Science News chills us to the bone with the latest breakthrough from Mark Mayford and Susumu Tonegawa, neuroscientists at Scripps and MIT, respectively. They’ve been able to manufacture memories – terrifying memories of things that never happened – in mice:

Though the two teams used different approaches, they both created a false memory of a fearful situation in mice. In [...]

Scientific American veers into “No, really?” territory with news that cocaine ages your brain prematurely:

“As we age we all lose gray matter,” Karen Ersche of the Behavioral and Clinical Neuroscience Institute at the University of Cambridge and co-author of the new study, said in a prepared statement. But, she noted, “chronic cocaine users lose grey matter at a [...]

…of killing endangered animals. Or at least Nature hypes up enough evidence to put Chinese medicine on trial:

“There’s absolutely no honesty in the labelling of these products. What they declare is completely at odds with what’s in there,” says Mike Bunce, a geneticist at Murdoch University near Perth, Australia, who led the study. The results are published today [...]

Click to embiggen

This is what America meant for Claude Auge, who edited Le Larousse pour tous nouveau dictionnaire encyclopedique in 1909.

Eskimos and tapirs.

You can browse through your Larousse at the Open Library.

Physics World has a solution for the Pioneer Anomaly – the strange slowdown experienced by both Pioneer space probes as they passed beyond the farthest reach of the solar wind. It’s not as exciting as aliens with tractor beams or magnetic walls built to keep humans from exploring the galaxy, but it is an explanation for what happened at [...]

Scientific American is seething with the swarm of possibilities that bring every human decision down to the level of bees:

To Dr. Thomas Seeley, a professor of neurobiology at Cornell University, the hive mind is more than just a metaphor. In a recent paper in Science, Seeley and his colleagues describe a potential deep parallel between how [...]

The space administration needs YOU – and your vision of what we should do on Mars:

“This is a two-way capability open to anyone,” says Doug McCuistion, director of the director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program. “We’re absolutely serious about that. We want to hear from anyone who has an idea, not just the establishment.”

The MPPG is reluctant [...]

I think I’m much more sympathetic to this viewpoint than might at first appear. New Scientist reports on medical philosophy that holds that when kids are in pain and discomfort, their bodies are doing important things:

What do you do differently from other doctors?
One example is when a child twists an ankle playing soccer. Everyone rushes to offer ice [...]

This is a flatworm. A German flatworm. It may be a distant cousin of the planarians that hypnotized Dutch artist M.C. Escher with their two-dimensional lives and their bizarre ability to learn by eating the brains of the educated.

It’s probably not thinking about that, though. Look into its eyespots. Did you see that?

Found on Wikimedia Commons.