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A long read but very interesting and well written.

PS: Does this quote from the article not sound a lot like Inception? 'In any given situation, the brain will retrieve old memories to inform an organism's behavior. If the memory is relevant to the situation, the organism can act on the information; if it is not relevant, then the organism can learn from the situation and create a new memory. With reconsolidation, researchers argued, there seemed to be a brief window in between the retrieval of an old memory and the creation of a new memory in which the old memory is vulnerable to manipulation.'

A new so called 5D data storage that could potentially survive for billions of years. The research consists of nanostructured glass that can record digital data in five dimensions using femtosecond laser writing.

Yes Alex, indeed, the durability is the point I think they highlight and focus on (besides the fact the abstract says something as the extrapolated decay time being comparable to the age of the Universe..). Indeed memories face problems with retention time. Most of the disks retain the information up to 10 years. When enterprises want to store data for longer times than this they use... yeah, magnetic tapes :-). Check a interesting article about magnetic tape market revival here http://www.information-age.com/technology/data-centre-and-it-infrastructure/123458854/rise-fall-and-re-rise-magnetic-tape I compared for fun, to have one idea of what we were talking about. I am also very curious so see the writing and reading times in this new memory :)

But how can glass store the information so long? Glass is not even solid?!

Get you human memory extended!!!!!

Brain electrodes wrongly implanted allow a man to reverse his memory loss

or "your phone vs. your wife"...

Researchers in South Korea are the first to make a bendable digital memory that can store data without constant power. Such memories could find applications in electronic paper for more comfortable reading and in wearable computers, which could be used in medical monitoring and treatment.

wow, looks pretty cool! I wonder what is "a ridiculous amount of memory on a chip"...? giga, tera, peta, exa, ... ?

Looks cool indeed, but as with all those technology "breakthroughs" my enthusiasm will be limited until this actually makes it to my laptop...

what a phrase: "this advance could increase the power and memory of computers to nearly unimaginable proportions within only a couple of years." ... sure ....

who wants 100 cores ... future of PAGMO?

The problem with this flurry of activity today regarding multicore architectures is that it is really unclear which one will be the winner in the long run. Never understimate the power of inertia, especially in the software industry (after all, people are still programming in COBOL and Fortran today). For instance, NVIDIA gives you the Teslas with 10000 cores, but then you have to rewrite extensive parts of your code in order to take advantage of this. Is this an investment worth undertaking? Difficult to say, it would certainly be if the whole software world moves into that direction (which is not happening - yet?). But then you have other approaches coming out, suche as the Cell processor by IBM (the one on the PS3) which has really impressive floating point performance and, of course, a completely different programming model. The nice thing about this Tilera processor seems to be that it is a general-purpose processor, which may not require extensive re-engineering of existing code (but I'm really hypothesizing, since the thechincal details are not very abundant on their website).

Moreover PaGMO computation model is more towards systems with distributed memory, and not with shared memory (i.e. multi-core). In the latter, at certain point the memory access becomes the bottleneck.

Exercise can enhance the development of new brain cells in the adult brain, a process called adult neurogenesis. These newborn brain cells play an important role in learning and memory. A new study has determined that mice that spent time running on wheels not only developed twice the normal number of new neurons, but also showed an increased ability to distinguish new objects from familiar objects.

wow ... time to start running again ...

For all of us who want to become smart without hard work :-D

Omelette du fromage?

Slime powered transistors with memory.

The goal is to better understand how memory works to help for example against dementia, depression, stress.. but as we all know it would be great to learn how to fly a helicopter in 5 seconds as well.

... or to make a first real inception ;)

it seems that there are indications that we are differently wired .... Sex differences in human behavior show adaptive complementarity: Males have better motor and spatial abilities, whereas females have superior memory and social cognition skills. Studies also show sex differences in human brains but do not explain this complementarity. In this work, we modeled the structural connectome using diffusion tensor imaging in a sample of 949 youths (aged 8-22 y, 428 males and 521 females) and discovered unique sex differences in brain connectivity during the course of development. Connection-wise statistical analysis, as well as analysis of regional and global network measures, presented a comprehensive description of network characteristics. In all supratentorial regions, males had greater within-hemispheric connectivity, as well as enhanced modularity and transitivity, whereas between-hemispheric connectivity and cross-module participation predominated in females. However, this effect was reversed in the cerebellar connections. Analysis of these changes developmentally demonstrated differences in trajectory between males and females mainly in adolescence and in adulthood. Overall, the results suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes.

I like this abstract: sex, sex, sex, sex, SEX, SEX, SEX, SEX...!!! I wonder if the "sex differences" are related to gender-specific differences...

'mushroom' (invertebrate brain) or 'cauliflower'(vertebrate cerebral cortex)? Both are responsible for associative learning and memory formation.

thats disgusting

How much more proof do we need.... and of course "It may be that those who have a tendency to wake up groggy are choosing not to siesta in the first place. Perhaps, though, as in so many things, it is practice that makes perfect."

Come on guys, be innovative and make at least an Ariadna...

memory cloning

"It would be very easy not to co-operate, and then it wouldn't work", that's still the important part. I'm sure Dario LOVES this paper. Would be nice to have a coffee with him right now...

Understanding how memory works in a brain. Not the last paper on this topic, I assume.