Himalayan Glaciers Shrinking, With Some Exceptions | Wired Science An important portion of the Himalaya’s glacier cover is currently stable and, thanks to an insulating layer of debris, may be even growing, a new study finds. The study’s conclusion contradicts a portion of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that had to be retracted last year because it could not be substantiated. Though the IPCC report stated that the risk of the region’s glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high,” the new study finds that ice cover is stable in the Karakoram mountains, a northern range that holds about half of the Himalaya’s store of frozen water. That’s not to imply that water reservoirs on what’s often called the roof of the world aren’t under stress. Scherler’s team pored over satellite images of 286 glaciers throughout the Himalayas. Indeed, for much of the past century Karakoram’s glaciers were in retreat. In general, the warmer the air above a glacier becomes the faster exposed ice will melt. See Also:
A Step Towards Quantum Computing: Entangling 10 Billion Particles | 80beats In life, most people try to avoid entanglement, be it with unsavory characters or alarmingly large balls of twine. In the quantum world, entanglement is a necessary step for the super-fast quantum computers of the future. According to a study published by Nature today, physicists have successfully entangled 10 billion quantum bits, otherwise known qubits. But the most significant part of the research is where the entanglement happened–in silicon–because, given that most of modern-day computing is forged in the smithy of silicon technology, this means that researchers may have an easier time incorporating quantum computers into our current gadgets. Quantum entanglement occurs when the quantum state of one particle is linked to the quantum state of another particle, so that you can’t measure one particle without also influencing the other. Spinning particles are all well and nice, but what do they have to do with computing? Image: Stephanie Simmons
New Doubts Raised About Potential Bee-Killing Pesticide | Wired Science A federal entomologist has become the latest researcher to voice doubts about neonicotinoids, a controversial new type of pesticide that may be linked to the collapse of honeybee populations in the United States. The Independent reports that in a documentary screened in Europe but not yet broadcast stateside, USDA bee specialist Jeffrey Pettis describes exposing two groups of bees, one dosed with a neonicotinoid called imidacloprid, to Nosema, a common honeybee disease. Pesticide-dosed bees proved especially vulnerable to infection. Imidacloprid is manufactured by German agrochemical Bayer, who also manufacture clothianidin, another neonicotinoid. Since its approval, clothianidin has become widespread. Correlation isn’t cause, but there are already grounds for concern about clothianidin. “Clothianidin’s major risk concern is to non-target insects (that is, honey bees),” wrote those researchers. Image: Flickr, Jack Wolf See Also:
Quantum Entanglement Whatever happened to one particle would thus immediately affect the other particle, wherever in the universe it may be. Einstein called this "Spooky action at a distance." Amir D. Aczel, Entanglement, The Greatest Mystery In Physics. The Theory When a photon (usually polarized laser light) passes through matter, it will be absorbed by an electron. When the original photon splits into two photons, the resulting photon pair is considered entangled. The process of using certain crystals to split incoming photons into pairs of photons is called parametric down-conversion. Normally the photons exit the crystal such that one is aligned in a horizontally polarized light cone, the other aligned vertically. To illustrate, if an entangled photon meets a vertical polarizing filter (analagous to the fence in Figure 4.4), the photon may or may not pass through. The Practice Experiments have shown that Einstein may have been wrong: entangled photons seem to communicate instantaneously. Figure 5.1.
