For quantum physicists working on future systems, entangling quantum systems is a key resource for upcoming quantum computers and simulators.

Physicists have crafted a new, reliable method to verify entanglement in the laboratory using a minimal number of assumptions about the system and measuring devices - it witnesses the presence of useful entanglement, a ‘verification without knowledge’.

Quantum computation, quantum communication and quantum cryptography often require entanglement. For many of these upcoming quantum technologies, entanglement – this hard to grasp, counter-intuitive aspect in the quantum world – is a key ingredient. Therefore, experimental physicists often need to verify entanglement in their systems.

In 2011, a paper revealed that Dictyostelium discoideum, a single-celled organism, picks up edible bacteria, carries them to new locations and harvests them like crops - basically, it is the world's smallest farmer. (Nature 469, 393-396 doi:10.1038/nature09668)

A new mineral, cubic boron nitride, has been officially approved by the International Mineralogical Association as “qingsongite.”  You'd think there aren't a lot of mineral discoveries happening every day but this had been in committee since 2009. Geology paces itself and perhaps so do naming conventions. But  it turns out there are at least 100 proposals for new minerals and their names submitted each year. To-date, more than 4700 species of minerals have been recognized.

Qingsongite was named after Qingsong Fang (1939–2010), a professor at the Institute of Geology, the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, who found the first diamond in the Tibetan chromium-rich rocks in the late 1970s, and contributed to the discovery of four new mineral species.

Ann Finkbeiner, author of 2007's The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite (among other things) and contributor to The Last Word On Nothing, recently had a fascinating exchange with one of my favorite journalists, USA Today's Dan Vergano.

A color image, taken on May 1st, 2013 by the Wide Angle Camera (WAC) instrument aboard NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft orbiting Mercury, features the Hovnatanian crater, named for Armenian painter Hakop Hovnatanian.

The crater's elliptical shape and the bright rays' butterfly pattern indicate that a very oblique impact produced the crater. The brightness of the rays indicate that they are relatively young features on Mercury's surface.

It didn't take long before the Netflix dramedy hit "Orange Is The New Black" made its way into Psychology of Women Quarterly, a publication devoted to peer-reviewing the feminist science.

With all that humor and girl kissing and talk of beatdowns, you know an editor was excited about the chance to link a paper to the show in a press release - things have been rather tame, culturally, for readers and contributors there since "The L Word" went off the air. The American Psychological Association is, as always, happy to ride a cultural wave.(1)

The sleeping patterns of baby birds are similar to that of baby mammals they even appear to change in the same way as it does in humans.

Studying barn owls in the wild, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and the University of Lausanne discovered that this change in sleep is strongly correlated with the expression of a gene involved in producing dark, melanic feather spots, a trait known to covary with behavioral and physiological traits in adult owls. They speculate that sleep-related developmental processes in the brain contribute to the link between melanism and other traits observed in adult barn owls and other animals.