Male splendid fairy-wrens flirt using fear and sing a special song each time they hear the call of one of their predators, the butcherbirds. Although this behaviour exposes their position and puts them in danger, it has been determined that this “vocal hitchhiking” on the predator calls is extremely useful for grabbing the attention of the ladies.

“We have shown that females do, in fact, become especially attentive after hearing butcherbird calls,” said Emma Greig, PhD, first author of the study and currently a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University. “So, it seems that male fairy-wrens may be singing when they know they will have an attentive audience, and, based on the response of females, this strategy may actually work!”

[Physorg.com]

I don’t know how this got by us in 2006, but apparently scientists have finally figured out what makes Rice Krispies snap, crackle and pop. It turns out that the fact that they’re made by frightening little Lebensborn demon elves has nothing to do with it and the crackling sound is *not* the burning cinders of hellfire like we were told by our older brother when we were 8.

There’s a scientific explanation involving science and possibly chemistry. You can read more here and explain it to us in the comments: What Makes Your Cereal Go Snap, Crackle and Pop

Researchers studying nine patients who survived swine flu during the H1N1 pandemic have noticed that they produced a wide range of antibodies that could be used to fight off other strains.

Currently they’re looking to see if they can use this to make a universal vaccine that could fight off any type of influenza – even the ones we’re most concerned about here on Weird Things:

We’ll keep our fingers crossed and hope it doesn’t give us an immunity to the bad-ass day walker virus.

BBC News

Over at CrunchGear they have a nice overview of why Minecraft matters. For the uninitiated, Minecraft is a fun sandbox game that lets you build things out of virtual blocks. The blocks have different properties and can be made into materials like glass. Think of it as the Matrix meets Legos. The game is hugely popular and shows how much we like to build and create. Some folks have gone as far as making deck by deck replicas of the starship Enterprise and actual working mechanical computers. Think about that one for a second.

One of the fascinating premises of movies like Tron and the Matrix is the idea of a computer powerful enough to simulate life itself. Although some process (like protein functions) are way beyond our current capabilities, replicating them virtually is an engineering problem and not an insurmountable scientific one. Sooner or later we’re going to see a research paper about a virtual bacteria that behaves precisely like its real world counterpart. From there it’s all a matter of scale before we’re creating virtual Olivia Wilde’s that have cellular chemistry every bit as complex as our own.

Aside from creating super intelligent AI, imagine if you took the 100 smartest people in the world and made virtual versions of them – and then you overclocked the computer. You’d be able to compress 100 years of scientific discovery into minutes. This is why concepts like the singularity give people the willies. It means that all those things we think of as being 1,000 years off in the future could be really just weeks away once you reach a certain level of computational ability.

Games like Minecraft and Sim City are the starting point to a very interesting journey. I hope we’re part of it.

A brief explanation of why Minecraft matters
Building mega objects in Minecraft

“Researchers at the University of Washington have been working on extremely tiny and semi-transparent LEDs designed to be integrated into contact lenses. So far, they’ve managed to create red pixels and blue pixels, and when they can figure out green ones, they’ll be able to make full color displays.”

The downside is that since these contacts, and therefore the images, are below your eyelids you will still see the scary parts even when you close your eyes and hide under the covers. This will be a great new tool for deprogrammers and mind-washers everywhere.

[dvice via Geekologie]

Want to visit the real or imagined past and future without having a pack of wild Lybians trying to shoot you with a GD bazooka? Scientists have found evidence that you can travel through time where you comically meets a horny, teenage version of your mom using only your brain:

Researchers have found evidence for “chronesthesia,” which is the brain’s ability to be aware of the past and future, and to mentally travel in subjective time. They found that activity in different brain regions is related to chronesthetic states when a person thinks about the same content during the past, present, or future.

Heavy, Doc.

[PhysOrg via Kurzweil]

A new finger bone fossil in Southern Siberia belonged to a young lady of an unknown human ancestor. She ain’t Neanderthal and she ain’t early human.

Yes, this means we have to set an extra place at Christmas dinner. No, you don’t have to get her a present. Maybe a nice ring.

[Science Daily]

Seriously though… dude…

Just like solids, liquids and gases, this recently discovered condition represents a state of matter. Called a Bose-Einstein condensate, it was created in 1995 with super-cold atoms of a gas, but scientists had thought it could not be done with photons, which are basic units of light. However, physicists Jan Klärs, Julian Schmitt, Frank Vewinger and Martin Weitz of the University of Bonn in Germany reported accomplishing it. They have dubbed the new particles “super photons.”

