TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Abruptly Forgotten: Working Memory Disappears in a Blink When you go from bed to bathroom on a dark night, a quick flick of the lights will leave a lingering impression on your mind’s eye. For decades evidence suggested that such visual working memories--which, even in daylight, connect the dots to create a complete scene as the eyes dart around rapidly--fade gradually over the span of several seconds. But a clever new study reported in the journal Psychological Science finds that such memories actually stay sharp until they are suddenly lost.Cognitive psychologists Weiwei Zhang and Stephen J. Luck, both at the University of California, Davis, tested subjects’ recall for the hues of colored squares flashed briefly on a screen up to 10 seconds earlier. Subjects marked their answer on a color wheel. If memories decay gradually, the guesses should have become increasingly imprecise as time wore on, evidenced by participants selecting yellow or red, for example, when the correct choice was orange. Instead subjects went straight from fairly accurate answers to random choices--no better than chance--indicating the memories were decaying all at once. According to Zhang and Luck’s mathematical analysis, most subjects’ memories went “poof” somewhere between four and 10 seconds after the stimulus. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Earth-Like Planets May Be Made of Carbon Astronomy is the science of the exotic, but the thing that astronomers most want to find is the familiar: another planet like Earth, a hospitable face in a hostile cosmos. The Kepler spacecraft, which was launched last March, is their best instrument yet for discovering Earth-like planets around sunlike stars, as opposed to the giant planets that have been planet finders’ main harvest so far. Many predict that 2010 will be the year of exo-Earths. But if the giant planets, which looked nothing like what astronomers had expected, are any indication, those Earths may not be so reassuringly familiar either.It has dawned on theorists in recent years that other Earth-mass planets may be enormous water droplets, balls of nitrogen or lumps of iron. Name your favorite element or compound, and someone has imagined a planet made of it. The spectrum of possibilities depends largely on the ratio of carbon to oxygen. After hydrogen and helium, these are the most common elements in the universe, and in an embryonic planetary system they pair off to create carbon monoxide. The element that is in slight excess ends up dominating the planet’s chemistry. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Report: Climate change is taking a toll on U.S. bird populations North American bird species are "facing a new threat--climate change--that could dramatically alter their habitat and food supply and push many species towards extinction," said Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar on Thursday when he announced the new report, " The State of the Birds: 2010 Report on Climate Change ." [More] rss.sciam.com |
Boot Camp at the West Side Y.M.C.A. The Boot Camp class at the West Side Y.M.C.A. not only challenges the body but also offers an unexpected array of characters. nytimes.com |
Power from pondscum: Algal biofuels In the discussion of alternative energy and fuels, algae have been bubbling to the top of the proverbial feedstock pool. Algae, the little green guys responsible for everything from making your Dairy Queen Blizzard solid to forming the basis of our current fossil fuels, are being looked at long and hard by some of the nation's top researchers and decision-makers as a source for next-generation biofuels.Biofuels are already produced in large quantities . In the United States, corn is used to produce tens of millions of gallons of the ethanol each year. Biodiesel, produced in smaller volumes, can be produced from everything from waste cooking oil to soybeans and tropical plants. [More] rss.sciam.com |