Best of Last Week: The surface of Betelgeuse, what women want, and a new electronic state of matter
It was a good week for space research, as a team working at the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope captured images revealing the surface of a dim Betelgeuse—historically one of the brightest stars in the night sky, it has been dimming of late. Also, a large team of astronomers working in Canada observed a fast radio burst with a steady 16-day cycle—the first of its kind.
In technology news, a team at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology fabricated inverted perovskite solar cells with a power conversion efficiency of 22.3 percent. And a team at Huazhong University of Science and Technology unveiled security vulnerabilities in EEG-based brain-computer interfaces that make them highly susceptible to adversarial attacks. Also, a team with members from the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University developed a private messaging system that hides message contents and user communication patterns—called Talek, it was also designed to hide user identities. And a team with members from the U.S., Singapore and Canada discovered that a longstanding flaw in sensor readings could lead to heating and cooling design errors in buildings that use globe thermometers to measure the temperature effects of radiant heating and cooling.
And in other news, an international team of medical researchers found that people who have 10 or more sexual partners have a higher likelihood of being diagnosed with cancer. Also, another international team showed that solar system processes have controlled the carbon cycle throughout Earth's history, and were responsible for sparking two of the most devastating extinction events. And a team with members affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. announced the discovery of a new electronic state of matter in which electrons travel without scattering in groups of two or more at a time, rather than individually in one-dimensional conducting systems.
And finally, if you are a single male interested in finding a female mate, you might be interested in the findings of a team of psychologists at Brunel University London—they found that women don't fancy easy-to-seduce men.
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