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"A few months after the World Trade Center attacks, a strange message appeared on a U.S. Army computer: "Your security system is crap," it read. "I am Solo. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels." Solo scanned thousands of U.S. government machines and discovered glaring security flaws in many of them. Between February 2001 and March 2002, Solo broke into almost a hundred PCs within the Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA, and the Department of Defense. He surfed around for months, copying files and passwords. At one point he brought down the U.S. Army's entire Washington, D.C., network, taking about 2000 computers out of service for three days. U.S. attorney Paul McNulty called his campaign "the biggest military computer hack of all time." But despite his expertise, Solo didn't cover his tracks. He was soon traced to a small apartment in London. In March 2002, the United Kingdom's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit arrested Gary McKinnon, a quiet 36-year-old Scot with elfin features and Spock-like upswept eyebrows. He'd been a systems administrator, but he didn't have a job at the time of his arrest; he spent his days indulging his obsession with UFOs. In fact, McKinnon claimed that UFOs were the reason for his hack. Convinced that the government was hiding alien antigravity devices and advanced energy technologies, he planned to find and release the information for the benefit of humanity. He said his intrusion was detected just as he was downloading a photo from NASA's Johnson Space Center of what he believed to be a UFO. Despite the outlandishness of his claims, McKinnon now faces extradition to the United States under a controversial treaty that could land him in prison for years-and possibly for the rest of his life. The case has transformed McKinnon into a cause célèbre. Supporters have rallied outside Parliament with picket signs. There are "Free Gary" websites, T-shirts, posters. Rock star David Gilmour, the former guitarist for Pink Floyd, even recorded

"Jeffrey Mitchell, a volunteer firefighter in the suburbs of Baltimore, came across the accident by chance: A car had smashed into a pickup truck loaded with metal pipes. Mitchell tried to help, but he saw at once that he was too late. The car had rear-ended the truck at high speed, sending a pipe through the windshield and into the chest of the passenger-a young bride returning home from her wedding. There was blood everywhere, staining her white dress crimson. Mitchell couldn't get the dead woman out of his mind; the tableau was stuck before his eyes. He tried to tough it out, but after months of suffering, he couldn't take it anymore. He finally told his brother, a fellow firefighter, about it. Miraculously, that worked. No more trauma; Mitchell felt free. This dramatic recovery, along with the experiences of fellow first responders, led Mitchell to do some research into recovery from trauma. He eventually concluded that he had stumbled upon a powerful treatment. In 1983, nearly a decade after the car accident, Mitchell wrote an influential paper in the Journal of Emergency Medical Services that transformed his experience into a seven-step practice, which he called critical incident stress debriefing, or CISD. The central idea: People who survive a painful event should express their feelings soon after so the memory isn't "sealed over" and repressed, which could lead to post-traumatic stress disorder. In recent years, CISD has become exceedingly popular, used by the US Department of Defense, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Israeli army, the United Nations, and the American Red Cross. Each year, more than 30,000 people are trained in the technique. (After the September 11 attacks, 2,000 facilitators descended on New York City.) Even though PTSD is triggered by a stressful incident, it is really a disease of memory. The problem isn't the trauma-it's that the trauma can't be forgotten. Most memories, and their associated emotion

"An army hospital in Tacoma, Wash. is under fire for reneging on mental health care for troops diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Since 2007, more than 300 soldiers under consideration for medical retirement because of PTSD had their diagnoses reversed by a screening team at Madigan Army Medical Center -- a move criticized for putting costs before care. "Over 40 percent of those service members who walked in the door with a PTSD diagnosis had their diagnosis changed to something else or overturned entirely," Sen. Patty Murray said at a Defense Appropriations Subcommittee hearing Wednesday. "In light of all the tragedies we have seen that stem from the untreated, invisible wounds of war, I'm sure that you would agree that this is very concerning." PTSD is an anxiety disorder brought on by a traumatic event. The symptoms -- from anger and hypervigilance to numbness and avoidance, not to mention recurrent nightmares and terrifying flashbacks -- can wreak havoc on a person's personal and professional life. A 2010 study by Walter Reed Army Institute of Research found up to 30 percent of Iraq war veterans have symptoms of PTSD. The diagnosis can cost taxpayers as much as $1.5 million per soldier, according to an Army Medical Command memo obtained by the Seattle Times. "The challenges of PTSD and mental health care are real. And no one -- no one -- should be denying any service member purely because of a question of cost," said Murray. "That is something the tax payers of this country bear the burden of providing. We will provide it." Madigan is currently under investigation by the U.S. Army Medical Command for the reversed diagnoses. But Murray argued the investigation should be military-wide. "I want to make sure that we are really looking not just at Madigan… but system-wide," she said, adding that cost should not stand in the way of soldiers getting "the care that they have earned and they deserve and that this country expects them to have." Army

"MIT researchers have shown, for the first time ever, that memories are stored in specific brain cells. By triggering a small cluster of neurons, the researchers were able to force the subject to recall a specific memory. By removing these neurons, the subject would lose that memory. As you can imagine, the trick here is activating individual neurons, which are incredibly small and not really the kind of thing you can attach electrodes to. To do this, the researchers used optogenetics, a bleeding edge sphere of science that involves the genetic manipulation of cells so that they're sensitive to light. These modified cells are then triggered using lasers; you drill a hole through the subject's skull and point the laser at a small cluster of neurons. Now, just to temper your excitement, we should note that MIT's subjects in this case are mice - but it's very, very likely that the human brain functions in the same way. To perform this experiment, though, MIT had to breed genetically engineered mice with optogenetic neurons - and we're a long, long way off breeding humans with optogenetic brains. In the experiment, MIT gave mice an electric shock to create a fear memory in the hippocampus region of the brain (pictured above) - and then later, using laser light, activated the neurons where the memory was stored. The mice "quickly entered a defensive, immobile crouch," strongly suggesting the fear memory was being recalled."