Hey there folks! A darn good Friday to you all, and welcome to another week’s nag of science goodies thanks to the candy factory that is the Friday Science Whatever.

Got four big creamy scoops of science ice cream for all you hungry science fans today, including 17 million digits of amazing, good news for us Drake Equation fans, an animal with an amazing superpower, and the darkness that lurks within the hearts, or rather brains, of evil people.

All that, plus of course the toppings of my own special sauce of observations and commentary, and the whipped cream of… um… stuff… and we are in for a heck of science sundae!

So let’s dig in!

First off, we have this impressive achievement : Doctor Richard Cooper of the University of Central Missouri has discovered a record-breaking 17 million digit prime number.

Technically, it was his computer that did it, but for obvious reasons, the hunt for very large prime numbers was taken over by computers many decades ago.

I mean, I guess you could figure it out by hand, but for heaven’s sake why?

The number is : 2^57,885,161-1. If you want a full printout of it instead, be warned that a text file containing just the number is 22.5 MB long, so you had better make sure you have enough paper and ink for a long, long haul.

But honestly, save yourself the trouble. I am sure some enterprising person will stick it in a book and put it on Amazon real soon now and you will be able to just buy it and stick it on your shelf next to your billion digits of pi book.

It’s pretty neat just as an achievement in number crunching, but it turns out that very high primes might also have a practical use :

RSA security, used widely in computer data encryption, is based on the fact that its easy to multiply two prime numbers (components) together to produce a larger number (composite) but extremely time consuming and difficult to take the composite and figure out the two components that created it.

I sort of understand that!

Next up, great news for us Drake’s Equation and/or exoplanet fans : new research indicates that there might be as many as 4.5 billion Earth-like planets within 13 light-years of Earth.

Admittedly, in terrestrial terms, 13 light years (or 7.64204976 x 10¹³ miles) is a mighty long way. I mean, you think going down to the 7-11 for a bag of chips is a long way, but that is peanuts compared to 13 light years.

But in astronomical terms, 13 light years is practically next door. Sure, we won’t be going there any time soon, but it is still thrilling to imagine that there might be another Earth type planet so relatively close to us.

To me, the point of all this marvelous exoplanet calculation and exploration is to find a place in the sky upon which to fix our dreams. Out of all this excitement, I hope we find one truly amazingly good candidate for life outside our solar system.

And then, for generations to come, we will have a place to dream of visiting.

And to me, dreams are what space travel is all about.

Our next story is a lot closer to Earth : it turns out that foxes may have a special magnetic sense that lets them hunt more accurately.

Red foxes, to be specific. You know, these guys :

Show there using their other mutant superpower, being darn adorable, to secure food, shelter, and hugs.

The idea is that foxes use a sense of the earth’s magnetic field as a kind of rangefinder, kind of like the sights on a gun, to more accurately judge exactly how far away an unseen prey creature is, and thus improve how successfully their judge their hunting pounces.

You know, when they are doing this.

They figured this out because they noticed that red foxes greatly prefer to hunt pointing a certain direction relative to magnetic north, and that when they start from that position, those adorable pounces are a lot more likely to end up in a snack for the fox instead of just a muzzle full of snow.

It is pretty amazing of nature to provide the fox such an unusual and useful sense. Being of a science fiction mindset, it makes me imagine some race that evolved from foxes being super accurate snipers, at least on their home planet.

Finally, we have, as always, a story from the realm of brain science. FSW hearts brain science bigtime.

German scientist Doctor Gerhard Roth claims to have found the exact neurological root of sociopathic evil, and what do you know, it’s a dark space in the brain.

He says that he can look at the brain scans of young people and predict which ones are felons with a 66 percent accuracy, which sounds impressive, but seeing as there are only two possibilities, “felon” and “not felon”, it’s actually only 16 percent better than chance.

As you can see, I am extremely skeptical of this theory. In fact, you can put me down as about as skeptical as it is possible to be without lapsing into compulsive dismissal.

So I am not saying that I know that evil = dark patch in brain is wrong, but I am extremely dubious. It is far too simplistic an answer, and historically, these theories have always failed under further scrutiny.

My prediction, therefore, and that is all that this is, is that once others scrutinize Doctor Roth’s results, they will find all kinds of exceptions to his theory that he has conveniently ignored, enough so that his theory is essentially useless.

I am not saying that it is impossible that we will find that certain kinds of criminals have a very specific brain defect. Empathy and compassion are probably at least somewhat localized in the brain, so a theory like Doctor Roth’s might have some merit.

But I am betting it will turn out to be far more complicated than that.

That’s all for this week, folks!