Neuroscientists can now switch memories from bad to good

By manipulating certain neurons in the brain, neuroscientists in the US can change the emotional association of a particular memory from bad to good in mice, and vice versa.

Give us another five minutes, will you? Researchers have created new positive memories in a male mouse by allowing him to spend some special time with two female mice.

Image: KPG Payless2/Shutterstock

Led by postdoctoral fellow Roger Redondo and graduate student Joshua Kim, a team from MIT has discovered a new technique for altering bad or fearful memories in the brains of mice by replacing them with new, pleasant memories.

To do so, they started off by establishing good and bad memories in the mice by prompting them to move into a certain area of their enclosure. Once they got there, they either received a treat, and so associated a good memory with that particular place, or they got a mild electric shock, which caused them to associate a bad memory with the place. The mice who got zapped did their best to avoid the area from that point on.

In order for the memories to be retained by each mouse, they needed to be encoded by two different areas of the brain. The memory of where the event happened - in this case that particular area in the enclosure - needs to be encoded by the brain’s hippocampus region, whereas the memory of whether the mouse experienced something good or something bad in this area - the emotional component of the memory - is encoded by the brain’s amygdala region. 

To alter the memory of a male mouse who got a shock when he ventured into the designated enclosure area, the researchers tried reactivating the neurons in the hippocampus that encoded where this memory was first established. They did this while he was having a very pleasant experience in the present - spending time with TWO female mice. Once the bad memory of the enclosure area was switched to a very pleasant memory, the researchers found that the male mouse spent a lot more time visiting it, probably hoping that his female friends would someday return. While the process sounds simple, achieving it was no small feat, as Greg Miller at Wired explains:

Schrödinger's cat caught on quantum film

Schrödinger's cat is the poster child for quantum weirdness. Now it has been immortalised in a portrait created by one of the theory's strangest consequences: quantum entanglement.

These images were generated using a cat stencil and entangled photons. The really spooky part is that the photons used to generate the image never interacted with the stencil, while the photons that illuminated the stencil were never seen by the camera.

When two separate particles are entangled, measurements of their physical properties are correlated, and they effectively share a single quantum state. Gabriela Barreto Lemos at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna and her colleagues used this quantum connection between particles to make these images of a cat without directly photographing it.

To do it, the researchers created yellow and red pairs of entangled photons. The yellow photons were fired at the cat stencil, while the red photons were sent to the camera. Thanks to their entanglement, the red photons formed the image of the cat because of the quantum link to their yellow twins.

The silicon stencil was transparent to red light and the camera could only detect red light. This demonstrates that the technique can image objects that are invisible to the detected photons.

unified field theory

The symbol known as the Sri Yantra is an ancient Hindu symbol comprised of nine triangles that are interlaced in such a way as to form 43 smaller triangles in a web said to be symbolic of the entire cosmos. The Sri Yantra also represents a very specific perspective on a 64 tetrahedron grid if viewed from down one of it's points. The 64 tetrahedron grid is also the foundational seed geometry of the fabric of the vacuum according toNassim Haramein's unified field theory. Everything is connected by the structure of space...

NASA's Mars rocket to launch on maiden voyage in 2018

NASA's Mars rocket to launch on maiden voyage in 2018

NASA's deep-space rocket -- the Space Launch System -- is the most powerful to date, designed to ferry humans to Mars. Scheduled to launch for the first time in 2018, it's the agency's first heavy-lift launch vehicle in over 40 years, and hopefully marks the first step for a manned Mars mission in the 2030s.

The rocket, which has been in development for three years, was officially approved by the space agency on August 27, which means a full commitment to the program.

Artist's concept of SLS MKI on the launchpad.NASA/MSFC

"We are on a journey of scientific and human exploration that leads to Mars," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "And we're firmly committed to building the launch vehicle and other supporting systems that will take us on that journey."

The SLS will carry the Orion spacecraft, which in turn will carry the Mars explorers. For its first test flight, the SLS will be configured with a 70-metric-ton lift capacity and carry an uncrewed Orion craft beyond low-Earth orbit. The final version of the rocket is slated for a lift capacity of 130 metric tons, which will enable missions to destinations as far as Mars.

"Our nation is embarked on an ambitious space exploration program, and we owe it to the American taxpayers to get it right," said Associate Administrator and review process overseer Robert Lightfoot. "After rigorous review, we're committing today to a funding level and readiness date that will keep us on track to sending humans to Mars in the 2030s -- and we're going to stand behind that commitment."

The Orion spacecraft is scheduled for an uncrewed test flight of its own on December 4 of this year, attached to a Delta IV Heavy rocket. This flight,Exploration Test Flight 1, will test several of the Orion's key systems, including avionics, heat shielding and parachutes.

"We are keeping each part of the program -- the rocket, ground systems, and Orion -- moving at its best possible speed toward the first integrated test launch," said NASA Exploration Systems Development director Bill Hill. "We are on a solid path toward an integrated mission and making progress in all three programs every day."

The first of the three SLS rockets is projected to cost $7.021 billion, and the entire project around $12 billion.