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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...

DURHAM, N.C. - Immune system cells of the brain, which scavenge pathogens and damaged neurons, are also key players in memory and learning, according to new research by Duke neuroscientists. Earlier studies by Staci Bilbo, an assistant professor in psychology & neuroscience, had shown that laboratory rats experiencing an infection at an early age have an aggressive immune response to subsequent infections, which also harms their learning and memory. In a study published in the Oct. 26 Journal of Neuroscience, Bilbo's team identifies the source of the learning difficulties and traces it back to the immune system itself. The researchers...

I have an older PC computer that is kinda slow. It has a SD Card reader, that functions like another drive. Can I reconfigure the system so that Windows 'scratch pad' memory is on a 8 GB SD card in the slot so that it doesn't have to use the hard drive, and thus would be faster? Thanks in advance for all your comments..........

The technology combines silicon nanowires with a "ferroelectric" polymer, a material that switches polarity when electric fields are applied, making possible a new type of ferroelectric transistor. "It's in a very nascent stage," said doctoral student Saptarshi Das, who is working with Joerg Appenzeller, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and scientific director of nanoelectronics at Purdue's Birck Nanotechnology Center.The ferroelectric transistor's changing polarity is read as 0 or 1, an operation needed for digital circuits to store information in binary code consisting of sequences of ones and zeroes. The new technology is called FeTRAM, for ferroelectric transistor random...

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the largest manufacturers of computer memory, Samsung, have created a new kind of flash memory that uses graphene—atom-thick sheets of pure carbon—along with silicon to store information. Incorporating graphene could help extend the viability of flash memory technology for years to come, and allow future portable electronics to store far more data. Chipmakers pack increasing amounts of data in the same physical area by miniaturizing the memory cells used to store individual bits. Inside today's flash drives, these cells are nanoscale "floating gate" transistors. Recent years have seen the...

Korean researchers working out of the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology report in a paper published in Nature Materials, that they've been able to create a non-volatile Resistance RAM (ReRam) chip capable of withstanding a trillion read/write cycles, all with a switching time of just 10ns (about a million times faster than current flash chips), paving the way for a possible upgrade to flash memory cards. ReRam chips are non-volatile, meaning they can retain stored information in the absence of power and are currently made using a Ta2O5 (tantalum) film, the new chips developed by the Samsung team uses Ta2O5-x/TaO2-x...

IBM researchers have made a breakthrough in a new kind of memory chip that can record data 100 times faster than today’s flash memory chips. That means scientists are one step closer to creating a universal memory chip that is fast, permanent, and has lots of capacity. If they really work as billed, these multi-bit phase-change memory chips could transform enterprise computing and storage by around 2016, according to IBM. The technology could lead to chips that are lower cost, faster, and more durable in storing applications for consumer devices, including mobile phones and cloud storage. It could also benefit...

The story of, Rhode Island 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. The instrumental medley of this video is, Precious Memories and In The Garden.

A prototype disk drive based on phase-change memory can outperform an off-the-shelf flash hard disk . A new type of data storage technology, called phase-change memory, has proven capable of writing some types of data faster than conventional flash based storage. The tests used a hard drive based on prototype phase-change memory chips. Disks based on solid-state, flash memory chips are increasingly used in computers and servers because they perform faster than conventional magnetic hard drives. The performance of the experimental phase-change disk drive, created by researchers at University of California San Diego, suggests that it won't be long before...

A University of Pittsburgh-led team has created a single-electron transistor that provides a building block for new, more powerful computer memories, advanced electronic materials, and the basic components of quantum computers. The researchers report in Nature Nanotechnology that the transistor's central component -- an island only 1.5 nanometers in diameter -- operates with the addition of only one or two electrons. That capability would make the transistor important to a range of computational applications, from ultradense memories to quantum processors, powerful devices that promise to solve problems so complex that all of the world's computers working together for billions of...

Panasonic Corp's Digital AVC Marketing Division will release a rewritable single-sided three-layer Blu-ray disc that is compatible with the Blu-ray Disc Rewritable Format and has a capacity of 100 Gbytes April 15, 2011. The company claims that it is the world's first rewritable Blu-ray disc with a capacity of 100 Gbytes. The new product is a 2x-speed recordable Blu-ray disc compatible with the BDXL Part1 Version3, and its capacity is twice as large as that of an existing single-sided two-layer Blu-ray disc (50 Gbytes). Specifically, it is possible to record about 12 hours of a terrestrial digital TV program in...

