Forked tongues, faked doctrines

Why snakes have forked tongues.

The serpent's forked tongue has intrigued humankind for millennia, but its function has remained obscure. Theory, anatomy, neural circuitry, function, and behavior now support a hypothesis of the forked tongue as a chemosensory edge detector used to follow pheromone trails of prey and conspecifics. The ability to sample simultaneously two points along a chemical gradient provides the basis for ...

Forked Tongues Revisited: Molecular Apomorphies Support Morphological Hypotheses of Squamate Evolution

Two radical neuron doctrines

Two radical neuron doctrines must be distinguished--strong and weak. G&S direct much of their attack at the former--but the Churchlands only hold the latter. The weak radical neuron doctrine remains a serious possibility. G&S describe the radical neuron doctrine in a number of slightly different ways, and we think this hides an important distinction. On the one hand, the radical neuron doctrine...

Faked states attack and quantum cryptography protocols

Leveraging quantum mechanics, cryptographers have devised provably secure key sharing protocols[4], [3], [6], [17]. Despite proving the security in theory, real-world application falls short of the ideal. Last year, cryptanalysts completed an experiment demonstrating a successful eavesdropping attack on commercial quantum key distribution (QKD) systems[12]. This attack exploits a weakness in th...

Lost tongues

The latest issue of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) atlas on the status of the world's languages finds threats to a growing number as a handful of languages dominate an increasingly 'globalised' world but policy towards languages can have a major effect on survival prospects. In one extreme example of the threatened status of some languages, Unesco ...