We know that new memory is stored in our hippocampus, and then the data is transfered to the cortex for storage. It’s much like RAM memory and a HDD. When you first gather data from the world, it is stored in the hippocampus (our RAM), and if our brain finds that data as important, it makes copies of it on the cortex (our Hard Drive). If the data is not transferred, new data will take its place.

But this study has managed to show that one can work without the other. Rats were trained to blink when they heard a tone (a tone was played and then an electroshock was sent, the rat than reacted to the tone with a self-defence mechanism : blinking). They removed either the hippocampus or the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) at different times relating to the training in order to see how the rats will react.

When the hippocampus was removed a day after the training, the rats did not blink when the tone was played (They removed the RAM before the data was stored in the HDD), but if the hippocampus was removed a month after the training, the rats still remembered that a shock was coming and that they had to blink (they removed the RAM but the data was already in the HDD). If the medial prefrontal cortex was removed, things went exactly the opposite.

This is not a new theory, but this study gives electrophysiologial proof that this is how the memory works. But now a new question has been raised : how is this exactly made ?

Bruno Bontempi, a neuroscientist at the Université de Bordeaux in Talence, France states : “memories are progressively laid down in the cortex as they mature over time and become independent of the hippocampus,”.”A lingering question, is exactly how memories become encoded in the mPFC. Research with both rodents and people has suggested that new memories are reactivated during sleep”. “One possibility, is that this memory reactivation has a role in changing neural firing patterns and stabilizing memories in the cortex.”

Most people rely on keys because you can’t use it or duplicate it if you don’t have it, but a team of computer scientists from UC San Diego have developed a sneaky software that will be able to break a key’s code using a photo. Each common key (not the modern key with asimetric sides) is basically a numeric code, represented by the height of the bumps. The software, actually called “Sneaky” does just that : finds the numeric code. Then a locksmith can build a copy of your key.

In one demonstration of this software photos from a cell phone were used and in another, a high resolution camera took pictures from a roof of a key 60 meters away. Both methods produced identical copies of the original keys.

Stefan Savage, the man that led the student-run project, is a computer science professor from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering. Their intentions were to make the genera public aware of this threat. There are many people who even post photos with some keys in the background online without knowing that that picture is a big threat to their security, and this is what this project is intended to do : prevent people from making this kind of mistakes in the future.

The software works by requesting 3 user-defined points in space as control points for the three dimensions. This is a technique broadly used in computer vision. Benjamin Laxton, the man who wrote the code (which was not released to the public explains) : “The program is simple. You only need to click a few control points in the image of the key and the ‘Sneakey’ program does the rest. It normalizes the key’s size and position so that each pixel then corresponds to a known distance. From this information, the height of each of the key cuts can easily be computed and likewise the bitting code can be extracted,”

Some might say that burglars are not scientists but Laxton adds that a man with basic knowledge of Mathlab and computer vision techniques can build a similar system that can be used for copying your keys without knowing.

More and more companies produce keys with electromagnetic secrets as well as a physical code, but classical keys are still used in more than 95 percent of the locks, so you might consider keeping your keys out of sight in the future.

This was possible because these rocks bare with them magnetic records that a team led by MIT planetary scientst Benjamin P. Weiss decrypted to find some interesting things and overturn some accepted theories about how the planets form.

In the beginning of the solar system, rubble and dust collided together and formed bigger and bigger rocks, called planetesimals. It seems that when these objects were about 150-200 km in diameter, they were big enough to melt almost entirely. When these rocks melted, the “ingredients” that they were composed of separated. When this happened silicates and other lighter components raised to the surface and eventually formed crusts while iron-rich components formed the core, where it began moving to form a magnetic dynamo, producing magnetic fields. The study results, published Oct. 31 in Science show that some meteorites that fell to Earth contain traces of that magnetic field.

It has previously been considered that these planetesimals were not much unlike the asteroids : ”just homogeneous, unmelted rocky material, with no large-scale structure,” Weiss said. “Now we’re realizing that many of the things that were forming planets were mini-planets themselves, with crusts and mantles and cores.”

If the plenetesimals were molten when they collided, it would change the theories about how the planets themselves were formed. This could give us clue about why minerals are distributed in the Earth’s structure.

“In the last five or 10 years,” Weiss said, “our understanding of the early history of the solar system has undergone a sort of mini-revolution, driven by analytical advances in geochemistry. In this study we used a geophysical technique to independently test many of these new ideas. ”

“Events happened surprisingly fast at the beginning of the solar system,” he said. Some of the angrite meteorites in this study formed just 3 million years after the birth of the solar system itself, 4,568 million years ago, and show signs that their parent body had a magnetic field that was 20 to 40 percent as strong as Earth’s today. “We are used to thinking of dynamo magnetic fields in rocky bodies as uncommon phenomena today. But it may be that short-lived planetesimal dynamos were widespread in the early solar system.”

