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Why do children generally forget all their memories from before the age of three or four? — E. Lawrence Langan III, Wynnewood, Pa. Paul Reber, a psychology professor at Northwestern University, answers: OUR INABILITY to remember many of our early experiences is a phenomenon known as childhood (or infantile) amnesia. Exactly why we forget these memories remains a mystery, although two hypotheses put forth possible explanations. The brain systems that support our memory of experiences—the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe—appear to function reasonably well by the end of the first year of life....

Open-source information repositories such as Wikipedia have changed the way knowledge is captured and disseminated, using the Internet as a perpetual worldwide editing system for a virtually unlimited digital encyclopedia. But who are the sources for the sites—and how much credence should we put in the information they provide? Although serious questions have been raised about the reliability of the information recorded on Wikipedia, particularly by anonymous contributors, a group of researchers from Dartmouth College in Hanover, N....

Hana Ševíková and Jen Christiansen; SOURCES: “WORLD POPULATION STABILIZATION UNLIKELY THIS CENTURY,” BY PATRICK GERLAND ET AL., IN SCIENCE EXPRESS. PUBLISHED ONLINE SEPTEMBER 18, 2014 (2014 projections); “THE END OF WORLD POPULATION GROWTH,” BY WOLFGANG LUTZ ET AL., IN NATURE, VOL. 412; AUGUST 2, 2001 (2001 projections) United Nations leaders have worried for decades about the pace of population growth. A few years ago leading calculations had global population peaking at nine billion by 2070 and then easing to 8....

View the Slide Show Extinction is a natural process. As evolution hums along, species disappear and new species emerge in an ongoing dynamic called “background extinction.” Geologic history has also been punctuated by five great “mass extinctions”—precipitous declines in the number of species spurred by dramatic events such as an asteroid impact or changing sea levels. Today we are witnessing what some experts believe to be the “sixth wave of extinction,” a species diminution that appears to be the handiwork of humankind....

Ben Valsler Sometimes it’s hard to determine exactly who should take the credit for a scientific discovery – but it’s rare that the credit actually goes to a researcher’s pet. Here’s Kat Arney… Kat Arney There are a lot of things you can do with milk: pour it in tea or on cereal, whip it into a milkshake, ferment it into yoghurt or cheese, and much more. But did you know you can also turn milk into plastic?...

A psychedelic drink used for centuries in healing ceremonies is now attracting the attention of biomedical scientists as a possible treatment for depression. Researchers from Brazil last month published results from the first clinical test of a potential therapeutic benefit for ayahuasca, a South American plant-based brew. Although the study included just six volunteers and no placebo group, the scientists say that the drink began to reduce depression in patients within hours, and the effect was still present after three weeks....

Every few weeks, another heart-warming tale of regular folks deciding to “pay it forward” makes the news. People have tracked the longest pay-it-forward chains at tollbooths at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco – where one person pays the toll for next person in line, that person pays for the next person, and so on. And just last month Starbucks encouraged their customers to treat their fellow customers to a coffee: “Pay it forward, and Starbucks will pay you back," stated CEO Howard Schultz....

President Biden said yesterday he still wants a bipartisan infrastructure deal. Then he climbed behind the wheel of a potential deal breaker for Republicans: an electric vehicle. Biden sped through Ford Motor Co.’s test site before rolling down his window and delivering his verdict on the new F-150 Lightning, the electric version of the country’s most popular vehicle: “This sucker’s quick.” Then he floored it. The flourish offered a rare peek into political negotiations that have mostly remained behind closed doors....

No one paid much attention to paragraph 1C of the executive order New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed on Jan. 27, 2020. Its directive for state environmental officials to “integrate climate change considerations” into regulations seemed vague. The deadline — two years — was remote. But New Jersey officials since have made clear they are contemplating massive restrictions on development in flood-prone areas, including the creation of a restricted zone along the state’s iconic Jersey Shore....

(Reuters) - An earthquake swarm that started rocking a secluded region in northwest Nevada this summer intensified over the past week, geology officials said on Wednesday. The swarm, centered just off the state’s northwest border some 40 miles (65 km) southeast of Lakeview, Oregon, started July 12 and is being caused by stretching of the Earth’s crust, said Graham Kent, the director of the Nevada Seismological Laboratory at the University of Nevada, Reno....

