Engineers get inspiration from insects to build more efficient tiny robots.

Photographer Amanda Means gave a public talk at the Harvard Museum of Natural History to explain her work.

What do plastic tubes, strings and tin cans have in common? According to Chris and Meredith Thompson, (http://www.cmthompson.com), they can all be musical instruments! At the 2008 Cambridge Science Festival, the Thompson twins show an audience of kids how fun the science of sound can be.

Dr. Walter Lewin, an award-winning science educator and physics professor at MIT, demonstrates the key to a successful science lesson.

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If you leave a piece of human brain at room temperature, and wait to see what happens…it will simply melt and disappear. Indeed, 80% of our brain is just made out of fat and water. That’s what Katerina Mancevska, the Assistant Director of Tissue Processing at the New-York Brain Bank explains.

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Imagine a world where you could defy any laws of physics, from gravitation to electromagnetism. Not a world of superheroes in comic books, but a world where liquids and solids would become super-cool matter.

In this world you would plug magnets under your feet and levitate to go to work. Electrical wires would never get hot and any liquid would squeeze through impossibly small holes. Spinning your glass of wine at a Friday night party would have it mimic a Swiss cheese pattern. Instead of seeing a single whirlpool at the center of your glass, you would observe a multiple of tiny vortices. Public parks would host water fountains spouting upward under the simple action of a light beam. You would have to watch after your coffee to make sure it doesn’t flow out of your cup by itself. And passing through walls to go from one room to another would just be routine.

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In October of 2006, I interviewed Jonathan Whitlock, a post-doctorate associate at the Picower Institute at that time. On that day, he lighted up my fascination for memory, and its mechanisms in the human brain. At the end of the interview, he launched that he was erasing rats’ memory. And the whole story began.

Whitlock explained me he had trained a rat to avoid the dark side of a two- compartment box by giving him mild foot shocks whenever he entered that side. After the rat learned that task, Whitlock used an array of electrodes to listen in on many places at the same time in his hippocampus. Once he eavesdrops on the hard-to-detect signal of the memory forming, he manipulated it with the goal of impairing the memory.

“The idea is to watch the initial changes set in motion by learning, and reverse those changes applying the inverse patterned electrical stimulation,” he explained. When Whitlock put the rat back in the box, he said he didn’t remember he had to avoid the dark side. He got trained again and the responses to learning reappeared. His brain was intact and hadn’t been damaged.

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Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Rachmaninoff… You dream that one day you could play the piano, and let your fingers fly on the keyboard. But here is the problem you can’t have your hands do two different things simultaneously. Don’t despair, there might be a machine that could help you practice.