If a few days ago we talked about about identifying a step in life’s evolution on Earth, this study has identified a step in the Solar System’s evolution. A new piece of the puzzle has fallen into place !

We all know that sea animals existed first, and then they grew legs and evolved to survive on land, but how this step in evolution was made.

Scientists used a fossil from 375 million years ago to try and explain this mystery in evolution. The fossil was discovered more than 1000 kilometers beyond the Arctic Circle, on Ellesmere Island in Canada.Tiktaalik roseae, is a sea predator that represents a crucial step towards the transition to animals that walk on land from fish. Scientists uncovered that the transition from fins to limbs were not enough to survive on land as changes are observed also in the head skeleton.

The study, published in Nature was made by team from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia that find this animal as the best example of transition from sea to land. It has both features needed to survive in sea like fin rays and scales, but also a mobile neck, appendages and skull modifications shared with some of the first tetrapods (limbed animals).The predator needed this step in evolution to adapt in shallow watter.

The program director in the foundation that funded this research, H. Richard Lane, stated : “Exquisite specimens of Tiktaalik roseae discovered several years ago continue to function as rosetta stones for understanding the emergence of quadripeds on land”.

Scientists believe that the gill arches, palate and braincase of Tiktaalik give information regarding the evolutionary pattern that changed the skeleton. So far, some of the cranial features Tiktaalik has have been associated with land animals, but now scientist believe that these were needed for living in shallow water.

“The gradual evolutionary transition from fish to tetrapod, and the transition from aquatic to terrestrial lifestyles required much more than the evolution of limbs,” said Daeschler. “The head of these animals was becoming more solidly constructed and, at the same time, more mobile with respect to the body across this transition.”

Tiktaalik also has a mobile neck, which is a land feature. Deep sea predators don’t need mobile neck because they can move their position up and down using the tail while when the body is fixed such as shallow water and land, a mobile neck advantageous.

Neil Shubin, who was a co-leader in the team that discovered this fossil stated : “We used to think of this transition of the neck and skull as a rapid event, largely because we lacked information about the intermediate animals,”.”Tiktaalik neatly fills this morphological gap, and helps to resolve the timing of this complex transition.”

This new way of processing and storing data is called quantum computing and it has huge advantages. One of those advantages is the speed a quantum computer could reach. This computer could perform some mathematical tasks, like factoring, billions times faster than the current top supercomputers. This is because a quantum computer works unlike a “classical” computer. Classical computers process and store data using the charge of an electron that is represented by binary bits : 1 represents a charge while 0 represents no charge.

Quantum computing utilizes an intrinsic quantum property called “spin,” in which certain particles can act as if they were tiny bar magnets. Spin is assigned a directional state of either “up” or “down,” which can be used to encode data in 0s and 1s. However, unlike charge in classical computing, which is either present or not, spin can be up, down or both, thanks to a quantum effect called “superposition.”

Superpositioning exponentially expands the storage capabilities of a quantum data bit or “qubit.” Whereas a byte of classical data, made up of three bits, can represent only one of the eight possible combinations of 0s and 1s, a quantum equivalent (sometimes called a qubyte) can represent all eight combinations at once. Furthermore, thanks to another quantum property called “entanglement,” operations on all eight combinations can be performed simultaneously.

Of the many challenges facing quantum computing, one of the biggest has been finding a way to preserve the integrity of data while it is stored. Although the spin of electrons has proven well-suited for data processing, it is too fragile to be used as memory – the data quickly becomes corrupted by the influence of other electrons. To overcome this obstacle, the co-authors of this experiment turned to the more protected environs of the atomic nucleus.

“In this exciting collaboration with colleagues from Oxford and Princeton, we have reported on a very important demonstration of coherent information transfer between the electron spin (processing qubit) and the nuclear spin (memory qubit) of phosphorus atoms in isotopically enriched silicon crystals,” said co-author Schenkel, a physicist in Berkeley Lab’s Accelerator and Fusion Research Division.

“The electron spin information was faithfully stored in the nuclear spin for nearly two seconds (thousands of times longer than ever reported for similar studies), then transferred back to the electron spin with about 90-percent fidelity,” Schenkel said.

Now that it has been demonstrated that electron spin data can be stored and retrieved via nuclear spin, future steps will require improving spin control and readout mechanisms. Also, while the quantum memory time observed in this study is exceptionally long by previous standards, it should still be possible to significantly extend this time.

