Most modern cryptographic schemes rely on complexity for security - they can be cracked, but that would take a prohibitively long time, even with enormous computational resources.

Information-theoretic security, in which even an adversary with unbounded computational power could extract no useful information from an encrypted message, is far too complicated to be practical. With the current White House administration engaged in an unprecedented level of domestic spying, there is a great deal of interest in privacy even the government can't crack.

To gain followers on Twitter, some supposed social media and SEO "experts" claim that a lot of volume and following a lot of people is the road to popularity. 

Not really. The most effective strategy is to already be famous. Due to its imbalanced structure, Stephen Hawking is going to get more followers than you because he is already famous. Once a person with a lot of followers notifies the public he is on Twitter, it takes off much faster than if his social media intern followed 100 people with a few dozen followers. Less popular users can compensate for this by increasing their activity and their tweets but the outcome is costly and inefficient. 

If you see a bat zooming toward you this evening, cover your hair. But if you do get bit, you will probably not the flu.

Halloween bats can be a little scary knowing they are not going to spread most viruses. A research project finds that influenza viruses carried by bats pose a low risk to humans.

Fantasizing about sex with two women is common but fantasizing about being urinated on - called a golden shower - is not.

That's just one of the findings from a research project on sexual deviation undertaken by scholars at Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal and Institut Philippe-Pinel de Montréal.

Deviant sexual fantasies are addressed in numerous speculations and conjectures by psychologists but atypical fantasies (paraphilias) are so subjective they aren't really defined. The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) refers to "anomalous" fantasies, while the World Health Organization talks about "unusual" fantasies in defining paraphilias.

4 billion light-years away, inside a collection of nearly 500 galaxies called Pandora's Cluster, are the faint, ghostly glow of stars gravitationally ripped apart several billion years ago.

The scattered stars are no longer bound to any one galaxy and drift freely between galaxies in the cluster. By observing the light from the orphaned stars, Hubble astronomers have assembled forensic evidence that suggests as many as six galaxies were torn to pieces inside the 
Abell 2744
cluster over a stretch of 6 billion years.