Science News

Crohn’s disease is a real pain in the gut. This inflammatory disorder can lead to some serious intestinal difficulties. And heredity is partly to blame: some 30 different genes enhance susceptibility. But not everyone who has the genes gets Crohn’s. [More]

Many people wish their memory worked like a video recording. How handy would that be? Finding your car keys would simply be a matter of zipping back to the last time you had them and hitting “play.” You would never miss an appointment or forget to pay a bill. You would remember everyone’s birthday. You would ace every exam.

Or so you might think. In fact, a memory like that would snare mostly useless data and mix them willy-nilly with the information you really needed. It would not let you prioritize or create the links between events that give them meaning. For the very few people who have true photographic recall--eidetic memory, in the parlance of the field--it is more burden than blessing.

Faced with a dauntingly complex problem, scientists typically do the logical thing. They break it into component parts, to simplify and focus their efforts. After all, grappling with smaller facets lets you try to conquer, one piece at a time, a larger problem. But the brain’s very nature resists this technique. In effect, it refuses to be compartmentalized. The more researchers may attempt to look at a single processing question, the more it turns out to be interrelated with many other things going on in the brain.

Take memory. It’s tempting to think of recall as a video recording or some simple device. Far from existing in one discrete module, however, recollections develop from thousands of connections among neurons. In the first article of this issue’s special report on memory, “ Making Connections ,” by Anthony J. Greene, you will learn that neural connections underlie everything we know. As neurons light up together, they create links within which our memories lie. As Greene puts it, memories are “a web of connections between people and things.” Events that have high emotional value are particularly crisp in our minds. The second article of our special report, “ Yearning for Yesterday ,” by Jochen Gebauer and Constantine Sedikides, explains how nostalgia, where we bask in the past, can actually be good for you.

The classroom gently rocked as the speaker approached the lectern. I sat quietly, holding one talisman in my left hand--an iPhone--while balancing another sign of fealty in my lap--a MacBook. The computer was brand-new, purchased for this very purpose. Otherwise, the assembled might have scoped me out for what I truly was--a ­quarter-of-a-century adherent to PCs that ran DOS and ­Windows--and thrown me overboard. For I was attending a weeklong gathering at sea of the faithful, called MacMania 10.

One hundred two Macphiles and I were onboard the Holland America cruise ship Veendam , heading southeast from New York to Bermuda in the first week of May. In 2008 and 2009 I also sailed, but as a speaker in the Scientific American Bright Horizons series produced by Insight Cruises. Insight also puts together the Mac­Mania outings, as well as sojourns featuring opera, astronomy and quilting. Hence their URL: geekcruises.com .

By Jeremy Pelofsky

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - BP Plc resumed collecting oil from its leaking Gulf of Mexico well on Thursday after a temporary setback while a poll showed the environmental disaster is draining public confidence in U.S. President Barack Obama.

California officials proposed regulations Wednesday that would force manufacturers and importers to reduce the use of toxic chemicals in everyday consumer products.

Driven by revelations of lead in children’s toys and jewelry, hormone-mimicking chemicals in plastic baby bottles and controversial flame-retardants in furniture, state officials drafted a set of rules aimed at products with chemicals that have been linked to illness or abnormal development.