To Learn Best, Write an Essay | Wired Science Trying to remember what you’ve just studied, then writing it down, may be a surprisingly good way to learn. In a study published January 21 in Science, researchers asked 200 college students to spend five minutes reading a short passage about a scientific subject. Afterwards, they were either told to re-read it several times, as if cramming for a test; make “concept maps” of the material; or spend 10 minutes writing a free-form essay about the passage. One week later, the students were given short-answer tests on what they remembered, and asked to draw logical conclusions from those facts. Students were then asked to draw concept maps from memory, and the essay-writers again did best, beating those students who made concept maps the first time around. The findings are necessarily limited, but do suggest that retrieval practice, as the essay-writing was called, is a powerful learning tool. However, concept mapping and cramming did prove useful in at least one way. See Also:
Bibliography of Quantum Cryptography by Gilles Brassard Département IRO, Université de Montréal. The original PostScript file from Gilles Brassard - provided by Edith Stoeveken - was converted to ASCII and reformatted in HTML; Sept 2 1994, Stephan Kaufmann. Abstract This paper provides an extensive annotated bibliography of papers that have been written on quantum cryptography and related topics. 1. For ages, mathematicians have searched for a system that would allow two people to exchange messages in perfect privacy. In addition to key distribution, quantum techniques may also assist in the achievement of subtler cryptographic goals, important in the post-cold war world, such as protecting private information while it is being used to reach public decisions. In the past few years, a remarkable surge of interest in the international scientific and industrial community has propelled quantum cryptography into mainstream computer science and physics. 2. Quantum cryptography is best known for key distribution. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Sleeping Protects Memories From Corruption | Wired Science “You must remember this,” Sam the piano player crooned to Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. The couple might have recalled even more about their days in Paris if they’d been napping when Sam played the tune again. Replaying memories while people are awake leaves their memories subject to tinkering. But reactivating memories during sleep protects them from interference, researchers in Germany and Switzerland report online January 23 in Nature Neuroscience. The finding shows that the brain handles memories differently during sleep than while awake, says Sara Mednick, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego who was not involved in the research. In the new study, volunteers played a Concentration-type game in which they had to remember the locations of pairs of cards. Both sleeping and awake volunteers who didn’t have their memories jogged by the odor remembered about 60 percent of the pairs. Image: Flickr/mollyollyoxenfree See Also:
How Quantum Cryptology Works" The idea that a vote cast by a person remains the same after he submitted it is taken very seriously in any democracy. Voting is the right of the citizen, and it's how we choose the people who make important decisions on our behalf. When the security of the ballot is compromised, so, too, is the individual's right to choose his leaders. There are plentiful examples of vote tampering throughout history in the United States and in other countries. But, hopefully, the days when paper ballots get lost on the back roads of Florida en route to be counted will soon be gone, and the hanging chad will become an obscure joke on sitcom reruns from the early 21st century. One of the ways to safeguard votes is to limit access to them when they're being transferred from precincts to central polling stations where they're tallied. Id Quantiques' quantum encryption is the first public use of such a technique.
Slime Molds Are Earth’s Smallest, Oldest Farmers | Wired Science Colonies of a bizarre microbial goo have been found practicing agriculture at a scale tinier than any seen before. Animals such as ants, snails and beetles are known to farm fungus. But the slime mold’s bacterial-farming trick takes it into a whole new realm.. “If you can pack your food source with you, it’s a serious advantage,” said molecular biologist Debra Brock of Rice University, co-author of the slime-mold study, published Jan. 19 in Nature. Dictyostelium discoideum, the best-known of a group of creatures called slime molds, spends part of its life as a single-celled amoeba feeding on bacteria that grow in decomposing leaves on forest floors. When food is short, hundreds of thousands of amoebas come together, fusing into a single entity. It’s been thought that slime molds simply scavenge, eating bacteria they like and oozing out the rest. When grown in the lab, the unusual fruiting bodies grew both the slime mold and the bacteria. See Also:
Traditional Cryptology Problems" Both the secret-key and public-key methods of cryptology have unique flaws. Oddly enough, quantum physics can be used to either solve or expand these flaws. The problem with public-key cryptology is that it's based on the staggering size of the numbers created by the combination of the key and the algorithm used to encode the message. These numbers can reach unbelievable proportions. What's more, they can be made so that in order to understand each bit of output data, you have to also understand every other bit as well. The keys used in modern cryptography are so large, in fact, that a billion computers working in conjunction with each processing a billion calculations per second would still take a trillion years to definitively crack a key [source: Dartmouth College]. But SKC has its problems as well. It's possible to send a message concerning which key a user would like to use, but shouldn't that message be encoded, too? Quantum physics has provided a way around this problem.
Legendary Dinosaur King Didn’t Survive on Fast Food | Wired Science According to the latest installment in the ongoing saga over the king of dinosaurs’ dietary habits, Tyrannosaurus rex was not simply an oversize scavenger. By the time T. rex was lucky enough to find a carcass, smaller animals would have stripped it to the bone first, claims a new study of the giant dino’s fierce competition for rotting flesh. The Jan. 26 study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B doesn’t explore what T. rex hunted, but it counters earlier research that suggested the creature could survive only on carrion when it roamed North America some 65 million years ago. “This has been a discussion for as long as we’ve known about [T. rex's] existence,” said study co-author and ecologist Chris Carbone of the Institute of Zoology in London. “Some people say it’s a settled issue, that it both scavenged and hunted, but evidence is scarce and we see both extremes in behavior in large carnivores today.” “I never really bought the ‘it was only a scavenger’ arguments. See Also: