More than 60 years after the last confirmed sighting, a strange deer with vampire-like fangs is roaming the rugged forested slopes of northeast Afghanistan, according to a research team which confirmed the species presence during recent surveys.

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. 

It's not all bad news for older brains. Credit: Shutterstock

By Angela Gutchess, Brandeis University

Have you ever wondered if any spaceship could ever travel through the sun with future technology? What if it is as big as Mercury or larger? Nothing material will work that we know of.  The sun's temperature of 26 million degrees is far too hot, and the most refractory substances we know of melt at a few thousand degrees. It seems a hopeless task. But there are a few things to explore, so let's look a bit more closely.

(You can download this article as a kindle ebook)

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.

The popular description of virtual particles “borrowing” energy and popping in and out of existence all the time is very misleading. There are no such processes “really happening” in the way of a naïve, classically mechanistic physicalism. Instead, all potential partial processes consistent with the observations are together what the observation supervenes on.

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.

When Australian singer and TV personality Mark Holden appeared as a clown recently on Channel 7’s "Dancing with the Stars", his supposedly “bizarre” behavior sparked furious debate and complaints to the network, demonstrating the problematic nature of the clown figure today.

The clown has a long history, ranging from the court clowns of ancient Egypt and imperial China, and trickster figures of Native American cultures, through the “sanctioned fool” of Renaissance drama and zanni of the commedia dell arte, to mainstay of the circus in the 19th century.

Children and adults alike are digging out those spooky costumes ready for a celebration.

We’ve reached that time of year again: Halloween. October 31 is dedicated to remembering the dead.

We’ve all experienced fear, but Halloween is the particular time of year when we look for that rush that usually accompanies feeling scared. Are you in need of a “scare-specialist” for this year’s Halloween celebrations? Then you need not look further than your very own brain.