Memories Exist Even When Forgotten, Study Suggests

Jeff Johnson of the UCI Center for the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory and colleagues discovered that a person's brain activity while remembering an event is very similar to when it was first experienced, even if specifics can't be recalled. Johnson says brain imaging shines a "searchlight" into the brain. (Credit: Daniel A. Anderson / University Communications)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 10, 2009) — A woman looks familiar, but you can't remember her name or where you met her. New research by UC Irvine neuroscientists suggests the memory exists – you simply can't retrieve it.

Using advanced brain imaging techniques, the scientists discovered that a person's brain activity while remembering an event is very similar to when it was first experienced, even if specifics can't be recalled.

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Computer Could Call Football Plays

New York Jets place kicker Jay Feely (3) kicks an overtime, game-winning field goal against the New England Patriots in their NFL football game in Foxborough, Massachusetts November 13, 2008. Brian Snyder / Reuters

From Live Science:

WASHINGTON (ISNS) -- Football coaches are famous for their dedication to winning. Video studies of upcoming opponents begin so early in the morning that most people are still dreaming about their first cup of coffee; strategy sessions run past the time insomniacs fall asleep.

But a new computer model may be able to take the play calling load off of the coach and, through fast, real-time analysis of all the offensive and defensive possibilities, dictate the best play to call in any game situation. The program takes the human element out of play calling and instead uses mathematical and statistical techniques.

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Diamonds Are For Softies – Boron Is Harder

Diamonds are famously the hardest natural substance, but they may be about to lose their crown (Image: Salexmccoy, Wikimedia Commons)

From New Scientist:

You don't often break a diamond. So when in 2003 Dave Mao cracked a tooth of his diamond anvil, he knew something extraordinary must have happened. Together with his daughter Wendy and other colleagues at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, he was using the device to test materials at pressures many millions of times higher than those at the Earth's surface - higher even than in our planet's core - by squeezing them between two tiny diamond jaws.

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The Working Person's Diet: Too Busy to Eat Right

From Time Magazine:

If you've ever gotten so busy at work that you skipped lunch and ended up staring at your hungry reflection in the vending-machine glass in the late afternoon, then you're familiar with this gastro-economic catch-22: losing your job may mean cutting back on food bills, but gainful employment could result in poor eating habits overall.

That's the conclusion of a new nutritional study by researchers at Cornell University. They conducted a survey of 25 working mothers and 25 working fathers in low-to-moderate-income communities and found that more than half of the participants routinely resorted to unhealthy eating options because of their work circumstances.

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Why Washing May Hamper Your Attractiveness

Chris Rout/Alamy

From The Independent:

A natural chemical found in the sweat of men has been shown to act as a primitive love potion that increases their attractiveness in the eyes of women, a study has found.

The substance, which is derived from the male sex hormone testosterone, has a small but significant effect on judgements made by women in a speed-dating situation of a male stranger's attractiveness.

Tamsin Saxton of the University of St Andrews studied the influence of androstadienone by dabbling a drop of it on the upper lip of 50 women who took part in the evening trial before they "dated" a series of men.

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Do Mention The War, Say Scientists

Members of the Post Office Home Guard receiving lessons on how to load the spigot mortar at a summer training camp in Hertfordshire. Photo: Getty Images

From The Telegraph:

Encouraging old people to talk about the war is good for their health, claim scientists.

Researchers have found that when the elderly sat around in groups discussing old times it improved their memory and limited the effects of dementia.

Reminiscence therapy, as it is technically known, could increase the cognitive recall and agility of the mind by up to 12 per cent in as little as six weeks, it was found.

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My Comment: There is some truth to this (in some cases) .... but in some cases this is probably not. My father never liked to talk about his war experience, and the only time he opened up was when he was drunk with men who had also served on the Russian front.

Otherwise .... this was a no man's land for everyone else.

Simpler, Fresher Facebook Lite Puts Twitter In The Shade

The login page of Facebook Lite - the service is aimed
at users in countries with limited bandwidth

From The Daily Mail:

Facebook is currently testing a simplified version of its social network service aimed at countries where internet bandwidth is limited. But it may prove popular with other users tired of the currently over-fussy website.

The new system, named Facebook Lite, focuses on messaging and user updates and now looks far more similar to rival micro-blogging service Twitter.

It is available to a handful of users in the UK by going to http://lite.facebook.com. However, at present a preview of the service is only widely available in India and the US.

