Apparently “quantum cats” are “photons (particles of light), boosting prospects for manipulating light in new ways to enhance precision measurements as well as computing and communications based on quantum physics” and not a new Saturday Morning cartoon featuring super powered felines solving mysteries and learning a little about themselves and others along the way.

[Science Daily]

If you thought staying away from airports would keep you safe from the new full-body scanners that were recently deployed think again. As this video shows back-scatter enabled vans are already rolling out.

According to Forbes:

American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents

Due to this recent development, now may be the perfect time to invest in lead underwear.

Who hasn’t dealt with a psychopath? You offer to help them put a sofa in the back of a van one moment, badda bing badda boom you’re putting the lotion on your skin or else you get the hose again…

A new report by Scientific American’s MIND magazine looks into the new research being done into the area of criminally crazy people. Included among the findings on the studies of sociopaths:

• Aided by EEGs and brain scans, scientists have discovered that psychopaths possess significant impairments that affect their ability to feel emotions, read other people’s cues and learn from their mistakes.

• These deficiencies may be apparent in children who are as young as five years old.

• When you tally trials, prison stays and inflicted damage, psychopaths cost us $250 billion to $400 billion a year.

• Psychopaths have traditionally been considered untreatable, but novel forms of therapy show promise.

A cure for psychopaths! Rejoice, Great Big Fat People the world over!

[Scientific American]

Finally, science is addressing the truly important questions… Namely, why that homely girl you took home after a night of drinking seemed much hotter the night before.

…two photos of the same person were supplied. One was natural. The other was subtly altered to make their face less symmetrical. Symmetry is one of the keys to perceived beauty. Respondents were asked which photo they preferred.

In the second test, more altered photos were supplied. The pub-goers were asked to rate the attractiveness of those.

As it turns out, alcohol keeps us from properly assessing the symmetry in people’s faces, and as we all know the more symmetrical a face the more attractive we perceive it to be.  What’s worse is that the uglier the person is the more this effect is enhanced.

See? Now instead of making excuses to your friends you can defend yourself with sound scientific fact!

[thestar.com]

We told you last week about a possible new therapy hoping to regrow body parts. Unlike the ill-fated research of Dr. Curt Connors, it does not use the DNA of an animal that naturally regrows limbs so the likelihood of the recipient turning into a giant lizard and forcing Spider-man to do a backflip whilst saying something glib… is unlikely.

But that was that therapy. This therapy makes none of the same boring promises.

Scientists are regrowing mouse limbs with newt and salamander DNA and humans could be next.

“Newts regenerate tissues very effectively,” said Helen Blau, PhD, the Donald E. and Delia B. Baxter Professor and a member of Stanford’s Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. “In contrast, mammals are pathetic. We can regenerate our livers, and that’s about it. Until now it’s been a mystery as to how they do it.”

Not noted in the story is that lightning struck right after she called mammals pathetic.

The unsolved puzzle to limb regeneration is apparently the rampant cancer that unchecked cell replication can kick start. Mouse trials have utilized two tumor-suppressing proteins to keep that mess in check.

Peter Parker, it’s time you came face to face with… The Newt.

Thanks to Weird Things reader Dan Wheeler for passing this along.

[Science Daily]

Paging Dr. Connors… Dr. Curt Connors…

Researchers at the Tufts Center for Regenerative & Developmental Biology at Tufts University are testing whether a replicated amniotic (womb fluid) environment can promote limb regeneration in adult mammals.

Trials in rats have now begun. No word yet if Empire State University has received their grant yet…

[Chemical & Engineering News via Kurzweil]

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Cadillac of dead body retrieval technology…

The system involves a small aluminum pipette that can detect trace amounts of a chemical called ninhydrin-reactive nitrogen, which collects in air pockets around a grave site. It’s the only known example of testing the chemical in its vapor phase, NIST says. As an added bonus, the system works at ambient temperatures instead of freezing cold, which could make it easy to transport.

Chemists Thomas J. Bruno and Tara M. Lovestead tested it on dead rats, burying some in 3 inches of soil and laying others on top of the soil. For comparison, they also tested boxes with no dead rats in them. The NRN compound was still detectable after nearly five months, the researchers say. A paper on their findings was published in the journal Forensic Science International.

Cross that one off your Christmas wish list.

