18 | NewScientist | 13 October 2012

A WHIFF of “love hormone” may help people beat alcoholism.

Cort Pedersen at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his team gave 11 alcohol-dependent volunteers two daily doses of an oxytocin nasal spray or a placebo, during the first three days of a detox programme. The volunteers also received lorazepam – a detox drug – when their withdrawal symptoms

reached a specific level.The oxytocin group had fewer

alcohol cravings and milder withdrawal symptoms than the placebo group, and used just one-fifth of the lorazepam (Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, doi.org/jgp). “Four [oxytocin] volunteers didn’t need any lorazepam at all,” says Pedersen.

This is good news because lorazepam is highly addictive.

Supernova fake explodes for real

DAZZLING in its brightness, a rare type of star’s first outburst in 2009 was soon dismissed as the tantrum of a supernova impostor. Now SN 2009ip has burst for real, a death that offers lessons for an unstable star much closer to home.

Supernovae are stars that explode catastrophically. Impostors undergo brilliant outbursts that eject material but don’t destroy the star. Eventually, though, even impostors explode once and for all.

Jon Mauerhan at the Steward Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, cites brightening on 26 September and material shooting out at 13,000 kilometres per second as sure-fire signs that SN 2009ip truly went supernova (arxiv.org/abs/1209.6320). Only the second time a pretender has been caught exploding for real, the event may offer clues to the future of Eta Carinae, an impostor in our own cosmic backyard.

Gentle observation spares iconic quantum cat

LONG live Schrödinger’s cat. Physicists have probed a delicate quantum state without destroying it – equivalent to taking a peek at the metaphorical cat without killing it.

Quantum objects can exist in multiple states at once. Erwin Schrödinger illustrated the strange implications of this “superposition” by imagining a cat in a box whose fate depends on a radioactive atom. Because the atom, a quantum object, only takes a definite state when observed, the cat is somehow both dead and alive until the box is opened.

This ability to destroy superposition just by peeking

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Oxytocin helps beat booze cravings While it reduces anxiety and seizures during alcohol withdrawal, users can experience insomnia and cravings when they come off the drug.

Although it is unclear how oxytocin – famed for its role in social bonding – helps to aid withdrawal, it has no known side effects. Pedersen hopes that alcoholics who take the hormone will therefore be less likely to experience the unpleasant symptoms that can lead to relapse.

makes systems that depend on it, such as quantum computers, fragile. To get around this, R. Vijay of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues studied a superconducting circuit used to store information in a quantum computer. They cycled this “qubit” through mixtures of the values 1 and 0, creating a superposition.

By measuring the frequency at which the qubit’s value switched rather than its actual value – akin to peeking inside Schrödinger’s box with blurry glasses, obscuring whether the cat is alive or dead – the team was able to probe the qubit without destroying the superposition (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature11505). The team stopped the measurement from changing the qubit’s state by applying an equal but opposite change to the system, returning the frequency to the value it had beforehand.

FOR one spider, mistaken identity during courtship can prove fatal.

Paratrechalea ornata lives on boulders on the edges of streams in South America. But so does its close relation, Paratrechalea azul, and the two are almost identical to the human eye.

Experiments by Luiz Ernesto Costa-Schmidt at the National University of Córdoba in Argentina suggest that even the spiders struggle to tell each other apart. In the lab, males frequently approached females of the wrong species (Animal Behaviour, DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.08.026).

The cost of an error can be high – particularly for P. ornata males. Slightly smaller than P. azul males, they are more likely to be eaten if they approach the wrong female.

Courtship muddle fatal for male spider

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