Neuroscientists at MIT say they have uncovered why relatively minor details of an episode are sometimes inexplicably linked to long-term memories.     Even irrelevant information that follows the relevant event (rather than precedes it) is more likely to be integrated into long-term memory.

Here's an interesting one, short and sweet - apparently Russians are able to perceive between slightly-different hues of the colour blue because their language contains more words for it.Researchers are still trying to figure out how it works - is it that language influences perception, or does physiology influence language? No definitive proof either way as far as I can tell, but it's an interesting effect nonetheless.http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070430/full/news070430-2.html

Science programs get regular criticism here for being overhyped and then delayed with budget overruns as a sweetener.But the James Webb Space Telescope and the Large Hadron Collider are not only.   The U.S. military's F-35 is getting renewed dirty looks as the recession continues.   

When I was a lad, the science fair was a dozen schools.   The Google Science Fair has students from around the world, which means I would be unlikely to spend 3 minutes looking at the problem, guess because I had to get to another event, and still place second in the physics competition.The good old days.But the prizes are better than the textbooks I got also.   So if you're ages 13 to 18, check it out.   You may a $50,000 scholarship, a 10-day trip to the Galápagos Islands or a three-day site visit to CERN.

In The Economist:Once seen as the last resort for a bunch of lonely geeks, online-dating services have gradually shed much of the stigma formerly associated with them. Sounds great, but when there is money ($3-4 billion per year!) to be made, you take the chance unscrupulous people will exploit the lonely.Last year Jetplace, an Australian company, admitted that it had been running more than 1,300 false profiles on a matchmaking service that it owned. Dating-site bosses maintain that such instances are rare, but detecting them can be tricky.

"Many unknown dinosaurs await discovery in rock formations all over the world, but some new species are hiding in plain sight. One such animal, described in an in-press Cretaceous Research paper, had one of the largest heads of any dinosaur."Check it out at Smithsonian online:Sam Noble museum specimen, just re-named Titanoceratops. Image from Flickr user cosmicautumn.

Brian Switek at Wired writes:Fossil birds don’t often receive good press. Numerous papers pass through the academic literature each year without even a nod from journalists, but the description of a prehistoric stork on the island of Flores proffered such delicious headline bait that reporters could not resist. Although no bigger than its modern-day relatives, this 6-foot stork would have towered over the tiny Flores “hobbits”

Kathryn Gray, a 10-year-old girl in Canada, has become the youngest person ever to discover a supernova.  With a middle name like Aurora, perhaps that isn't a surprise.The supernova occurred in the galaxy UGC 3378 and is part of the constellation Camelopardalis.   It is about 240 million light-years away.  She discovered it with the help of two other amateur astronomers.CBC News has the story

A cave in the Annamite Mountains of Viet Nam contains a river and jungle and is large enough, in spots, to hold a skyscraper.Hang Son Doong Cave is part of a network of about 150 caves in central Vietnam near the Laotian border.  The husband and wife team of Howard and Deb Limbert first discovered it in 2009 but only recently returned to scale a huge calcite wall and try to find the cavern's end.

If you're a conspiracy theorist, these are good times.   Leading up to the end of 2012, when the mother of all world endings is scheduled (until the next one), plenty of things would be expected to happen that sets it all in motion and counts as ominous portends, in that 'no-snowflake-in-an-avalanche-takes-the-blame' sort of way.And one just did.   In Arkansas, thousands of blackbirds fell dead from the sky over the town of Beebe.