Scientists discovered that eating blueberries and having friends are good for the memory and that pregnancy and smoking are bad for it. Nautiluses can remember useful things, but only for a day, whereas cuttlefish, which are much more sophisticated cephalopods, observe and form preferences for their future prey when they are still embryos. Swiss biologists determined that stupid flies live longer than smart flies because intelligence wears out flies' brains, and Canadian researchers said that straining to recall information on the tip of the tongue makes us learn our mistaken guesses rather than the correct answers we eventually remember. Strokes were found to generate depolarization waves that spread outward from the affected area and damage other parts of the brain. Geologists reported that large earthquakes often trigger other seismic events in distant parts of the world; a Franco-Turkish team of seismologists found that the hypersonic energy pulses unleashed by super-shear earthquakes may awaken dormant faults nearby; and massive, slow-motion ice-quakes were shaking the West Antarctic Ice Sheet twice a day. China's pandas were said to be in grave danger after an earthquake severely damaged the habitat in which 90 percent of the animals live. Neuroscientists
found that sloths sleep around nine-and-a-half hours a day. Previous research had studied only captive sloths, which sleep on average 16 hours a day, possibly because they are bored and depressed.
Engineers stabilized the Leaning Tower of Pisa. A rise in penile deformities among newborn Israeli boys was blamed on pesticides, and a meta-study by an Australian geneticist found that first-cousin marriages are unlikely to cause birth defects. Children exposed to lead are more likely to commit violent crimes as adults, children born to mothers who use cell phones while pregnant are 54 percent more likely to have behavioral problems, and children born to fathers older than 45 are twice as likely to die before reaching adulthood. Researchers found that most of the United States' 36,000 yearly bunk-bed injuries involve male victims, that 58 percent of African-American children don't know how to swim, and that British children do not brush their teeth properly. Liverpudlian psychologists found that 6-year-olds can competently evaluate the plausibility of past-tense forms of imaginary verbs like "to spling." An increase in pet-owl abandonment in Wales was blamed on Harry Potter. Spanish researchers designed a cloak of silence.
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