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Shuttle Landing Delayed For A Day

From The BBC:

The landing of the shuttle Discovery at the Kennedy Space Center has been delayed for at least a day due to bad weather in Florida.

Thunderstorms and strong winds meant that the US space agency Nasa skipped both Thursday landing possibilities.

The shuttle, which is returning from a mission to the International Space Station (ISS), will have to orbit the earth for a 14th day.

The new landing slot is at 1754 (2154 GMT) on Friday.

However the weather forecast for Friday is worse, and Saturday is only a little better.

Nasa says if necessary it will consider the possibility of using a runway at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

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Women Are Getting More Beautiful

From Times Online:

FOR the female half of the population, it may bring a satisfied smile. Scientists have found that evolution is driving women to become ever more beautiful, while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors.

The researchers have found beautiful women have more children than their plainer counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female. Those daughters, once adult, also tend to be attractive and so repeat the pattern.

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Electrical Circuit Runs Entirely Off Power In Trees

Electrical engineers Babak Parviz and Brian Otis and undergraduate student Carlton Himes (right to left) demonstrate a circuit that runs entirely off tree power. (Credit: University of Washington)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 9, 2009) — You've heard about flower power. What about tree power? It turns out that it's there, in small but measurable quantities. There's enough power in trees for University of Washington researchers to run an electronic circuit, according to results to be published in an upcoming issue of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Transactions on Nanotechnology.

"As far as we know this is the first peer-reviewed paper of someone powering something entirely by sticking electrodes into a tree," said co-author Babak Parviz, a UW associate professor of electrical engineering.

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Arctic May Be Changed Forever, Study Finds

An adult female caribou and her newborn calf in Greenland during 2008-2009. Caribou numbers have been declining as a result of climate change. Credit: Eric Post, Penn State University

From Live Science:

The dramatic changes sweeping the Arctic as a result of global warming aren't just confined to melting sea ice and polar bears — a new study finds that the forces of climate change are propagating throughout the frigid north, producing different effects in each ecosystem with the upshot that the face of the Arctic may be forever altered.

"The Arctic as we know it may be a thing of the past," said Eric Post of Penn State, who led an international team that brought together research on the effects of climate change from ecosystems across the Arctic.

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Is Warfare in Our Genes? Apparently Not

Can humans ever live in eternal peace? (Image: Rex Features)

Winning The Ultimate Battle: How Humans Could End War -- The Scientist

OPTIMISTS called the first world war "the war to end all wars". Philosopher George Santayana demurred. In its aftermath he declared: "Only the dead have seen the end of war". History has proved him right, of course. What's more, today virtually nobody believes that humankind will ever transcend the violence and bloodshed of warfare. I know this because for years I have conducted numerous surveys asking people if they think war is inevitable. Whether male or female, liberal or conservative, old or young, most people believe it is. For example, when I asked students at my university "Will humans ever stop fighting wars?" more than 90 per cent answered "No". Many justified their assertion by adding that war is "part of human nature" or "in our genes". But is it really?

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My Comment: A fascinating read. Somehow I missed this story. Read the whole thing.

Solar Superstorm

An ultraviolet-wavelength picture of the sun taken by the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) on Oct. 23, 2003.

From NASA:

October 23, 2003: Newly uncovered scientific data of recorded history's most massive space storm is helping a NASA scientist investigate its intensity and the probability that what occurred on Earth and in the heavens almost a century-and-a-half ago could happen again.

In scientific circles where solar flares, magnetic storms and other unique solar events are discussed, the occurrences of September 1-2, 1859, are the star stuff of legend. Even 144 years ago, many of Earth's inhabitants realized something momentous had just occurred. Within hours, telegraph wires in both the United States and Europe spontaneously shorted out, causing numerous fires, while the Northern Lights, solar-induced phenomena more closely associated with regions near Earth's North Pole, were documented as far south as Rome, Havana and Hawaii, with similar effects at the South Pole.

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The Age Of Enhancement

From Prospect:

A cornucopia of drugs will soon be on sale to improve everything from our memories to our trust in others.

On 6th December 2004 a baby girl named Yan was born. Her father, an internet entrepreneur, is called Shen Tong. Yan was Shen’s first child, and you might have expected him to have an excitable, sleepless night. But oddly the opposite occurred. He slept better than he had done for 15 years, six months and two days. It’s possible to be exact about the timing because 15 years, six months and two days earlier was 4th June 1989 and on that day Shen had been on a boulevard just off Tiananmen Square in Beijing. He was a 20-year-old student, and like thousands of others he was demonstrating in favour of political reform.