The discovery has created a mad rush for the creation of a new strain of weed to fully appreciate the splendor. In other news: dude…

[Live Science]

We’ve finally demonstrated the ability to create and sustain antimatter.

In a new study, physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva were able to create 38 antihydrogen atoms and preserve each for more than one-tenth of a second. The project was part of the ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser PHysics Apparatus) experiment, an international collaboration that includes physicists from the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

It is thought that most antimatter was eliminated shortly after the Big Bang. This will go a long way to our understanding of the mysterious phenomenon.

Or it will create Negaduck.

[Live Science]

Japanese scientists have created a cyborg moth that can track odors by plugging a robot into the moth’s nervous system. The robot’s actions were controlled by electrodes plugged into the moth and the brain signals were rerouted to the motors of the robot. When the moth was exposed to the smell of a female, the robot replicated the moth dance in an attempt to track down the odor. Scientists believe that they can use this system in tracking down explosives.

[New Scientist]

Scientists in London claim that new materials with the ability to control the speed of light would not only be capable of bending light around the object, but also creating an invisibility cloak capable of hiding in both time and space. These materials currently only exist in the mathematical theory of “metamaterials”. Metamaterials are artificial materials “designed and manipulated at a molecular level to interact with and control electromagnetic waves.”

“In some senses our work is mathematically quite closely related to the idea of invisibility cloaking,” McCall told CNN. “It’s just that we’re doing it in space and time instead of just in space. It’s added a new dimension to cloaking, quite literally.”

The scientists are already thinking of real world uses for this technology:

“A safe cracker would be able, for a brief time, to enter a scene, open the safe, remove its contents, close the door and exit the scene, whilst the record of a surveillance camera apparently showed that the safe door was closed all the time,” they write.

I can’t wait.

[CNN]

CERN research scientists have stated that their Big Bang project is going along so swimmingly that, by the end of 2011, they may be able to offer the first proof of extra dimensions beyond the known four.

Guido Tonelli, spokesman for one of the CERN specialist teams monitoring operations in the vast, subterranean LHC, said probing for extra dimensions — besides length, breadth, height and time — would become easier as the energy of the proton collisions in it is increased in 2011.

The LHC will be shut down for maintenance in early December, but will be starting up again in February running full blast looking for those extra dimensions.

[Reuters]

Did you know that male nipples need to be surgically detached and repositioned sometimes? Then you probably didn’t know that the same Golden Ratio used in modern architecture is employed to make sure a gentlemen’s chest nubs look A-OK.

Science!

[Improbable Research]

Researchers have discovered that all primates have an innate ability to repair spinal damage, including humans. They have never noticed this before because scientists usually use rodents in neurology experiments and rodents simply don’t possess neural sprouting.

The researchers found that the injured nerves didn’t regrow. Instead, new nerves sprouted in a process called “spontaneous plasticity,” essentially routing the spinal column around the injury. This kind of neural sprouting doesn’t occur in rodents, which are the animals that scientists typically use in neuroscience experiments. As a result, nobody had noticed this phenomenon before. This new study may lead to more testing on monkeys, but hopefully it will lead to discoveries that allow all primates to grow new nerve cells in the future.

When legendary horse Secretariat died, the veterinary doctors performing the necropsy made a startling realization. There was a reason Big Red destroyed other horses en route to the most convincing Triple Crown win of all time, his heart was gigantic. Over twice the normal size for a horse his weight.

Genome scientists have made a similar discovery with Ozzy Osbourne, thankfully without The Prince Of Darkness having to croak first.

Simply speaking: he’s the Secretariat of drug users.

… the most notable differences in Osbourne’s genes had to do with how he processes drugs and alcohol. Genes connected to addiction, alcoholism and the absorption of marijuana, opiates and methamphetamines all had unique variations in Osbourne, a few of which Knome geneticists had never seen before.

“He had a change on the regulatory region of the ADH4 gene, a gene associated with alcoholism, that we’ve never seen before,” Conde told ABCnews.com. “He has an increased predisposition for alcohol dependence of something like six times higher. He also had a slight increased risk for cocaine addiction, but he dismissed that. He said that if anyone has done as much cocaine he had, they would have been hooked.”

They also found some Neanderthal DNA, because, well why not.

[ABC News via Reason]

“This may sound like science fiction, the ability to selectively erase memories,” says Huganir. “But this may one day be applicable for the treatment of debilitating fearful memories in people, such as post-traumatic stress syndrome associated with war, rape or other traumatic events.”

[Physorg.com via Kotaku]