This week, the FBI arrested 11 alleged Russian spies living in New Jersey. How did they catch them? By digging through their photos.

These weren’t snapshots of covert meetings or secret handshakes, but–more likely–the quotidian: kittens and ice cream cones. They weren’t hidden in some obscure drop location, but viewable to the public, online. The pictures’ real importance was tucked inside, in encoded messages detailing secret meetings.

We aren’t talking Magic Eye–no mater how long you cross your eyes, staring at these pictures wouldn’t tell you where to drop off money or who to call. The alleged spies reportedly encoded the messages at the pixel level.

Every color on your computer screen is a combination of red, blue, and green–digitally represented as three numeric values. By making subtle changes to these numbers, the Russians hid binary code that someone–with the right software–could recombine into a message.

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The U.S. Coast Guard is saying today that the “top kill” procedure looks like it’s having success at stemming BP’s oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. We hope they’re right.

In the meantime, you can now say that the BP oil spill is the worst in our nation’s history, eclipsing the 11 million gallons spill by the Exxon Valdez.

In a teleconference this morning, U.S. Geological Survey head Marcia McNutt released the new estimates by her scientists trying to gauge the flow rate of the oil leak. There were two teams working—one watching the surface and the other monitoring the video feed from the leak site. The low estimate is now 12,000 barrels per day, but it may be more like 19,000 to 25,000, the teams found. (The previous estimate, repeated throughout the first month of the spill, was just 5,000 barrels per day).

McNutt wouldn’t say explicitly if the BP spill is now the worst the United States has ever seen, but the numbers speak for themselves. If we do a very conservative calculation and say that 12,000 barrels leaked every day between April 22, when the Deepwater Horizon rig sank, and May 17, when BP installed the siphon to catch some of the oil, you get approximately 13.1 million gallons of oil released into the Gulf’s waters (there are 42 gallons in a barrel of oil).

And keep in mind that’s just the conservative estimate; it’s probably a lot worse than that. The AP did a similar calculation, assuming that either 12,000 or 25,000 barrels leaked every day from the rig’s explosion on April 20 to the present moment, and came up with even more dire figures.

The new government estimate means at least 19 million gallons and maybe as much as 39 million gallons have leaked in the five weeks since an oil rig exploded and sank [AP].

Recent posts on the BP oil spill:

80beats: “Top Kill” Operation Is Under Way in Attempt to Stop Gulf Oil Leak
80beats: BP To Switch Dispersants; Will Kevin Costner Save Us All?
80beats: Scientists Say Gulf Spill Is Way Worse Than Estimated. How’d We Get It So Wrong?
80beats: Testimony Highlights 3 Major Failures That Caused Gulf Spill
80beats: 5 Offshore Oil Hotspots Beyond the Gulf That Could Boom—Or Go Boom

Image: NOAA (the Exxon Valdez)

A team of scientists led by Mark Raizen at the University of Texas at Austin had the gumption to take on Einstein. And according to their new paper in Science, they won. The point of contention? The lovechild of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics: Brownian motion.

Here’s how they did it.

Step 1. Learning the Moves

In the 1820s, Scottish botanist Robert Brown looked through a microscope at plant bits floating in water, and wrote [PDF]:

“I observed many of them very evidently in motion . . . [these motions] arose neither from currents in the fluid, nor from its gradual evaporation, but belonged to the particle itself.”

To make sure that the pollen wasn’t alive–actually swimming around–Brown tried it with coal dust. Dust had the same moves.

Today, we understand that Brownian motion, the random break dance of these tiny particles, comes from the water molecules bumping against them. In 1905, Einstein determined the properties of the liquid and the particles that would help describe their wanderings and the motion of molecules. But he also said that it was “impossible” to determine at any moment the speed and direction of a single particle during this dance.

Step 2. Water Into Air

The reason for Einstein’s doubt? The particles bumped around too quickly to ever measure their speed and direction:

He believed that it would be impossible in practice to track this motion, given the incredibly short timescales over which the Brownian fluctuations take place. [PhysicsWorld]

How quick is too quick? A very tiny glass sphere (think micrometers) in water would change direction almost every 100 nanoseconds (about the time it takes light to travel 30 meters). Raizen wanted to make the time between moves longer, so they didn’t use water. They put the glass beads on a dance floor with fewer partners, using a medium whose molecules are farther apart: air.

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Does your first- or second-grade daughter have trouble with math? Her anxiety could be stemming not just from a genuine fear of number crunching but also, a new study indicates, from an anxious female math teacher.

The study (pdf) published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that if a female teacher is anxious about math, she tends to pass on that anxiety to her female students. This can make the female students believe they aren’t hard-wired for math like the boys, and cause them to shy away from fully flexing and developing their mathematical muscles.