“The basic purpose of dog shows is to facilitate the evaluation of breeding stock for use in producing the next generations,” the organization’s website says. Judges choose winners based on how closely a dog fits a standard, or “ideal breed.” Standards are based on both personality traits and physical ones—from eye color to ear shape and even tail placement. Mutts need not apply. It is competitions like these that contribute to the common perception that mixing animal species leads to “maladapted” animals, according to Michael Arnold, a professor of genetics at the University of Georgia....

Apples beget apples, but can machines beget machines? Today it takes an elaborate manufacturing apparatus to build even a simple machine. Could we endow an artificial device with the ability to multiply on its own? Selfreplication has long been considered one of the fundamental properties separating the living from the nonliving. Historically our limited understanding of how biological reproduction works has given it an aura of mystery and made it seem unlikely that it would ever be done by a man-made object....

John Feal, now 54 years old, was a supervisor at a demolition company when terrorists hijacked two planes that brought down the World Trade Center buildings—and two others that crashed into the Pentagon and a field near Shanksville, Pa., respectively—20 years ago. Feal, who hails from Long Island, N.Y., arrived the day after New York City’s iconic buildings came down. He had been working at Ground Zero for five straight days when 8,000 pounds of steel crushed his left foot....

By Erika Check Hayden The 25,000 US women who give birth at home each year received shocking news from the nation’s obstetricians early this year. Babies born at home die within their first month of life at two to three times the rate of children born in hospitals, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) declared on the basis of a review published in July 2010.But the study behind the warning is not as definitive as it seemed....

Tornadoes are forecast to swarm Friday through a very large and populated area of the nation, stretching from Illinois, Indiana and Ohio to Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama and other states. After a brief reprieve from severe weather today, a storm system emerging from the Rockies late this afternoon will act as the trigger for another round of dangerous storms in portions of recently hard-hit states and others late tonight through Friday. Although residents in the Ohio and Tennessee valleys will have dry but breezy weather for clean-up efforts today, the tranquil weather will not last long....

Desperately seeking a good night’s sleep, insomniacs spend more money on alcohol than medical help and sleep aids combined, according to a study published today in the journal Sleep. But experts say turning to the bottle is the last thing you should do if you can’t fall asleep at night. The study, led by Meagan Daley, a professor of psychology and business at Laval University in Quebec, found that insomniacs in that Canadian province spend an annual $275 million ($340 million Canadian) on alcohol to lull them to sleep at night compared with $14....

The practice of mindfulness is everywhere. Business leaders, professional athletes, mental health professionals, and, of course, your neighbor down the street are all discussing how being mindful can improve our mental state and general well-being. Mindfulness is used as an approach for treating pain, depression, anxiety, OCD, addiction, chronic diseases, and HIV treatment side effects, as well as an aid in weight loss and in being more productive. So what is mindfulness?...

People born with Down syndrome have always been considered to be incurably developmentally delayed—until now. In the past few years a number of laboratories have uncovered critical drug targets within disabled chemical pathways in the brain that might be restored with medication. At least two clinical trials are currently studying the effects of such treatments on people with Down syndrome. Now geneticist Roger Reeves of Johns Hopkins University may have stumbled on another drug target—this one with the potential to correct the learning and memory deficits so central to the condition....

Before the MS Explorer sank off the coast of Antarctica seven years ago, passengers fled the ship in inflatable lifeboats in a scene reminiscent of the Titanic disaster. All 154 passengers and crew were evacuated after the ship severely damaged its hull and began flooding while navigating through thick ice in the Bransfield Strait as part of an Antarctic tour. The lifeboats were so full of people that “you literally could not move your feet,” according to one Canadian passenger in an official account released by the Liberian government, which registered the ship....

Humanity’s on-again, off-again exploration of Mars has lived through its latest make-or-break moment, and scientists around the world are breathing sighs of relief. Shortly after 3:44 P.M. Eastern time today, a visitor from Earth fell from a clear, cold Martian sky into a 3.5-billion-year old, 50-kilometer-wide bowl of rock, dust and volcanic ash called Jezero Crater that once held a large lake. Seven minutes earlier, it had touched the top of the planet’s atmosphere at nearly 20,000 kilometers per hour, bleeding off most of its speed through friction, protected from the resulting fireball by a heat shield....