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It’s an inconvenient truth of aging: In our 30s and up, it gets increasingly harder for most of us to recall names, faces, and details from the past. Scientists have long debated whether this gradual decline is an early form of Alzheimer’s disease—a neurodegenerative condition that leads to severe dementia—or a distinct neurological process. Now, researchers have found a protein that distinguishes typical forgetfulness from Alzheimer’s and could lead to potential treatments for age-related memory loss. Previous studies have shown that Alzheimer’s disease and age-related memory loss involve different neural circuits in the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped structure in the brain...

In the new study, the team from Harvard randomly assigned 60 elderly people to drink two cups of flavanol-rich or flavanol-poor cocoa every day for a month. There weren't any overall differences between the high- and low-flavanol groups in terms of cognitive abilities, so the researchers looked a little deeper. They found that people who had compromised blood flow to the brain and white matter damage at the beginning of the study did show a difference after drinking the cocoa for a month: Blood flow in their brains improved by about 8%, and the time it took them to complete...

A reporter asked me, "Would you prefer that students know information, or how to find information?" Clearly she thought that knowing where to find information was best. Actually knowing facts was, in her mind, not important. That was the old way, the medieval approach, when children were whipped to make them memorize the state capitals and other such irrelevant stuff. Thank goodness, she clearly believed, we have moved on to more civilized ways. Children no longer know anything. All they know is that they must go somewhere to find what they want to know. But why would the reporter believe...

Hardware makers often sing the praises of their latest and greatest flash memory, but the folks at Crossbar are ready to show them up with resistive RAM (RRAM) that they've been quietly working on. Compared to NAND, RRAM comes in at half the size and boasts 20 times faster write speeds (140MB/s), reads data at 17MB per second, guzzles 20 times less power and has 10 times more endurance. Since RRAM is non-volatile memory, it can keep data even when it's powered off, á la NAND. As if that weren't enough, 3D stacking construction allows for several terabytes of storage,...

Researchers manipulate mouse neurons to create a false memory; the work could lead to a better understanding of how memories form. Remember this: The red neurons are the brain cells in the hippocampus of a mouse carrying a new memory of a particular place. Scientists have created a false memory in mice by manipulating neurons that bear the memory of a place. The work further demonstrates just how unreliable memory can be. It also lays new ground for understanding the cell behavior and circuitry that controls memory, and could one day help researchers discover new ways to treat mental illnesses...

New Delhi - It's a disease long associated with the elderly but is now diagnosed in younger people as well and with no permanent cure available till date. However, in what could give hope to thousands suffering from Alzheimer's Disease (AD), the pharmacology department in AIIMS has identified Ayurvedic drugs which could have a role in preventing the onset of AD and also restricting its spread in affected patients. AD is a degenerative neurological disorder leading to progressive loss of cognitive abilities, including the patient's memory due to a drop in chemicals — known as neurotransmitters — which transmits messages...

Laboratory advance shows that nano-imprinting could help the hard drive industry meet its long-term goals for data storage capacity. Researchers at HGST, a major manufacturer of hard disk drives, have shown that an emerging fabrication technology called nano-imprinting could be used to double the data storage capacity of today’s hard disks. They say the patent-pending work, done in collaboration with a company called Molecular Imprints, could lead to a cost-effective manufacturing process by the end of the decade. Hard disk drives store data in magnetic material on the surface of a spinning disk. During production, this material is deposited as...

Current hard-drive designs are reaching their limit in data storage, but a new manufacturing technique could allow drive capacities to keep expanding. A technique that enables the nanopatterned layers that store data in hard disk drives to assemble themselves has been improved to better suit mass production, and could enable disks that store five times as much data as the largest available today. Using self-assembly instead of machines that print or etch out features has long been considered a potential solution to a looming barrier to expanding the capacity of hard-disk designs. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin...

My "seasoned citizen" mom is concerned that she might be having memory issues, and feels that she's slow on the uptake on some things during conversations. In the past I've tried to recommend ginkgo to her, but she's resistant to try new things... but now, it seems she's willing to give gingko a shot. I understand some preparations are better than others, and I we sure the natural healing community on FR would have some recommends... My mom works here, she's not a member, but I'm going to send her a link to this thread, she'll read what you advise...~*Thank...

FRIDAY, Sept. 14 (HealthDay News) — Regular exposure to secondhand smoke has a negative effect on brain function, according to a new British study that found people who live with or spend a significant amount of time with a smoker are damaging their memories. “According to recent reports by the World Health Organization, exposure to secondhand smoke can have serious consequences on the health of people who have never smoked themselves, but who are exposed to other people’s tobacco smoke,” Dr. Tom Heffernan, a researcher at the Collaboration for Drug and Alcohol Research Group at Northumbria University, said in a...