The findings are the product of a year-long study on 17 first-and second-grade teachers and 52 boys and 65 girls who were their students [Science Daily]. Researchers recruited the female teachers from a Midwestern school district and assessed their level of math anxiety. They also gave math tests to 117 of these teachers’ students and jotted down their beliefs about math and gender at the beginning and end of the year. By the end of the year, the more anxious teachers were about their own math skills, the more likely their female students – but not the boys – were to agree that “boys are good at math and girls are good at reading” [AP].

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When scientists talk up learning about transportation networks from nature, it’s often ants that get the praise for being so much more organized and efficient than we humans with our silly gridlock. But a team of Japanese researchers found, for a new study in Science, that you don’t even need a brain to be to a traffic genius. Single-celled slime molds, they found, can build networks as complex as the Tokyo subway system.

The yellow slime mold Physarum polycephalum grows as a single cell that is big enough to be seen with the naked eye. When it encounters numerous food sources separated in space, the slime mold cell surrounds the food and creates tunnels to distribute the nutrients [Science News]. To test how efficient the mold could be, Toshiyuki Nakagaki’s team duplicated the layout of the area around Tokyo: They placed the slime mold in the position of the city, and dispersed bits of oat around the “map” in the locations of 36 surrounding towns.

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For soldiers and civilians alike, insurgency wars are not only deadly but also frustrating in their apparently random spikes of violence. In a study in Nature, however, researchers put forth a mathematical model that shows terrorist attacks and insurgencies are not so scattershot as they seem.

The team searched for statistical similarities across nine historic and ongoing insurgencies including those of Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland [BBC News]. That meant compiling more than 50,000 acts of violence. And despite the fact that these events happened in different countries in different times, Neil Johnson and his team found a relationship between the size of an attack in casualty terms and how often it occurs.

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Once again, scientists are trying to read your mind. Specifically, they are using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to see what areas of the brain people use to process numbers, and even to determine what number a person just viewed.

Test subjects were shown images with either an amount of something—in this case a bunch of dots—or a numeral like 2, 4, or 6. Scientists suspected that our brains use overlapping areas to process quantities and their symbolic representations, however the findings suggest that people process the fundamental idea of a quantity differently from the way they process a symbol representing that quantity [Science News]. When a test subject looked at two dots and later at the number 2, different areas of the brain were activated, researchers report in Current Biology.

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Researchers have more evidence that takes aim at the old stereotype that boys are better at math than girls. Psychologist Janet Hyde had previously studied scores on standardized math tests in the United States, and found no difference in performance between girls and boys. Her new study expands the scope of the work by analyzing international data. She and her colleague analyzed studies from around the world on math performance along with gender inequality as measured by the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index. This index measures the gap between men and women in economic opportunity, educational attainment and other socioeconomic factors [LiveScience].

They found that countries with poor gender equality, like India, had a larger gender gap in math, while in countries with excellent gender equality, like the Netherlands, girls performed as well as boys. If males really did have an innate advantage in math, the researchers note, that advantage should be obvious throughout all these cultures. Instead, the study suggests that cultural issues are the basis of the math gender gap.

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A new online tool is expected to debut this week to answer questions like these: How far away from Earth is the planet Neptune at this point in its orbit? And how has the unemployment rate in Iowa’s Scott County changed over the past decade? WolframAlpha, a powerful new service that can answer a broad range of queries, has become one of the most anticipated Web products of the year. But its creator, Stephen Wolfram, wants to make something clear: Despite the online chatter comparing it to Google, his service is not intended to dethrone the king of search engines. “I am not keen on the hype,” said Mr. Wolfram [The New York Times].

Google’s mission, after all, is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” In contrast, WolframAlpha doesn’t present users with an organized list of information; it sorts through data sets, performs calculations, and presents an answer. Type in a query for a statistic, a profile of a country or company, the average airspeed of a sparrow ― and instead of a series of results that may or may not provide the answer you’re looking for, you get a mini dossier on the subject compiled in real time that, ideally, nails the exact thing you want to know. It’s like having a squad of Cambridge mathematicians and CIA analysts inside your browser [Wired].

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Young chickens just a few days old can count and perform basic arithmetic, according to a fluffy new study. Researchers manipulated objects that the chicks had formed an attachment to, moving the objects behind little screens, and found that the observant young birds kept track of where the objects were. In effect, the chicks were solving simple math problems like “4 – 2 = 2.”

While some adult animals, including primates and dogs, have been found to have an understanding of basic math, researchers had not previously demonstrated numerical abilities in any young animals (except for humans). Karen Wynn, who has reported evidence of numerical skills in human babies, points out that the chicks haven’t had a chance to learn or develop much. “This work, then, is a compelling existence proof that numerical understanding comprises a built-in system of unlearned knowledge,” Wynn says [Science News].

