Quantum cryptography is the technology of the future for military and financial organizations because it sends information as entangled particles of light - anyone who tries to tap into the information changes it in a way that reveals their presence.

The data is encoded with an encrypted key but one important limitation is range.  The longest distance over which an encrypted key can be sent is approximately 100 kilometers but new technology developed by researchers increases 30-fold the amount of time the memory can hold information, which means that a series of quantum repeaters, arrayed like Christmas lights on a string, could reach distances in excess of 1,000 kilometers.

The Museum of UnNatural History has a page about the Kraken, of course, a pleasant romp through the history of the mythological creature, but unfortunately it does its part to perpetrate a common misunderstanding about the giant squid: that this poor animal is actually capable of taking on a whale.

Though giant squids are considerably less then a mile and a half across, some are thought to be large enough to wrestle with a whale. On at least three occasions in the 1930's they reportedly attacked a ship. While the squids got the worst of these encounters when they slid into the ship's propellers, the fact that they attacked at all shows that it is possible for these creatures to mistake a vessel for a whale.

Week number one of my course on Subnuclear Gauge Physics is over. I think that in the first five hours of lesson I have given to my students a reasonable picture of the early experimental attempts and theoretical developments aimed at understanding the structure of atomic nuclei and individual nucleons with electron scattering. So I thought I might try and simplify the picture further, to reach a wider audience here. Of course, the topic is not terribly entertaining, unless one understands fully just how important these studies are for fundamental physics even nowadays -despite having started over 60 years back.

Yesterday, I posted Game Theory's El Farol Bar problem, with a couple questions. (If you haven't read it yet, go back—the answer's no good without the puzzle.) And the truth is there's no answer, or more precisely, there's no pure strategy that works—if everyone decides to go, the bar's too crowded and it's no fun; if everyone decides to stay home, the bar will be empty and it would've been more fun to go.