In a nutshell, the experiment proved that amino acids could be created from exposing inorganic molecules to electricity. But it seems that this was not all to Miller’s experiments. Two other experiments, neither published, have been conducted. The vials containing products from those experiments have been recently recovered and they have been analyzed using today’s technology.

The new results, published in this week’s edition of Science, prove that the better experiment remained in the shadow for 55 years. The experiment that got Miller the Nobel prize was not the one that produced the wider variety of organic molecules. His second experiment was basically an upgrade of his first : an additional device was used to increase air flow trough an air-tight device.It seems that increasing the air flow works towards creating a better environment for chemical reactions.

The leader of the report, Adam Johnson stated : “The apparatus Stanley Miller paid the least attention to gave the most exciting results,”"We suspect part of the reason for this was that he did not have the analytical tools we have today, so he would have missed a lot.”

Due to the fact that identifiying organic compounds at that time was possible only if they were present in high levels, when Miller published his results in the May 15, 1953 edition of Science, he identified only 5 amino acids : two types of alanine,alpha-amino-butyric acid, glycine and aspartic acid. He later identified additional compounds like hidroxy and carboxylic acids. A team of chemists and biologists from the Scrips Institution of Oceanography, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Carnegie Institution of Washington and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center analyzed the vials from Miller’s experiments in the 1950’s, and the results were interesting at least. It seems that Miller’s initial experiment contained 14 amino acids, compared to only 5 that Miller thought. But his “upgraded” experiment, yielded22 amino acids and the same five amines present in the original experiment.

Jeffrey Bada, principal investigator for Science stated : “We believed there was more to be learned from Miller’s original experiment,” Bada said. “We found that in comparison to his design everyone is familiar with from textbooks, the volcanic apparatus produces a wider variety of compounds.” “Many of these other amino acids have hydroxyl groups attached to them, meaning they’d be more reactive and more likely to create totally new molecules, given enough time.”

Researchers believe that Miller opted to publish his simpler experiment given the fact that at the time the results seemed identical. But the air flow was removing new molecules from the spark before other reactions turned them into basic compounds again. ”

It seems scientists get closer and closer towards understanding how life arose on Earth.

Have you ever surfed the net looking for an image that contains things that you want ? You might of noticed that you can search pictures by tags, but those tags can be fake and/or incomplete. And from the other side of the gun, when people post pictures they don’t usually have the patience to cover all the tags. And you spend at least half an hour if you want to find an image that contains all the elements you want.

But a team of researchers from Penn State developed a nice little thing called “Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures in Real-Time (ALIPR)”. This is a statistical approach to photos that can make our task of finding photographs on the Internet much easier.

This system works like this : you take a bunch of pictures, you put in all the tags (patience my friend) and then the system scans those images for similar patterns amongst keywords. ALIPR studies the colors, the shapes, the sizes amongst those similar tags. When this development stage is finished, the system will be able to identify tags in a new picture. It’s more like training the computer than programming it to do something, much like the voice recognition programs. This is a big step from the way current image search engines work : analyzing the words around the image and the name of the image itself.

The team currently holds the patent for a previous version of this approach, called ALIP, and now is in the process of patenting the new and improved ALIPR.

Jia Li, a professor of statistics at Penn State further explains : “Our basic approach is to take a large number of photos — we started with 60,000 photos — and to manually tag them with a variety of keywords that describe their contents. For example, we might select 100 photos of national parks and tag them with the following keywords: national park, landscape, and tree,”"We then would build a statistical model to teach the computer to recognize patterns in color and texture among these 100 photos and to assign our keywords to new photos that seem to contain national parks, landscapes, and/or trees. Eventually, we hope to reverse the process so that a person can use the keywords to search the Web for relevant images.”

While the team is brainstorming and implementing new ideas into this program, the final selection will still need a human eye, but the variety will be much more precise : “There are so many images out there and so many variations on the images’ contents that I don’t think it will be possible for ALIPR to be 100-percent accurate,”

The study, lead by Malcom Chisholm, Chairman of the Department of Chemistry at Ohio State, is presented in the Oct 16 edition of the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)”. “There are other such hybrids out there, but the advantage of our material is that we can cover the entire range of the solar spectrum,” said Chisholm.

This long-lived excited state should allow us to better manipulate charge separation,” Chisholm said.

The project was funded by the National Science Foundation and Ohio State’s Institute for Materials Research, and even tough this material is years away from commercial development, this new discovery proves that solar panels can become an important source of energy in the future.