Cryptography goes quantum

Darkfrog submitted, created time 4 months 1 week (www.nature.com)

Break out your nitpicking hats, Neal Stephenson fans. Quantum cryptography just got closer to practical.

According to this article in Nature, the code would work not by confusing or foiling those who attempt to break it, but by the idea that any third observer (the first two being the sender and the recipient) would disrupt the message, rendering it unreadable.

The new development is that a team of research have managed to quantum-mechanically connect rubidium ions instead of photons, making the message more robust and giving the message a longer range.

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Genetic Discrimination: No Longer Just Science Fiction

Gene-transcription machinery seen poised for action, held in check until needed

sumsung submitted, created time 1 year 5 months (www.eurekalert.org)

For some time, scientists have been tracking down the sequence of biochemical steps required to attract and assemble at the head end of a gene the molecular machinery needed to transcribe that gene to put to work the information it encodes.

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Profiling phylogenetic informativeness

JeffTownsend submitted, created time 1 year 6 months (www.informaworld.com)

This article lays out a method for describing the utility of a marker for phylogenetic inference during specified historical epochs. It may be useful for phylogenetic experimental design (i.e. what characters or character sets to sample) or for understanding the contribution of different partitions of your data (e.g. genes) to the resolution you achieve.

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Autism May Be More Prevelant Than Previous Estimates

nomad submitted, created time 1 year 10 months (www.sciencedaily.com)

For decades, the best estimate for the prevalence of autism was four to five per 10,000 children. More recent studies from multiple countries using current diagnostic criteria conducted with different methods have indicated that there is a range of ASD prevalence between 1 in 500 children and 1 in 166 children. The CDC studies provide information on the occurrence of ASDs in fourteen communities in the United States

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I know what you're thinking...

drunkard submitted, created time 1 year 10 months (www.nature.com)

Just by looking at the pattern of firing in your brain, neuroscientists can tell whether you are thinking about moving your hand to the left or to the right. They can tell if you have seen something you didn't even know you saw, and, now it seems, they can tell which mathematical operation you secretly have in mind.

"We wanted to see how far we could go with reading peoples' thoughts from their brain activity," says John-Dylan Haynes, lead author of the a study just published in Current Biology.

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