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“Flying while Muslim” is the new “driving while black”, according to air travellers who believe they are being targeted for extra security measures on the basis of racial and religious profiling [New Scientist]. The Transportation Security Administration is mum on whether they use racial profiling in deciding who to pull out of line at airport security, and also won’t give details as to whether it scrutinizes air travelers’ behavior (like when and how they bought their tickets, or whether they have checked luggage). But a new mathematical study suggests that any such profiling is not the most effective way to find a terrorist lurking in a crowd of ordinary people.

At first glance, the profiling approach seems logical, despite many people’s moral objections. If all previous acts of politically motivated terrorism have been committed by a particular nationality, then doesn’t it make sense to focus searches on those groups? Not necessarily, says William Press of the University of Texas at Austin. Do the maths and you discover that a simple-minded application of these actuarial methods is worthless: all you end up doing is repeatedly picking out the same innocent people [Nature News].

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Honeybees have the ability to distinguish and remember visual quantities up to four, according to a new study. Researchers demonstrated that honeybees can match patterns containing the same number of icons, even when the icons are of mixed color and shape. This suggests that honeybees possess a basic number sense that was once thought to be exclusive to vertebrates. Researcher Shaowu Zhang says, “There has been a lot of evidence that vertebrates, such as pigeons, dolphins or monkeys, have some numerical competence but we never expected to find such abilities in insects. So far as these very basic skills go, there is probably no boundary between insects, animals and us” [Daily Mail]

To test the extent of the bees’ number sense, researchers set up a Y-shaped maze with a sweet treat at the end of one arm. In the training phase, bees entered the base of the maze through an entrance marked with either two or three dots. They had to remember this number when the maze forked into two paths— one marked with two dots, the other with three—in order to reach a sugar-water reward [Telegraph]. The 20 or so bees that were trained attained a success rate of 70 percent. Researchers then presented tougher challenges by increasing the number of dots. The bees could also distinguish between three and four dots, but were confused when even more dots were added. 

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Trying to assess the importance of particular scientific papers has long been a tricky task. The current system relies on counting the number of times a paper is cited by others to determine how large an effect it has had on subsequent research, but this number can be misleading, a new study notes. Simply counting citations favors disciplines such as biology, where papers tend to be cited more, over fields such as mathematics, where citations are less frequent. In addition, a citation from a relatively marginal paper counts just the same as a citation from a leading researcher publishing in a marquee journal [Scientific American].

To try to get around these problems, a pair of researchers decided on a different tactic: They took the algorithm that Google uses to determine how to rank the Web pages turned up in a search result, and used it to rank the importance of scientific articles. The Google PageRank algorithm checks the number of times each Web page is linked to in order to determine its importance, which is equivalent to counting citations. But it has several other aspects that were very useful when applied to ranking scientific papers. The algorithm gives greater weight to citations from papers that list only a few references, and also to citations from papers that are themselves often cited. “Because of these attributes, PageRank readily identifies a large number of scientific ‘gems’–modestly cited articles that contain ground-breaking results” [arXiv], the researchers write. Among those gems turned up in the researchers first experiment were nine papers written by future Nobel Prize winners.

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Mathematicians at UCLA believe they have found a very long and very special prime number: It clocks in at nearly 13 million digits, and belongs to an elite group of numbers called Mersenne primes. If the math checks out, the discovery will win UCLA’s math department a $100,000 prize that was offered for the first Mersenne prime found with over 10 million digits.

Primes are numbers like three, seven and 11 that are divisible by only two whole positive numbers: themselves and one. Mersenne primes — named for their discoverer, 17th century French mathematician Marin Mersenne — are expressed as 2^P-1, or two to the power of “P” minus one. P is itself a prime number. For the new prime, P is 43,112,609 [AP].

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A new study argues that people have an intuitive understanding of numbers that closely correlates with their aptitude for complex math, and that some people are simply better at it. The research team found that 14-year-olds who were better at estimating quantities were more likely to have gotten high grades in math. Says lead researcher Justin Halberda: “We discovered that a child’s ability to quickly estimate how many things are in a group significantly predicts their performance in school mathematics all the way back to kindergarten” [Washington Post].

Researchers expressed surprise that the basic “number sense” that has been observed in some animals is linked to the ability to solve complicated equations. “Maximising your search for food, finding a seat on the bus, recognizing the difference between a mating call and an alarm call in a particular species of bird by the number of warbles — all of these require [number sense]…. What is surprising is that the formal mathematics we work so hard to learn in school … is related in any way to what a rat is doing when it is out looking for scraps of food, or what you and I are doing when we look for a seat on a bus,” said Halberda [AFP].

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