If only you could ditch that traumatic memory, that craving, that debilitating fear of ventriloquist dummies (autonomatonophobia)! But these tendencies are so deeply ingrained that try as you might, you can't dig them out. Maybe you can drug them out.

The process of recalling a memory is like a rolling snowball——a trigger provides the first ball, which then rolls through various parts of your brain picking up the additional elements it needs to become a full memory.

Many bacteria spend much of their existence within a matrix that they create, called biofilm. Biofilm consists of mucopolysaccharide (or slime-like, think “The Blob” from the 1950s) structures produced by microorganisms as a defense mechanism against their environment. 

A good science fair project typically takes less time and is more interesting to do, than a bad one.  Does this make sense?  Do you want to spend extra time having less fun?  As a sequel to last year's "Secrets of a Science Fair Judge", I present to you my suggestions for making your science fair project go faster, be more fun, and still get you a higher grade.

Choose an Interesting Question

As beautiful as they get, or even more so. It is hard to express the beauty of the event that the CMS collaboration published today. CMS, which stands for "compact muon solenoid", is one of the two main detectors operating at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (the other is ATLAS). The duo is seeking evidence for the Higgs boson, the only elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model that still awaits to be discovered.