Researchers working at MIT have successfully manipulated the content of a rat's dream by replaying an audio cue that was associated with the previous day's events, namely running through a maze (what else). The breakthrough furthers our understanding of how memory gets consolidated during sleep — but it also holds potential for the prospect of "dream engineering." Working at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, neuroscientist Matt Wilson was able to accomplish this feat by exploiting the way the brain's hippocampus encodes self-experienced events into memory. Scientists know that our hippocampus is busy at work replaying a number of...

The story of this blessing, is true and the place where this story happened is Chepachet Rhode Island in the late 1960s. The actual river sound was recorded from the Chepachet river. This video is in memory of Roy, my nephew who was young when he went to his final home a few years later in the early 1970's and had faith in his Savior Jesus Christ the Lord.

I had a bad night last night, one filled with dreams and memories of my time in combat – six months of front line duty with the 15th Infantry Regiment, four of them as a scout for which I foolishly volunteered. Tomorrow is the 10th of June. Sixty years ago, on the 10th, I was on a daytime patrol. I never enjoyed those, you always got shot at by someone and if you have once heard a bullet go past your head from a sniper, you would just as soon not have another one. Anyway, after returning safely, I was...

The value of mental-training games may be speculative, as Dan Hurley writes in his article on the quest to make ourselves smarter, but there is another, easy-to-achieve, scientifically proven way to make yourself smarter. Go for a walk or a swim. For more than a decade, neuroscientists and physiologists have been gathering evidence of the beneficial relationship between exercise and brainpower. But the newest findings make it clear that this isn't just a relationship; it is the relationship. Using sophisticated technologies to examine the workings of individual neurons - and the makeup of brain matter itself - scientists in just...

Federal health officials on Tuesday added new safety alerts to the prescribing information for statins, the cholesterol-reducing medications that are among the most widely prescribed drugs in the world, citing rare risks of memory loss, diabetes and muscle pain. It is the first time that the Food and Drug Administration has officially linked statin use with cognitive problems like forgetfulness and confusion, although some patients have reported such problems for years. Among the drugs affected are huge sellers like Lipitor, Zocor, Crestor and Vytorin. But federal officials and some medical experts said the new alerts should not scare people away...

The story of, A Miracle, is true and the place that this story happened is in, Chepachet Rhode Island in the late 1960s. Roy was young when he went to his final home a few years later in the early 1970’s and had faith in his Savior Jesus Christ the Lord. In Loving Memory of Roy, past tragically in early 1970's. The instrumental medley of this video is, Precious Memories, In The Garden and Precious Lord Take My Hand, author is unknown.

The arrow on this MRI of a brain shows areas where researchers applied electrical stimulation. In an experiment likely to raise new hopes for those with memory-robbing diseases such as Alzheimer's, researchers have found that sending an electrical jolt to a part of the brain that plays a key role in memory improved people's ability to learn — and remember — their way across an unfamiliar landscape. The study, conducted at UCLA and published in Thursday's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, was small and highly preliminary, involving just seven patients with epilepsy. But deep brain stimulation helped...

Researchers have successfully stored a single data bit in only 12 atoms. Currently it takes about a million atoms to store a bit on a modern hard-disk, the researchers from IBM say. They believe this is the world's smallest magnetic memory bit. According to the researchers, the technique opens up the possibility of producing much denser forms of magnetic computer memory than today's hard disk drives and solid state memory chips. "Roughly every two years hard drives become denser," research lead author Sebastian Loth told the BBC. "The obvious question to ask is how long can we keep going. And...

2012 marks the 90th anniversary of what is believed to be Alfred Hitchcock’s first directorial effort: an unfinished, now lost silent film called No. 13. I’ve been holding my own private Alfred Hitchcock festival at home for several weeks, using DVDs, streaming video, even a VHS. I’m not aware of any other, official celebrations out there, but Hitchcock doesn’t really need any: His work is never out of circulation, and he’s often in the news for one reason or the other. Image by AFP via @daylife For instance, it was recently reported on LiveScience.com that scientists believe they’ve ascertained the...

We've all experienced it: The frustration of entering a room and forgetting what we were going to do. Or get. Or find. New research from University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses. "Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an 'event boundary' in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away," Radvansky explains. "Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized." The study was published recently in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental...