Month: August 2016

(credit: Walter Reed National Military Medical Center)

Recent advances in imaging have revealed that false memories can be held by the very same cells that hold accurate ones, but we don't have much information about how false memories get there in the first place. A recent study published in PNAS provides some insight into this issue, finding that false memories may arise from similarities among the items being remembered.

In neuroscience, false memories don’t necessarily refer to a sensational memory that might land you on a daytime talk show. Typically, neuroscientists are more interested in banal false memories. For example, a classic experiment in false memories involves showing a subject a series of words related to the winter season, like ice, snow, wind, etc. In this paradigm, even if subjects aren’t shown the word “cold,” they are still likely to remember having seen it. This is a classic false memory.

Neuroscientists have suspected that this type of false memory arises because the word “cold” is similar conceptually to the list of winter words that the subject did see. Even though the cognitive mechanism that causes this phenomenon (called conceptual similarity) is theoretically understood, however, its neural underpinnings have not been widely explored. Using a combination of the word-recall experiment described above and fMRI scans that could track the brain activity of the participants, the authors of this paper have begun to identify some of what’s behind the false memory effect.

Enlarge (credit: Theranos)

Theranos has withdrawn its application to the Food and Drug Administration for an emergency clearance of a new diagnostic blood test for Zika virus infections, according to the Wall Street Journal. The FDA’s emergency clearance process, used in times of extraordinary medical need, such as the current Zika outbreaks, is a lower regulatory hurdle than normal for new medical products.

The Zika test would have been carried out on Theranos' new MiniLab device; both were unveiled August 1 at a conference of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry. However, during a subsequent lab inspection, the FDA found that the company had collected some of the data on its Zika test prior to having patient-safety protocols in place. Theranos informed investors that it “recognized” the problem during the inspection and decided to withdraw its application.

The move is yet another stumble for the company, which appears to be trying to rebrand itself as a device manufacturer after federal regulators handed down heavy sanctions for safety issues in its clinical diagnostic work.

Enlarge / Another Android update means another stack of phones that will never see it.

Not all of the big Android phone makers have announced their plans for the Nougat update, but if you look at Sony’s and Google’s and HTC’s official lists (as well as the supplemental lists being published by some carriers), you’ll notice they all have one big thing in common. None of the phones are more than a year or two old.

And while this is sadly the norm for the Android ecosystem, it looks like this isn’t exclusively the fault of lazy phone makers who have little incentive to provide support for anything they’ve already sold you. Sony, for instance, was working on a Nougat build for 2014’s Xperia Z3 and even got it added to the official Nougat developer program midway through, only to be dropped in the last beta build and the final Nougat release.

After doing some digging and talking to some people, we can say that it will be either very difficult if not completely impossible for any phone that uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 or 801 to get an official, Google-sanctioned Nougat update (including the Z3). And that’s a pretty big deal, since those two chips powered practically every single Android flagship sold from late 2013 until late 2014 and a few more recent devices to boot.