A group of computer scientists in Vienna have built a computer network that uses quantum encryption for its security. And it is not a lab toy. There is some 200 km of fiber optic cable linking six locations in Vienna and a nearby town. Impressive stuff. And allegedly unbreakable security.
Update: Apparently the “unbreakable” security has been cracked already. Stories here and here. And apologies to DrJon for our spam trap having eaten his comment.
With all of the fuss about financial markets I completely missed this potentially more serious story. I just caught up with it via Nature, and they don’t seem too worried right now, but it has a small potential to be very, very bad indeed.
Those of you who have read Passage by Connie Willis will remember that the book centers around the idea that people who are dying can have “out of body” experiences. Are such things real? Well, The Guardian reports that a group of researchers at Southampton University plan to find out. One of the classic elements of the “out of body” report is that people report being able to look down upon their bodies lying in bed, so the experimenters will place a number of postcards in places that can only be seen by someone hovering above the bed. If their subjects can correctly recall seeing the postcards (the contents of which they do not know in advance) then their viewpoint will be proven to have moved.
The Guardian journalist manages to demonstrate about as much knowledge of logic as a creationist, but then it is her job to incite a flame war so I guess I shouldn’t be too hard.
Sometimes knowing stuff can be depressing. I was looking at the hurricane tracker map for Gustav and I suddenly wondered what the storm surge pattern looked like. Conveniently there is map (scroll down). It doesn’t look good. I suspect that there are two factors at work here. Firstly hurricanes rotate counter-clockwise, which means you always get a bigger northward surge to the east of them than to the west. And secondly there are probably factors in the shape of the sea bottom up through the Breton Sound that funnels any surge coming into it. The net result is that while the eye of the hurricane might be coming ashore near Lafayette, the biggest rises in sea level will be near new Orleans.
Damn.
Update: rotation corrected as per George below.
Here’s one for Jay Lake: Ben Goldacre on how journalists and celebrities cause vaccination panics.
We all know that chimps can be taught sign language, right? So a chimp can learn the sign for banana and the sign for ball and can make the right sign when shown the particular object. But is that language? Isn’t language something more than information transfer? Well, yes it is. We humans are very clever apes and we do all sorts of things with language. Can chimps argue a point, or negotiate for what they want? It appears that they can. This article describes a paper by Janni Pedersen of Iowa State University. It analyzes a video of a conversation between a bonobo chimp, Panbanisha, and a human, Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. Pedersen has this to say about Panbanisha:
“She was using language to get at what she wanted,” Pedersen said. “She is very, very clever and is fully capable of following the conversation the same way a human does. This tells me that Panbanisha’s knowledge of language is far beyond understanding the words, to understanding how to use them in a conversation to get what she wants.”
And one of these days a chimp is going to learn the sign language for “vote”.
Interesting news today about our long-extinct Neanderthal cousins. Apparently they were just as good at making tools as our ancestors. There’s an overview in The Guardian, and somewhat more detail here. I particularly liked this bit:
The University of Exeter is the only university in the world to offer a degree course in Experimental Archaeology. This strand of archaeology focuses on understanding how people lived in the past by recreating their activities and replicating their technologies. Eren says: “It was only by spending three years in the lab learning how to physically make these tools that we were able to finally replicate them accurately enough to come up with our findings.”
So, where are all the Neanderthal re-enactment groups, eh?
Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science blog is a favorite of mine as it is very good at debunking nonsense, but today he has a post that claims that magic works:
Alia Crum and Ellen Langer from Harvard psychology department took 84 female hotel attendants in 7 hotels. They were cleaning an average of 15 rooms a day, each requiring half an hour of walking, bending, pushing, lifting, and carrying. These women were clearly getting a lot of good exercise, but they didn’t believe it: 66.6% of them reported not exercising regularly, and 36.8% said they didn’t get any exercise at all.
Their health, measured by things like weight, body fat, body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio and blood pressure, was related to their perceived amount of exercise, rather than the actual amount of exercise they got
And it gets better. The researchers then divided the subjects into two groups. One of them got a series of lectures explaining to them how healthy their lifestyles were, and the other group did not. After four weeks the group that had received the lectures showed a marked increase in health.
I’m sold from now on I am having Kevin tell me three times a day* how healthy my lifestyle is.
(* As every good magician knows, you have to tell people things three times before they become true.)
Nicola Griffith wants to hack your cranial hardware and re-program you. And she thinks that she can do this with fiction. There’s a whole pile of science behind it as well. Good stuff.
