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Could dj vu be explained by grid cells? —Robyn Ganeles, San Francisco Neuroscientist Edvard I. Moser of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology responds: THIS IS A GREAT QUESTION, because grid cells, which are involved in processing spatial information about our surroundings, are located in a brain region that is part of a larger memory system thought to be responsible for the feeling of familiarity. After considering their function in detail, however, I think it seems more likely that a different system of neurons, place cells, plays a stronger role in providing us with the sense that a new locale is familiar—a feeling called “dj visit....

By Elaine Lies TOKYO (Reuters) - Aftershocks rattled southwestern Japan on Friday after a strong quake the night before killed nine, injured at least 1,000 and left thousands without power or water, though nuclear plants in the area avoided damage. By afternoon, more than 130 aftershocks had hit the area around the city of Kumamoto in the wake of the initial 6.4 magnitude quake the night before. Officials said the frequency was tapering off but the risk of further strong aftershocks will remain for about a week....

FINALIST YEAR: 1993 HER PROJECT: Using geometry to study the relationships between numbers WHAT LED TO THE PROJECT: Growing up, Moon Duchin heard a lot of jokes about her name. Her parents were “on the science-y fringes of the hippie classification,” she says. In addition to her unusual name, her mom (an economist) and dad (who worked in the paper industry), gave her a love of numbers. “I wanted to be a mathematician since I was 7,” she says....

Chimpanzees meld sounds and colours, associating light objects with high tones and dark objects with deeper tones. The finding hints that chimps, like humans, experience some form of synaesthesia, an uncommon condition in which the senses become intertwined, says Vera Ludwig, a cognitive neuroscientist at Charité Medical University in Berlin, Germany, who led a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Some synaesthetes associate different colours with letters and numbers, for instance, whereas others taste shapes....

By Richard LovettA “failed” volcanic eruption caused a swarm of more than 30,000 earthquakes in a remote region of Saudi Arabia last year, a team of U.S. and Saudi scientists has found. The quakes show that plate boundaries can make their influence felt at far greater distances than researchers had supposed.Magma rose from the bottom of the crust to within 2 kilometers of the surface, says team leader John Pallister, a volcanologist at the U....

Artificial trans fats in foods may soon be a thing of the past, according to a new announcement from the Food and Drug Administration. The agency said today it has taken steps to move trans fat out of its current category of ingredients that are “generally recognized as safe,” a move that, if finalized, could require the food industry to phase out the use of the ingredient. Trans fat, or partially hydrogenated oil, has been linked with increased cholesterol levels, and a higher risk of coronary heart disease, the agency said....

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in a series of six features on the science of food, running daily from March 30 through April 6, 2009. UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa.—Marlene Moskowitz unscrews the cap from an amber vial. Within moments, a roasty scent permeates this food science laboratory at Pennsylvania State University, conjuring in my mind my local bakery in the predawn hours as baguette loaves—golden-brown, crusty and warm—are taken out of massive ovens on rolling steel carts....

It wasn’t supposed to happen this fast. Some of the reefs around the Florida Keys are dissolving. They may have crossed a tipping point due to increasing ocean acidification, raising the alarm that climate change impacts in the ocean are continuing to happen at a much quicker pace than scientists previously suspected. Rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are making seas more acidic. That makes it harder for coral to build up their skeletons....

Forests are notoriously difficult to manage. Trees grow slowly, under the influence of variables ranging from global climate to local soil. Yet invasive species, native pests or catastrophic wildfires can spread lasting destruction within days. With 305.5 million hectares of forest in the U.S. alone, monitoring that much woody real estate has traditionally been largely a guessing game. A new movement in forest management is trying to change this, coupling satellite images with tree-counting algorithms and other technologies in ways that promise to give foresters, ecologists and lumber companies the lay of the land quickly and more comprehensively....

The song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” could double as sound medical advice, the results of a new study suggest. Whereas previous research had linked depression with an increased incidence of health problems, the new findings reveal that people who report more everyday happiness are healthier overall than their less joyous counterparts in a number of key ways. In particular, happy men experienced lower heart rates throughout the day, indicating good cardiovascular health....

