Thinking your memory will get worse as you get older may actually be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Researchers at North Carolina State University have found that senior citizens who think older people should perform poorly on tests of memory actually score much worse than seniors who do not buy in to negative stereotypes about aging and memory loss.

When we emerge from a supermarket laden down with bags and faced with a sea of vehicles, how do we remember where we've parked our car and translate the memory into the correct action to get back there? A paper in PLoS Biology identifies the specific parts of the brain responsible for solving this everyday problem, which could have implications for understanding the functional significance of a prominent brain abnormality observed in neuropsychiatric diseases such as schizophrenia. 

Scientists at Cambridge University have discovered that freshwater algae can form stable groupings in which they dance around each other, miraculously held together only by the fluid flows they create. Their research was published today in Physical Review Letters.

The researchers studied the multicellular organism Volvox carteri, which consists of approximately 1,000 cells arranged on the surface of a spherical matrix about half a millimetre in diameter. Each of the surface cells has two hair-like appendages known as flagella, whose beating propels the colony through the fluid and simultaneously makes them spin about an axis.

Transcatheter valve implantation is a newly developed technique for the curative treatment of high-grade aortic stenosis. It is likely to be of benefit especially to elderly, multimorbid patients for whom the risk of open heart surgery would be too great. The initial results obtained with this technique at the German Heart Center in Munich are presented in the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International by Sabine Bleiziffer and her colleagues . 

We've all heard it before.   Some of you may even have used it:   "I thought she was X" age.    Alcohol impairs judgment, it is said, or releases inhibitions, depending on whether you like the effects.

There may be nothing to that argument, according to a new study.   Consuming alcohol did not affect how men judged the age of women, which has important legal implications if alcohol is cited as a cause of impairing judgement in cases of unlawful sex with a minor, because  men always think women look older.

The fossil record usually shows what adult animals looked like. But the appearance and lifestyle of juvenile animals often differ dramatically from those of the adults. A classic example is provided by frogs and salamanders. New discoveries from Uppsala, Cambridge and Duke Universities, published in Science, show that some of the earliest backboned land animals also underwent such changes of lifestyle as they grew up.