When I was at college there was no money at all in oceanography. That’s why I never finished my doctorate. By global warming and over-fishing have changed all that. Now we urgently need to know all sorts of things about our oceans. And now my former colleagues get to go on expeditions like this. Which is exactly the sort of thing I dreamed of as a kid, and why I signed up for the course in the first place.
Ah well, if I was spending my life swanning about the Caribbean in research vessels I probably would never have won a Hugo, or met Kevin.
On the face if it, watching a movie ought to be a lot more intense than reading a book. After all, in a movie you can actually see things happen to people. When reading a book you have to imagine it. But human brains are wonderful things, and a recent experiment has shown that reading a description of an event in a book has very much the same effect on your brain as watching it happen in a movie.
Now here’s a modest proposal. What if you ran the experiment with a number of different stories, all describing the same thing, but written by different people. Would that prove which writer was the best? Oh my, can of worms.
With the Large Hadron Collider about to enter full operation, Jennifer Ouellette brings news of a new protest against the instrument:
Continue reading
Today’s Independent has a feature highlighting a story from the latest issue of New Scientist. It is the latest shot in the ongoing war over whether men and women have “different” brains. Are men aliens from Mars who are incapable of understanding shopping or asking for directions, or are they just crippled by their upbringing? As the Indy rather breathlessly puts it:
The differences in the circuitry that wires them up and the chemicals that transmit messages inside them are so great as to point to the conclusion that there is not just one kind of human brain, but two, according to recent neurological studies.
Well maybe. Or maybe not. The actual New Scientist article is subscriber-only, but I’m sufficiently interested to stump up the cash when I have time to read it. I don’t, however, expect the study to be at all definitive, and the comments listed at the end of the Indy article are pretty much indicative of what I expect in the way of reactions.
By far the most important point here is that there is no binary. If the development of human brains is affected by chemical balances in the womb, and by your environment, then the resulting mix of human beings will not be all either “male-brained” or “female-brained”, they will be on a probability distribution that is weighted strongly to the extremes, but doesn’t fall to zero even in the middle. And in some cases “brain sex” and “body sex” won’t match up.
Because apparently it is possible to “pull a quantum state back from the brink of collapse, ‘uncollapsing’ it and returning it to its unobserved state.” Nature explains. I’m afraid it is a bit to much for my brain this evening.
Scarcely a summer goes by without the UK media reporting some weather event as the most extreme “since records began”. It gets a bit predictable. This one, however, is a good one. A climate scientist from the University of Colorado is suggesting that, for the first time in recorded history, the North Pole could be free of ice this summer. Ah, Martin Frobisher, if only you were alive today.
Just when you thought it was safe to leave your bunker, Nature has a whole pile of stories about cataclysmic asteroid impacts.
Firstly here’s an article about some of the odd theories advanced to explain the Tunguska crater.
Next up, an article about South Pole–Aitken, a crater on the moon that is 2,600 kilometers across and 12 kilometers deep (which as Nature helpfully explains is “big enough to blot out half of China and hide the highest mountains of Tibet”).
And finally, the biggest crater in the solar system: a hole on Mars that is 10,600 kilometers long and 8,500 kilometers wide. There’s even a computer-generated simulation of the asteroid impact smashing the top off Mars. Ouch!
In which Jennifer Ouellette explains why the Large Hadron Collider will not destroy Earth. Not that this will convince any of the protesters. If they didn’t trust CERN in the first place, they certainly won’t trust a safety assessment published by CERN.
Over at Cocktail Party Physics, Jennifer Ouellette talks about the physics behind Jean-Michel Jarre’s laser harp (complete with video). She also talks about the photocello and the photonic guitar, which use optical fibers instead of strings, and were invented by a chap from Montreal.
Hello, Anticipation Programming? Any chance of getting Professor Kashyup to Worldcon next year?
Yes, we are. Here’s Ben Goldacre on experiments that show, amongst other things, that people are far more likely to act on advice if they have paid for it than if it was free, even though they are told in advance that the quality of the advice is the same in both cases.
Jennifer Ouellette has a new blog on the Discovery Channel web site. Today she looks at a wonderful piece of steampunk theater: a telescope that allows you to look through the Transatlantic Tunnel. Of course the whole think is faked with webcams, but it is a lovely idea. Hopefully someone will invite Harry Harrison along to look through it. It is abut time he got credit for writing steampunk back in 1972.