The ability to remember a briefly presented scene depends on a number of factors, such as its saliency, novelty, degree of threat, or behavioral relevance to a task. Generally, attention is thought to be key, in that people can only remember part of a visual scene when paying attention to it at any given moment.

University of Washington researchers, however, say that memory for visual scenes may not depend on attention level or what a scene contains, but when the scene is presented. Their study, they say, shows how visual scenes are encoded into memory at behaviorally relevant points in time.

The results are published in PLoS Biology.

Though people tend to give journalists a hard time for reporting overly negative news, the media is a little too optimistic when it comes to cancer research, experts say.

A study in the Archives of Internal Medicine reports that newspaper and magazine coverage of cancer research is more likely to discuss aggressive treatment and survival, than treatment failure, adverse events or death, and unlikely to mention end-of-life palliative or hospice care.

New Thermal images of Jupiter's Great Red Spot show swirls of warmer air and cooler regions never seen before, enabling scientists to make the first detailed interior weather map of the giant storm system linking its temperature, winds, pressure and composition with its color.

“This is the first time we can say that there’s an intimate link between environmental conditions — temperature, winds, pressure and composition — and the actual color of the Great Red Spot,” says Leigh Fletcher, lead author of the study in Icarus that documents the research results.

Global meat production has tripled in the past three decades and could double its present level by 2050, according to a new report on the livestock industry by an international team of scientists and policy experts led by Standford University.

If not addressed, the impact of this 'livestock revolution' is likely to have significant consequences for human health, the environment and the global economy.

Palaeontologists have discovered evidence of how an extinct shark attacked its prey, reconstructing a killing that took place 4 million years ago.

Such fossil evidence of behavior is incredibly rare, but by careful, forensic-style analysis of bite marks on an otherwise well-preserved dolphin skeleton, the research team say they have reconstructed the events that led to the death of the dolphin, and likely determined the identity of the killer: a 4 m shark called Cosmopolitodus hastalis.

The evidence, published in Palaeontology, comes from the fossilized skeleton of a 2.8 m long dolphin (Astadelphis gastaldii) discovered in the Piedmont region of northern Italy.

Questionable lending helped sink the U.S. economy, but also provided a lifeline that kept countless firms afloat and averted an even deeper recession, according to research by University of Illinois finance professor Murillo Campello.

The research was cited by President Obama in a report on the state of the economy, so you know it must be correct.

The survey of corporate executives found that many small and mid-sized firms survived the economic storm by tapping easy, low-cost lines of credit locked in ahead of the downturn, during an era of loose lending that also included sub-prime home mortgages. "These lines of credit were so liquid and so accessible that it made this recession far less acute than it would have been otherwise," he said.