in the wild as well, as this US story shows:

California ground squirrels and rock squirrels chew up rattlesnake skin and smear it on their fur to mask their scent from predators, according to a new study by researchers at UC Davis.

Be wary of squirrels, they might be smarter than we are and are just lulling us into a false sense of security by their cute antics.

Some Japanese scientists have taught chimps to play a simple video game, and have found that they are rather better than humans at it.

Yes, really. Nature reports on a paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology that explains how the emerald cockroach wasp enslaves its victim using a neurotoxin, enabling the much smaller wasp to lead the hapless cockroach to its death. Much easier than paralyzing the prey and having to drag it back home yourself, you see. Isn’t science wonderful?

Hey look, fewer cockroaches in the world has to be a good thing, and until such time as politicians work how how to play a similar trick on voters we are safe, right?

Not quite live dinosaurs, but apparently Romania is home to a species of crab that has been around for 150 million years.

You are familiar with the situation, right? A black hole captures an unfortunate star, which ends up in orbit around it. Slowly but surely material from the captured star gets sucked away into an accretion disk around the black hole. Mostly the black hole just sips on this, but every so often, CHOMP! And some lucky astronomers have now seen this in action.

Very spectacular, but perhaps not quite as gruesome as Glenda Larke’s frog-eating post. Don’t go there if you have a delicate stomach or a phobia about snakes.

Want to know what sort of life-forms might live in water rich in methane and hydrogen sulphide? No, you don’t need to go to Titan. New Zealand will do.

Today’s Guardian has an article about Cern’s new Large Hadron Collider, which has now begun construction. This comment caught my eye:

The project may prise open extra dimensions and create baby black holes

You know, baby black holes have a habit of eating things, and growing bigger…

Of course I’m not the only one to have thought of that:

Cern officials are keen to point out that there is no reason to be alarmed by artificial black holes. “You should not deduce that we are ready to build a black hole and Cern along with the planet will disappear, although this is a letter I receive every week,” said Robert Aylmar, head of Cern.

But hey, no week should pass without a new media flap about how we are all going to die, right?

One of the things I love about oceanography is that the denizens of the deep are so weird and wonderful. In particular deep sea fish are bioluminescent – that is they make their own light. So what, I have always wondered, does it look like down there? Now I know. The very clever folks at Oceanlab have been taking film in the briny deep. You can see some of it here. The final clip is fabulous.

Tonight’s Horizon focuses on Ray Kurzweil and human evolution. Obviously viewers outside the UK won’t be able to watch, but there’s a lot of information about the program here.

I’m staying at the Clute’s tonight on my way to San Francisco so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to watch it myself.

OK, who’s up to speed on their fundamental particles? No, OK, here’s a bit of background.

Baryons are particles that are made up of three quarks. The most famous are the proton, made from two Up quarks and one Down quark, and the neutron, made from one Up quark and two Down quarks.

But quarks come in six flavors: Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange and Charm. Which, of course, leaves the way open for all sorts of entertainingly different baryons. My favorite is the omega minus baryon (Ω−), which is made of three Strange quarks. But the odd things about baryons is that no one has ever seen one containing a Bottom quark: until now.

So congratulations to Fermilab for their clever data mining. Here’s hoping they manage to find even more types of baryons. The world would be a boring place if we could not find a baryon with three bottoms.

Well, not quite yet, but some clever folks at Duke reckon that they have developed a cloaking device that renders objects invisible to microwave-based sensors.

Here’s one for all of you particle physics wonks. It would appear that the decay of B mesons proceeds a way that is very different to that predicted by the Standard Model of quantum mechanics. The explanation is way beyond my 30-year-old understanding of particle physics, but I do know enough about science to know that when experimental results differ wildly from theoretical predictions interesting things are likely to happen.

(Love the penguin diagram too.)

Thanks to Deanna Hoak for spotting this one. Physicists in Denmark have apparently succeeded in producing quantum entanglement on a macro level – involving trillions of atoms according to this report. There’s not a lot of information available as yet because Prof. Polzik and his team have announced their work through a letter to the editor of Nature. There is, as yet, no official paper as far as I can see. The letter itself is available through Nature’s web site, but only if you pay $30 for it, so I’m going to go look for an old-fashioned paper edition instead. In the meantime I’ll see if I can get in touch with Oliver Morton.

Update: Here’s Scientific American’s take on the experiment.

Update 2: The Nature podcast has an interview with Professor Polzik that sheds some more light on the subject (and includes the usual Star Trek jokes). One thing to note is that the current techniques for quantum teleportation, while they can transfer large amount of information instantaneously over a long distance, do require a classical (i.e. non-quantum) signal connecting the two sites. The SFnal goal of FtL Communication is therefore ruled out, at least for now.

The Polzik interview is, of course, the last item on the podcast, but there’s other interesting stuff in it too. I was interested to learn, for example, that lions can count, although I think we should all have known that the mammal with the most powerful bite is the Tasmanian Devil. How long the podcast will be available is uncertain. I expect a new one will be up on the 12th, but that you can find the Polzik on in the archives after that.

Update 3: Here’s another summary of the experiment. It isn’t clear quite how much information is being transferred in the teleport, but this article notes that it was achieved with a fidelity of 0.6 (i.e. 60% accuracy) which it compares favorably with the 0.5 you’d expect from a classical information transfer. It is interesting that the quantum entanglement is so much more accurate (and that the “real world” is so inaccurate). At the same time, however, I’d be disinclined to trust a Star Trek-style teleporter that was only 60% accurate.

Those of you who live in New York still have one day left to pop along to Wired’s NextFest exhibition. To whet your appetite, here’s a review of the event with details of some of the types of robot on display.

All of which makes me even more sad that Wired’s coverage of Worldcon consisted largely of poking fun at fandom.