By Eric Hand of Nature magazineClose and bright though it is, the Sun still defies a thorough understanding. One reason is that some of the features on its roiling surface are too small and short-lived to be studied even by the world’s largest solar telescopes.That will change if the US National Solar Observatory (NSO) proceeds with its latest project–the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST), a Sun-gazing behemoth due to be built on the summit of Haleakala, the highest peak on the Hawaiian island of Maui....

At 6:11 p.m. on September 6, 2010, San Bruno, Calif. 911 received an urgent call. A gas station had just exploded and a fire with flames reaching 300 feet was raging through the neighborhood. The explosion was so large that residents suspected an airplane crash. But the real culprit was found underground: a ruptured pipeline spewing natural gas caused a blast that left behind a 72 foot long crater, killed eight people, and injured more than fifty....

Roughly 14,700 years ago the weather patterns that bring snow to Greenland shifted from one year to the next—a pattern of abrupt change that was repeated 12,900 years ago and 11,700 years ago when the earth’s climate became the one enjoyed today—according to records preserved in an ice core taken from the northern island. These speedy changes—transitions from warming to cooling and back again—in the absence of changes in greenhouse gas could presage abrupt, catastrophic climate change in our future....

By Faith Hung and Antoni SlodkowskiTAIPEI/TOKYO (Reuters) - A nuclear power plant in Taiwan may have been leaking radioactive water for three years, the government has said, adding to a growing crisis of confidence in North Asia about nuclear safety.Japan is struggling to contain radioactive water pouring out of the Fukushima nuclear plant that was wrecked by a 2011 tsunami. In South Korea, prosecutors are conducting a massive investigation into forged safety certificates and substandard parts at many of its reactors....

Jazz-playing computers and robots could soon yield clues about how to help people collaborate with machines, researchers say. The new project, called MUSICA (short for Musical Improvising Collaborative Agent), aims to develop a musical device that can improvise a jazz solo in response to human partners, just as real jazz musicians improvisealongside one another. MUSICA is part of a new program from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the branch of the U....

DETROIT – When Renee Thomas moved into her two-story home two years ago, she had no idea it posed a hidden threat to her four children. But a new city law forced her landlord to check the century-old house for lead contamination. Old, deteriorating paint had left lead dust on its windows, floors and porch. Through a patchwork of grants and city partnerships, the contamination was cleaned up. “They kept cleaning the floors … cleaning them over and over again,” Thomas said....

“Fat Man,” the atomic bomb dropped by the U.S. on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945, carried about 6.2 kilograms of enriched plutonium, roughly the size of a softball. The origin of that deadly hunk of metal can be traced back via a tiny sliver weighing less than three millionths of a gram, created in the labs of Manhattan Project researchers. It is a historic fragment, embodying both stunning scientific achievement and deep tragedy—that one bomb killed and wounded at least 64,000 people (estimates vary) as well as hastened Japan’s surrender....

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—A company founded in the Palo Alto, Calif., public library has taken a dose of government money and technology and turned it into the most energy-dense battery ever. Envia Systems’s new lithium-ion battery packs roughly twice as much energy per gram as present batteries, the company will announce here at the third annual summit of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-e). “We achieved 400 watt-hours per kilogram,” explains materials scientist Sujeet Kumar, Envia co-founder and chief technology officer....

Imagine if every conversation you had was like speaking with someone in a foreign language that you only partially understood. Your conversations—to the extent they could be called that—would be filled with an exasperating combination of confusion, frustration and even embarrassment at being unable to comprehend many of the words and phrases that native speakers take for granted. That’s what it feels like for the nearly 8 percent of U.S. kindergartners who suffer from a developmental disorder called specific language impairment (SLI), except that instead of struggling with a foreign language they find it difficult to communicate verbally in any language....

Paleontologists working in western China have unearthed the remains of a new species of dinosaur that is an early member of the family of dinosaurs that culminated in Tyrannosaurus rex. They have dubbed the three-meter-long predator, which sports an elaborate crest along its snout, Guanlong wucaii, the “crowned dragon of the five-colored rocks.” Xu Xing and his colleagues from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing uncovered two specimens of the beast–a fully grown 12-year-old and a still-developing six-year-old–in the multi-hued rocks of the Junggar Basin in Xinjiang....