Even long after it is formed, a memory in rats can be enhanced or erased by increasing or decreasing the activity of a brain enzyme, say researchers supported, in part, by the National Institutes of Health. "Our study is the first to demonstrate that, in the context of a functioning brain in a behaving animal, a single molecule, PKMzeta, is both necessary and sufficient for maintaining long-term memory," explained Todd Sacktor, of the SUNY Downstate Medical Center, New York City, a grantee of the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health. Sacktor, Yadin Dudai, Ph.D., of the Weizmann Institute of Science,...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers working with mice have discovered that by removing a protein from the region of the brain responsible for recalling fear, they can permanently delete traumatic memories. Their report on a molecular means of erasing fear memories in rodents appears this week in Science Express. “When a traumatic event occurs, it creates a fearful memory that can last a lifetime and have a debilitating effect on a person’s life,” says Richard L. Huganir, Ph.D., professor and director of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “Our finding describing these...

Can you imagine remembering every single day of your life? That's what actress Marilu Henner says she can do. On "The Early Show" Monday, Henner -- one of only six people recognized in the world as having a rare gift called superior autobiographical memory -- explained what life is like remembering every day of her life. Henner and others with the same ability were profiled Sunday on "60 Minutes."

The two economists call their paper “Mental Retirement,” and their argument has intrigued behavioral researchers. Data from the United States, England and 11 other European countries suggest that the earlier people retire, the more quickly their memories decline. The implication, the economists and others say, is that there really seems to be something to the “use it or lose it” notion — if people want to preserve their memories and reasoning abilities, they may have to keep active. “It’s incredibly interesting and exciting,” said Laura L. Carstensen, director of the Center on Longevity at Stanford University. “It suggests that work...

CHAMPAIGN, lll. — A diet rich in the plant compound luteolin reduces age-related inflammation in the brain and related memory deficits by directly inhibiting the release of inflammatory molecules in the brain, researchers report. Luteolin (LOOT-ee-oh-lin) is found in many plants, including carrots, peppers, celery, olive oil, peppermint, rosemary and chamomile. The new study, which examined the effects of dietary luteolin in a mouse model of aging, appears in the Journal of Nutrition. The researchers focused on microglial cells, specialized immune cells that reside in the brain and spinal cord. Infections stimulate microglia to produce signaling molecules, called cytokines, which...

Every September, millions of parents try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies). And check out the classroom. Does Junior’s learning style match the new teacher’s approach? Or the school’s philosophy? Maybe the child isn’t “a good fit” for the school. Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn’t offer clear guidance. Student traits and teaching styles surely...

Recently I upgraded the memory on my computer. It runs Windows Vista and was slow with only 1 gigabyte of memory. I had been told that 2 gigabytes were the minimum for optimum function, but I was lazy. Inertia is a property of matter, but regrettably it is also a property of people. Finally I upgraded the memory to 2 gigabytes. Everything is faster, including word processing and Web surfing. Human beings are not computers − except for bureaucrats, that is. But if we stumble along with inadequate memory, everything we do is less efficient. In particular, our knowledge of...

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s 1 p.m. on a Thursday and Dianne Bates, 40, juggles three screens. She listens to a few songs on her iPod, then taps out a quick e-mail on her iPhone and turns her attention to the high-definition television. Just another day at the gym. As Ms. Bates multitasks, she is also churning her legs in fast loops on an elliptical machine in a downtown fitness center. She is in good company. In gyms and elsewhere, people use phones and other electronic devices to get work done — and as a reliable antidote to boredom. Cellphones, which...

FINDING it difficult to revise for an exam? Help could be on its way in the form of the first non-invasive way of stimulating the brain that can boost visual memory. The technique uses transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), in which weak electrical currents are applied to the scalp using electrodes. The method can temporarily increase or decrease activity in a specific brain region and has already been shown to boost verbal and motor skills in volunteers. Richard Chi, a PhD student at the Centre for the Mind, University of Sydney, and colleagues wanted to follow up on previous research...