[PhysOrg via Pop Sci]

Kidnapped by scientists who dress like Nazis, but aren’t actually Nazis, the trio is pushed to try a radical new procedure that would make them temporarily gay. With the life of a young child on the line, they have to confront their own concept of sexuality and identity and make a potentially life changing choice and end up offending just about everyone. Then it gets kind of boring, but there’s a twist ending and a guy with mutant feet.

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A Polish plant biologist is suggesting that plants are capable of thought.

Plants “remember” information about light, and a certain type of cell transmits that information, much like nerves do in animals.

In the study, which has not yet been published, the researchers found that light shone on one leaf of an Arabidopsis thaliana plant caused the whole plant to respond. The response lasted even after the light source was taken away, suggesting the plant remembered the light input.

Different wavelengths of light produce a different response, suggesting the plants use the information to generate protective chemical reactions — like pathogen defense or food production.

Rick Moranis is terrified.

[Pop Sci]

Tinkerers from the Site3 coLabratory have discovered how to make fire… with your mind!

The PK4A Project uses a headset to read brain patterns and a small homemade computer to increase or decrease the flame based on the user’s cerebral input.

The headset is called the NeuroSky MindSet and uses four sensors to detect two of the eight energy bands the brain produces. The computer interprets the brainwaves using a custom algorithm and reflects the level of activity with a massive propane flame.

Safety is obviously a concern so the inventors use a ‘dead-man switch,’ which constantly has to be pressed for the device to function.

While there are no plans to put the item up for sale basic specs are available on the project site.

If you can’t wait to see this thing in action, here’s a video of them using it at Firefly 2010.

Shooting a diamond bullet at anything might be the most Bowie badass thing ever conceived of, but if, as Chinese scientists are now theorizing it can also create nuclear power then we have a new favorite source of alternative energy.

[Popular Science]

Russian legends tell of a breed of homonids who were excellent herders, tough as (the yet to be invented) nails and most importantly made a sport of fighting Griffins for caches of gold.

It now appears that we have biological proof of these legendary wild men.

Siberia’s Denisova cave held the pinky bone of an unknown early human species, a genetics team reported in March. The Naturejournal study, led by Johannes Krause of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, offered no answer for what happened to this “archaic” human species, more than one million years old and living near their human and Neanderthal cousins as recently as 30,000 years ago.

But at least one scholar has an intriguing answer: “The discovery of material evidence of a distinct hominin (human) lineage in Central Asia as recently as 30,000 years ago does not come as a surprise to those who have looked at the historical and anecdotal evidence of ‘wild people’ inhabiting the region,” wrote folklorist Michael Heaney of the United Kingdom’s Bodleian Library Oxford, in a letter to The Times of London.

So it’s just a matter of finding some Griffin bones. But now that we have a pinky bone of a wild man, we just have to look for the foot he buried in the winged lion’s butt.

[USA Today]

Sick of using all sorts of different shapes of things only for the purpose they were initially designed for? Step right up to the bold new future named programmable matter!

To make them self-folding, computer scientist Daniela Rus at MIT and her colleagues embedded strips just 100 microns thick – as wide as a human hair – made of a “shape-memory” nickel-titanium alloy that changes shape when heated or cooled. They also included flexible, stretchable copper-laminated plastic mesh ribbons on the sheets that served as wires.

When electricity running through the coppery ribbons was applied to heat the shape memory alloy strips to 70 degrees C (158 degrees F) or more, they went from flat to bent, causing the entire sheet to fold with them. In the end, the 32-tile sheets the researchers devised could fold into origami boats and airplanes.

This means a whole toolbox could be replaced by one single anamorphic shape shifting tool. Like Mystique, but with a phillips AND flat heads.

[Yahoo]

Our primate brains seem to equate seriousness with touching heavier or harder objects. For example, a resume on thick stock will be taken more serious than something printed off on fax paper.

Think I’m kidding? Would someone with a business card made of stainless steel, weighing 8 lbs. be joking?

[National Geographic]

New, real-time brain scan accurately predicted 2/3rds of study respondents would make a decision even if they told the administrator they would do the opposite. Could revolutionize advertising, education and determining if bartender at Chilis is flirting with you because she likes you or if she’s just looking for a bigger tip.

[Reuters]

Just because cats are trying to take control of our brains doesn’t mean they need them. In this eerie footage we see a cat achieve 3 different gait patterns with NO BRAIN AT ALL! Scientists turned off the cats brain to study how much of an animal’s movement is controlled by thought and how much is simply a mechanical mechanism.

As if we needed another reason to fear cats…