In a new study, researchers found that neurons in a specific brain region play a key role in rapidly forming memories about every day events, a finding that may result in a better understanding of memory loss and new methods to fight it in Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases.

Specifically, the study examined neurons in the medial temporal lobe associated with episodic memory, the brain’s ability to consciously recall experienced events and situations like running into an old school friend at the opera. Episodic memory logs these unique experiences and relies on the very rapid formation of new associations in the brain.

Quantum computing is well into its second decade of hype with little progress being made. Computer chip companies have continued to optimize available physics and have left the quantum kind to the academic sandbox. It's not stable long enough to make calculations.

Perhaps what is needed is an intermediary to transmit information, say researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST).

Our brain recognizes objects within milliseconds, even if it only receives rudimentary visual information. Researchers believe that reliable and fast recognition works because the brain is constantly making predictions about objects in the field of view and is comparing these with incoming information.

Only if mismatches occur in this process do higher areas of the brain have to be notified of the error in order to make active corrections to the predictions. Now scientists at the Goethe University have confirmed this hypothesis. Those brain waves that are sent to higher brain areas increase their activity when a predictive error occurs. 

Government-funded science spends a lot of money promoting the idea that only government-funded science is real science, even though almost 60 percent of basic research and almost 100 percent of applied research is done by the private sector.

It has worked. When people picture a hard science like physics, they picture a university-based lab. In reality, physicists often leave academia for jobs in the private sector, pursuing careers that are traditionally not tracked in workforce surveys of the physics field. Investment banking loves people who can create models that may translate to the real world, for example.

Studies have shown that men find female faces more attractive when women are ovulating, but how they might know - the visual clues that allow this - are unclear.

New research research sought to show it might be subtle changes in skin color and that women's faces do increase in redness during ovulation. The scholars found it was so, but the levels of change are just under the detectable range of the human eye. They speculate that facial redness in females was once an involuntary signal for optimal fertility, but has since been "dampened" by evolution - it's best not to look too fertile walking down those city streets and psychologists think that is how evolution works. 

A collaborative group of Japanese researchers has demonstrated that the Earth's daily rotation period (24 hours) is encoded in the KaiC protein at the atomic level, a small, 10 nm-diameter biomolecule expressed in cyanobacterial cells.

The results of this joint research will help elucidate a longstanding question in chronobiology: How is the circadian period of biological clocks determined? The results will also help understand the basic molecular mechanism of the biological clock. This knowledge might contribute to the development of therapies for disorders associated with abnormal circadian rhythms.