A very eclectic mix of articles this month. I love how weird and unexpected many of these findings are.

• Last month we had an article about how the lockdowns around the world yielded some unexpected dividends for researchers in the field of quantum computing. Not too surprisingly this applies to many other fields as well as the phenomenon has since been noted as the longest and most significant reduction in seismic noise caused by humans on record. This paper talks about how this quiet period can be used to establish a baseline and how the intensity of human activity on Earth can now be estimated based on detected seismic noise from here on out.
• Here is one loosely related paper about how scientists can glean so much from just a little data. It talks about a technique to listen to the noise that a physical key makes when opening a lock and using that data to recreate that key.
• This next one is a little suspect in its conclusions but I love the attempt. With the goal of trying to learn what bats are communicating when they make their high-pitched squeals, the researchers recorded the sounds, used a machine learning algorithm to break them down into common sounds, and tried to match these to activities that they were observed as engaging in on video. They found that most of calls were related to arguing about food, complaining about their position in a sleeping cluster or when other bats get too close, or females fending off unwanted advances from males. I say it’s suspect because it’s trying to draw very broad conclusions with very little data but it’s a good attempt and as all philosophers of the mind know, learning how a bat thinks has special significance.
• Then we have this presentation that purportedly proves that cats are lazy. This begins with the observation that many animals exhibit contrafreeloading behavior, that is when offered both free food or an opportunity to do some task in exchange for food, the animal will often to choose to actually work. The researchers tried this with cats, with the work taking the form of a puzzle that the cats must solve to get the food, and could find no evidence of contrafreeloading behavior in cats, meaning they are perfectly happy to freeload if you let them.
• The last article is about the legendary lost colony of Roanoke, so well known that it has been the subject of innumerable television shows, books, comics and so on. This article talks about a new book which asserts that the colony was never lost at all when contact was lost but that they befriended the friendly Croatoans and eventually fully integrated into them. It claims that there is plenty of evidence for that in the form of artefacts such parts of guns and swords that exist in the same layer of soil as Indian pottery and arrowheads and stories of natives with blue eyes and who could read books. This actually isn’t a new theory but it is good to have all of the evidence laid one in one place.