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Rats know when they forget stuff
NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Swiss banks now invest in bitcoin the currency’s volatility, it is currently trading at just under $2500, but overall has tripled in value in the last year alone. Users of Falcon’s bitcoin service will have to sign a waiver to show they understand the risks.
WHAT do you get the person who has everything? As of 12 July, investors at Falcon Private Bank – a boutique investment firm headquartered in Zurich – were able to ask their asset manager to purchase and store bitcoin on their behalf. Despite the cryptocurrency’s infamous volatility, this is another indication that bitcoin is here to stay. “We have various clients that are interested in buying bitcoin for investment purposes,” says Arthur Vayloyan, the global head of products and services at Falcon. And now, these customers won’t require any specialist knowledge to switch their cash into bitcoin. The Swiss financial authority, FINMA, granted Falcon regulatory approval on 11 July. Only a few years ago, many conventional banks still thought that bitcoin was doomed to fail. But the price has soared and it has continued to survive, making it too attractive for investors to resist. In 2012, you could buy a bitcoin for less than $10, last month they were selling for a record high of $3000. Illustrating
Rats know when they forget stuff MUCH like students doing a test, rats tend to skip questions when they have forgotten the answer. The finding suggests rats share an ability of humans and some primates – they may have metamemory, an awareness of what they can remember. Victoria Templer at Providence College, Rhode Island, and her team trained rats to sniff samples of 12 | NewScientist | 22 July 2017
DENNIS HALLINAN / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Timothy Revell
cinnamon, thyme, paprika or coffee, and then go to a dish smelling of the matching scent. If the rats picked the correct dish, they got a piece of cereal. But there was a twist. Although rats that chose a dish with the wrong scent got no reward, rats that chose a fifth, unscented dish received a quarter-piece of the cereal. This meant that when rats forgot what they had smelled, their best bet was to pick the unscented dish – provided they could tell that they had forgotten the relevant smell. Nine rats were tested across a range of experiments. In some of
But some worry that the risks go beyond standard investing exposure. Traditional banks in possession of large sums of bitcoin will be obvious targets for hackers. “It’s a lot easier to steal digital currency than a traditional currency,” say Andreas Antonopoulos, host of the Let’s Talk Bitcoin podcast. “This is why decentralisation is so important,” he says – a principle bitcoin is ostensibly
built on. Instead of relying on central banks and governments, bitcoin relies on a network of computers that anyone can join to check the legitimacy of transactions. Whenever currency changes hands, everyone on the network updates their copy of a shared ledger known as the blockchain. Underpinning the whole system is complex mathematics that makes it very difficult to deceive or control without infeasible amounts of computing power. Instead of bank accounts, anyone can create and store their own bitcoin “wallet” – these too are decentralised. That means there is no central target enticing hackers with large amounts of digital currency. But if you put lots of wallets in the same place, the system may no longer hold. “By putting in more eggs, you make the basket weaker,” says Antonopoulos. You will need far more security to protect the wallets. Indeed, this problem has plagued exchanges, where people trade different digital and traditional currencies. The biggest of these until 2014 was Mt. Gox, which at the time was handling more than half of all bitcoin transactions. In February of that year, 850,000 bitcoins corresponding to $450 million at the time disappeared, thought to –But how’s their digital protection?– have been stolen by hackers. n
these the unscented dish was not there, forcing rats to choose a scent even if they couldn’t remember it. Without the unscented option, the rats picked the wrong dish 48 per cent of the time. But when it was available, they chose the unscented option 20 per cent of the time, and in those cases where they did choose a scented dish, the rate of picking the wrong one fell to 39 per cent – a drop
“Rats did better when there was an opt-out choice, suggesting they chose it if they forgot the answer”
that wouldn’t be expected by chance (Animal Cognition, doi.org/b9nt). Because the rats’ performance improved when the unscented dish was available as an opt-out, Templer says this shows the rats weren’t simply choosing it for no reason. In further experiments, the rats chose the unscented dish less often when they were allowed to sniff the sample twice before choosing a match. But making the rats wait longer between sniffing the sample and choosing a match pushed up the number of times they opted out. Diana Crow n
Swiss banks now invest in bitcoin the currency’s volatility, it is currently trading at just under $2500, but overall has tripled in value in the last year alone. Users of Falcon’s bitcoin service will have to sign a waiver to show they understand the risks.
