Jan. 29, 2004 — The Inca invented a powerful counting system that could be used to make complex calculations without the tiniest mistake, according to an Italian engineer who claims to have cracked the mathematics of this still mysterious ancient population.

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Recent studies are investigating the hypothesis that elaborated knotted strings known as khipu contain a hidden written language stored following a seven-bit binary code. Nobody, however, had been able to explain the meaning of these geometrical tablets known as yupana.

Different in size and shape, the yupana had been often interpreted as a stylized fortress model. Some scholars also interpreted it as a counting board, but how the abacus would have worked remained a mystery.

"It took me about 40 minutes to solve the riddle. I am not an expert on pre-Columbian civilizations. I simply decoded a 16th century drawing from a book on mathematical enigmas I received as a Christmas present," engineer Nicolino De Pasquale said.

Incan Counting System Decoded?

Pictures from Nasa’s roving Mars buggy have astonished scientists by indicating that it may have landed in mud.

Mars Buggy 'May Have Landed in Mud-Like Material'

The Voynich manuscript may be elegant gibberish.

A strange sixteenth-century book may be cunningly crafted nonsense, says a computer scientist. Gordon Rugg has used the techniques of Elizabethan espionage to recreate the Voynich manuscript, which has stumped code-breakers and linguists for nearly a century.

World's most mysterious book may be a hoax

Abstract

Security must be built into Internet Protocols for those protocols to offer their services securely. Many security problems can be traced to improper implementations. However, even a proper implementation will have security problems if the fundamental protocol is itself exploitable. Exactly how security should be implemented in a protocol will vary, because of the structure of the protocol itself. However, there are many protocols for which standard Internet security mechanisms, already developed, may be applicable. The precise one that is appropriate in any given situation can vary. We review a number of different choices, explaining the properties of each.

RFC 3631: Security Mechanisms for the Internet

Physics News Update #658: [...] The problem of imaging extrasolar planets directly is that the planet is far outshone by the nearby star. One proposed way of getting around this glare problem is to use nulling interferometry.

Direct Imaging of Extrasolar Planets

TIME article explores the manner in which Iraqi agents recruited by the CIA assisted the war effort in Iraq.

Secret Collaborations

Visitors to CEATEC 2003 (Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies) met Morph3, a human-like robot about 30-centimetres tall developed by researchers at the Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan. It can perform back flips and karate moves thanks to 138 pressure sensors, 30 different onboard motors and 14 computer processors.

Martial arts robots hit Asian tech fair

BuzzFlash Interviews - BuzzFlash.com

09.30.03 - BUZZFLASH: Electronic voting machines, including touch-screen voting, have been touted as the salvation of a fair voting process. Your tenacious research over the last year has shown that this idea may be the Trojan Horse of voting machine reform, allowing elections to be stolen more easily than in the past. What are the basic reasons that you argue that electronic voting machines pose a threat to democracy?

BEV HARRIS: Four reasons:

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Electronic Voting Machines: Interview with Bev Harris

Quantum optics demonstrates the existence of interaction-free measurements: the detection of objects without light-or anything else-ever hitting them.

Quantum Seeing in the Dark

Faulty software underpinning a touch-screen voting system used in past US elections has been revamped substantially and will be used by Maryland voters in the next US elections, says a report published by the Governor's Office of Maryland on Wednesday.

But the lead researcher on the original study showing that serious bugs in the software might allow one person to cast many votes, was sceptical.

Avi Rubin at Johns Hopkins University, maintains that by continuing to use the software - the Diebold AccuVote Touch Screen Voting System - American democracy remains jeopardized.

E-voting given go-ahead despite flaws