Even More Eurekas!

Science headline of the week:

MORALITY ASKEW IN PSYCHOPATHS

From the Neuroscience section of Science News, under “Meeting Notes.”

Another item there is headlined: “Parasite twists rats’ innate fear.” The parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, fools the rat into mistaking the smell of cat urine for the scent of a luscious, lascivious female rat. Talk about star-crossed lovers.

*

Scientific article lead of the week:
(Science News again; they never sleep):

“The graves of people who died 12,000 years ago rarely contain a woman’s skeleton pinned down in an unusual position by large stones, accompanied by another person’s foot and a menagerie of animal remains, including tortoise shells and marten skulls.”

Right. But guess what? That’s exactly what they found!

*

Time-Traveling Code Crackers

The ultimate weapon against sneaks and snoops is quantum encryption. If someone steals or intercepts the key and listens in, it’s immediately obvious because, once it’s read, a transmitted unit changes from its fuzzy, indeterminate quantum state to a firmly resolved piece of data. So the sneak’s cover is blown.

But now, a team of physicists from USC report online (arxiv.org/abs/0811.1209) that if there are wormholes present (not the nematode variety; the Stephen Hawking variety), the eavesdroppers could go back in time and intercept the message before their presence is detected.

To paraphrase one of the many Jesus-Moses golf jokes, “Come on guys. Are you gonna do science, or you just gonna fuck around?”

2 Comments »

1. Regarding the woman’s grave with a smattering of stuff in it: Did anyone try to draw a conclusion about this? Or is it actually possible that someone figured that as long as they had the hole, they might as well clean up the cave?

   Comment by Steve Alber — December 5, 2008 @ 9:05 am

2. They think the lady was a shaman. The grave is in Israel, so the tradition of Jewish doctors is long one. But these pre-Israelites were Natufian, among whom –as in most traditional societies — shamans were buried with great honor and ample provisions, in this case tortoises and someone else’s foot. To confuse us further, the lead researcher is named Ofer Bar-Yosef — of Harvard.

   But in my initial post, I was so transfixed with the sixth grade syntactical structure of the lead that I ignored all the real anthropology.

   Comment by Al — December 5, 2008 @ 11:23 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>