WHAT do you get the person who has everything? As of 12 July, investors at Falcon Private Bank – a boutique investment firm headquartered in Zurich – were able to ask their asset manager to purchase and store bitcoin on their behalf. Despite the cryptocurrency’s infamous volatility, this is another indication that bitcoin is here to stay. “We have various clients that are interested in buying bitcoin for investment purposes,” says Arthur Vayloyan, the global head of products and services at Falcon. And now, these customers won’t require any specialist knowledge to switch their cash into bitcoin. The Swiss financial authority, FINMA, granted Falcon regulatory approval on 11 July. Only a few years ago, many conventional banks still thought that bitcoin was doomed to fail. But the price has soared and it has continued to survive, making it too attractive for investors to resist. In 2012, you could buy a bitcoin for less than $10, last month they were selling for a record high of $3000. Illustrating
Rats know when they forget stuff MUCH like students doing a test, rats tend to skip questions when they have forgotten the answer. The finding suggests rats share an ability of humans and some primates – they may have metamemory, an awareness of what they can remember. Victoria Templer at Providence College, Rhode Island, and her team trained rats to sniff samples of 12 | NewScientist | 22 July 2017
DENNIS HALLINAN / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Timothy Revell
cinnamon, thyme, paprika or coffee, and then go to a dish smelling of the matching scent. If the rats picked the correct dish, they got a piece of cereal. But there was a twist. Although rats that chose a dish with the wrong scent got no reward, rats that chose a fifth, unscented dish received a quarter-piece of the cereal. This meant that when rats forgot what they had smelled, their best bet was to pick the unscented dish – provided they could tell that they had forgotten the relevant smell. Nine rats were tested across a range of experiments. In some of
But some worry that the risks go beyond standard investing exposure. Traditional banks in possession of large sums of bitcoin will be obvious targets for hackers. “It’s a lot easier to steal digital currency than a traditional currency,” say Andreas Antonopoulos, host of the Let’s Talk Bitcoin podcast. “This is why decentralisation is so important,” he says – a principle bitcoin is ostensibly
built on. Instead of relying on central banks and governments, bitcoin relies on a network of computers that anyone can join to check the legitimacy of transactions. Whenever currency changes hands, everyone on the network updates their copy of a shared ledger known as the blockchain. Underpinning the whole system is complex mathematics that makes it very difficult to deceive or control without infeasible amounts of computing power. Instead of bank accounts, anyone can create and store their own bitcoin “wallet” – these too are decentralised. That means there is no central target enticing hackers with large amounts of digital currency. But if you put lots of wallets in the same place, the system may no longer hold. “By putting in more eggs, you make the basket weaker,” says Antonopoulos. You will need far more security to protect the wallets. Indeed, this problem has plagued exchanges, where people trade different digital and traditional currencies. The biggest of these until 2014 was Mt. Gox, which at the time was handling more than half of all bitcoin transactions. In February of that year, 850,000 bitcoins corresponding to $450 million at the time disappeared, thought to –But how’s their digital protection?– have been stolen by hackers. n
these the unscented dish was not there, forcing rats to choose a scent even if they couldn’t remember it. Without the unscented option, the rats picked the wrong dish 48 per cent of the time. But when it was available, they chose the unscented option 20 per cent of the time, and in those cases where they did choose a scented dish, the rate of picking the wrong one fell to 39 per cent – a drop
“Rats did better when there was an opt-out choice, suggesting they chose it if they forgot the answer”
that wouldn’t be expected by chance (Animal Cognition, doi.org/b9nt). Because the rats’ performance improved when the unscented dish was available as an opt-out, Templer says this shows the rats weren’t simply choosing it for no reason. In further experiments, the rats chose the unscented dish less often when they were allowed to sniff the sample twice before choosing a match. But making the rats wait longer between sniffing the sample and choosing a match pushed up the number of times they opted out. Diana Crow n