Scientific American Online

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.

While taking a walk on a lunch break from fieldwork in Alberta, Canada, paleontologist Michael Ryan came across a couple of bones. In one hand he gripped an antler from a modern mule deer. In the other he held a piece of an ornithischian dinosaur bone. Ryan couldn't help but notice that both bones bore highly similar bite marks . And that's when it hit him. [More]

By Janelle Weaver

The loss of genes that guide the development of fins may help to explain how fish evolved into four-limbed vertebrates, according to a study.

In the late Devonian period, around 365 million years ago, fish-like creatures started venturing from shallow waters onto land with the help of eight-fingered limbs. [More]

By Declan Butler

"With this profound new knowledge, humankind is on the verge of gaining immense, new power to heal. [More]

South Africa will lift on Friday its nearly three-year-old ban on commercial abalone fishing, a move that a wildlife group says will send the highly valued and highly poached species spiraling toward extinction.

Known in South African as perlemoen, abalone (specifically the Haliotis midae species) has long been a cash cow for the nation's fishermen, with thousands of tons taken from coastal waters every year. Although there is a legal, regulated abalone industry in South Africa, much of that catch has been illegal; it is caught by unlicensed poachers and smuggled to Asia where abalone is valued as a purported aphrodisiac . Organized crime syndicates, primarily Chinese triad gangs, have been the major players in this field. The Triads often pay for the perlemoen with methamphetamine , which in turn has fueled an increase in violent crime throughout South Africa. In 2006 South African authorities confiscated more than one million perlemoen from smugglers (representing just a portion of the total amount believed to have been poached).

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory was meant to precisely measure carbon dioxide throughout Earth's atmosphere. Instead, it wound up shattering on the Pacific Ocean* near Antarctica in 2009, a victim of a failed fairing--the aerodynamic nose cone shroud that keeps the satellite from burning up during launch. [More]

The final planned space shuttle mission, currently slated for mid-November at the earliest, may not lift off until February 2011, according to a NASA spokesperson. [More]

A long-studied planet orbiting a star 150 light-years away has been given a new look, thanks to a novel method of studying extrasolar planets from Earth. [More]

“Six thousand billion of them are going through your body every second.” That’s physicist Lawrence Krauss on neutrinos, on the June 15th weekly Science Talk podcast. “Neutrinos are the lightest elementary particles we know of. The name comes from the fact that they had to be neutral because we couldn’t see them in detectors. But they had to be light. So Enrico Fermi called them "a little neutron," in Italian is neutrino. So they were baby neutrons, which were the only other neutral particles at the time that were known.”

Now astrophysicists [Shaun Thomas, Ofer Lahav and Filipe Abdalla] have put a best-guess upper limit on the mass of the neutrino. The research is being reported this week at the Weizmann U.K. conference at University College London and will appear in an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters .

By Scott Haggett

Moviemakers continue to up the ante in their quest to make film animation as realistic as live action, thanks to improvements in 3-D computer-generated (CG) graphics. These efforts can pay off in big ways--James Cameron's Avatar earned a mountain of money and three Academy Awards. But, as New Zealand digital effects–maker Weta Digital can attest, painstakingly creating three-meter-tall blue bioluminescent aliens required an unprecedented amount of computing power and data storage--and those resources are likely be dwarfed by subsequent projects. [More]

The adapted virus that immunized hundreds of millions of people against smallpox has now been enlisted in the war on cancer. Vaccinia poxvirus joins a herpesvirus and a host of other pathogens on a growing list of engineered viruses entering late-stage human testing against cancer. [More]

In his 1974 commencement speech at the California Institute of Technology, Nobel laureate physicist Richard P. Feynman articulated the foundation of scientific integrity: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool.... After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”

Unfortunately, says Feynman’s Caltech colleague David Goodstein in his new book On Fact and Fraud: Cautionary Tales from the Front Lines of Science (Princeton University Press, 2010), some scientists do try to fool their colleagues, and believing that everyone is conventionally honest may make a person more likely to be duped by deliberate fraud. Nature may be subtle, but she does not intentionally lie. People do. Why some scientists lie is what Goodstein wants to understand. He begins by debunking myths about science such as: “A scientist should never be motivated to do science for personal gain, advancement or other rewards.” “Scientists should always be objective and impartial when gathering data.” “Scientists must never believe dogmatically in an idea or use rhetorical exaggeration in promoting it.” “Scientists should never permit their judgments to be affected by authority.” These and many other maxims just do not reflect how science works in practice.

The New York Times Sunday business section recently ran an enormous puff piece on Ray Kurzweil and the "Singularity" cult (my term, not the Times 's). Kurzweil is a successful inventor–entrepreneur best known lately for his sci-tech prophecies. He claims that advances in AI, nanotech, biotech, computer science and neuroscience are bearing us toward a radical transformation of our minds and bodies called the Singularity--aka "rapture of the geeks". [More]

There must be something in the water here in Lanesboro, Minnesota, because last night I dreamt of an encounter with a very muscular African-American centaur, an orgiastic experience with – gasp – drunken members of the opposite sex and (as if that weren’t enough) then being asked by my hostess to wear a white wedding dress while giving a scientific keynote presentation. “Does it make me look too feminine?” “Not at all,” she assured me, “it’s a man’s dress.”

Now Freud might raise his eyebrows at such a lurid dreamscape, but if these images represent my repressed sexual yearnings, then there’s a side of me that I apparently have yet to discover. But I doubt that this is the case. Dreams with erotic undertones are like most other dreams during REM sleep--runaway trains with a conductor who is helpless to do anything about the surrealistic directions they take. Rather, if you really want to know about a person’s hidden sexual desires, then find out what’s on his or her mind’s eye during the deepest throes of masturbation.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has struggled in the past two months to come to grips with dispersants , the chemical cocktails being used to break up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill into tiny droplets that are easier for microbes to eat . It now appears that the EPA failed to require adequate controls for dispersant toxicity testing, despite the fact that the agency set very explicit criteria for how such chemicals should be tested. This follows the agency's call for BP to use less deadly dispersants ( pdf ) with toxicities below a certain threshold when, in toxicology, it's smaller figures that indicate a concentration that is more dangerous. [More]