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New Robot Travels Across The Seafloor To Monitor The Impact Of Climate Change On Deep-sea Ecosystems

During July 2009, the Benthic Rover traveled across the seafloor while hooked up to the MARS ocean observatory. This allowed researchers to control the vehicle in "real time." The yellow cable on the right side of the image is a long "extension cord" that unspools as the Rover moves. (Credit: Copyright 2009 MBARI)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 10, 2009) — Like the robotic rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which wheeled tirelessly across the dusty surface of Mars, a new robot spent most of July traveling across the muddy ocean bottom, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) off the California coast. This robot, the Benthic Rover, has been providing scientists with an entirely new view of life on the deep seafloor. It will also give scientists a way to document the effects of climate change on the deep sea. The Rover is the result of four years of hard work by a team of engineers and scientists led by MBARI project engineer Alana Sherman and marine biologist Ken Smith.

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Memory Scientists Say: All Is Not Forgotten

fMRI Brain Activity Jan Hardenbergh

From Popular Science:

Unless you are this woman, you probably have a long mental list of moments and facts you wish you could remember -- but for the life of you, you can't. To use a personal example, I periodically Google the words "yellow house Berlin," hoping to produce the name of that one hostel I lived in for a summer in college; alas, no success yet. The good news, though, is that while such memories may be currently inaccessible, they're not entirely gone, and could theoretically be retrieved, according to new brain imaging research from the University of California, Irvine.

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No Sex Tonight Honey, I Haven't Taken My Statins

High cholesterol levels could prevent women from becoming sexually aroused
(Image: F1 Online / Rex Features)

From New Scientist:

High cholesterol isn't just bad for the heart – it could also make it harder for women to become sexually aroused. That might mean that cholesterol-lowering drugs like statins would help to treat so-called female sexual dysfunction (FSD).

Hyperlipidemia, or raised levels of cholesterol and other fats in the blood, is associated with erectile dysfunction in men, because the build-up of fats in blood vessel walls can reduce blood flow to erectile tissue. Since some aspects of female sexual arousal also rely on increased blood flow to the genitals, Katherine Esposito and her colleagues at the Second University of Naples in Italy compared sexual function in premenopausal women with and without hyperlipidemia.

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When two husbands are better than one

Women laborers work in an onion field at Rambha village of Karnal district in the northern Indian state of Haryana on April 30, 2009. A shortage of females in this area has led to more people participating in polyandry, or the phenomenon of a woman taking more than one husband. (Vijay Mathur/Reuters)

From Global Post:

Polyandry in the Himalayas is a complex affair. Not surprisingly.

SPITI VALLEY, HIMACHAL PRADESH, India — An array of stars twinkled over Himalayan peaks towering nearly three miles high, while below in the chilly darkness a husband and wife relaxed after their 120-mile pilgrimage. Leaning back in chairs in front of a guest house, warm in their woolen clothing, they appeared indistinguishable from the hundreds of others who had come to hear the teachings of a Buddhist leader.

What set them apart was the person they had left behind: the woman's other husband.

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4 Forgotten Facts About Combat UAVs

MQ-9 Reaper

From Popular Mechanics:

CREECH AIR FORCE BASE, Nev.—The U.S. Air Force squadrons that form the 432d Air Expeditionary Wing here are the first that exist only to fly unmanned aerial vehicles. The base, which currently hosts training and operations for MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers, is trailblazing modern military aviation. It's a perfect place for practitioners who fly UAVs every day to set the record straight on some common misconceptions about UAVs.

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My Comment: No real surprises .... but for those who are still new to what UAVs are capable of, this is a good read.

Ancient Oceans Offer New Insight Into Origins Of Animal Life

In prehistoric times, Earth experienced two periods of large increases and fluctuations in the oxygen level of the atmosphere and oceans. These fluctuations also led to an explosion of multicellular organisms in the oceans, which are the predecessors for life as we know it today. (Credit: iStockphoto/Sebastian Meckelmann)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Sep. 10, 2009) — Analysis of a rock type found only in the world's oldest oceans has shed new light on how large animals first got a foothold on Earth.

A scientific team led by Professor Robert Frei at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and including scientists from Newcastle University, UK, and universities in Uruguay and Southern Denmark, have for the first time managed to plot the rise and fall of oxygen levels in the Earth's atmosphere over the last 3.8 billion years.

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