It’s funny that we have to make our brain work in order to be able to figure out how it’s working. Well, at least that is what neuroscientists Kaori Takehara-Nishiuchi and Bruce McNaughton formerly from the University of Arizona had to do in order to find clues about how our memory works.
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.
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- Tags: brain, cortex, hippocampus, memory
I’m sure that you don’t let people stare at you’re credit card number and at your driver’s licence number, but you will leave your keys in plain sight and won’t see it as a security threat. But scientists proved that with some medium knowledge of computers, a photo of your key can be turned into a copy.
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.
It seems that scientists from MIT have answered a question many have been trying to sort out regarding the the conditions present when the solar system was still young. The team has analyzed pieces of 3 meteorites that contained the most ancient rocks known, called angrites and they provided clues about the way the planets were formed.
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.
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- Tags: planets, solar system
It seems that tiny pieces of the puzzle that represents evolution are gathered each day. And evolution is not as simple as presented in the game “Spore”.
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. Continue Reading…
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- Tags: darwinism, evolution, tetrapods
In a world where time is of the essence, science and technology just keep giving us faster ways to achieve older goals and new paths towards new breakthroughs. A team of scientists from around the globe are working on a way to store information into the nucleus of an atom.
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. Continue Reading…