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VirZoom's VR exercise bike technology sports a sleek new look at GDC. If you don't mind looking silly, it sure beats fighting cars to pedal around in the cold and rain.

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In the midst of all the technical talks and indie game demos at the Game Developers Conference, you'll find the show floor, a place where serious companies try to grab your attention in decidedly non-serious ways. Every year as the GDC winds down, we like to make a circuit of the show floor to see what new techniques middleware companies are using to grab show-goer attention. This year's show floor, in the cavernous Moscone Center in San Francisco, did not disappoint.

A number of companies tried their best to latch on to the emerging virtual reality trend with new controllers and accessories. These aren't the well-funded, big-name head-mounted displays from the likes of Valve or Oculus, but often gimmicky prototypes trying to add a novel twist to the way you interact in virtual reality.

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In terms of mere height, the SLS rocket will end up nearly 38-stories tall. Building and assembling something that unfathomably massive and unique (remember, it must traverse treacherous space environments) requires equally impressive tools. Luckily for NASA, that's exactly what its Michoud Assembly Facility can offer.

(credit: Apple)

Apple's next press event happens on Monday, March 21 at the company's campus in Cupertino, California. We're going to be in the audience to report all of the announcements as they happen.

We've already talked about what to expect, but to recap: Apple is expected to announce a new 4-inch iPhone that combines the size of the iPhone 5S with features from the iPhone 6 and 6S. It will also supposedly be upgrading the 9.7-inch iPad, giving it updated internals, a Smart Connector, and Apple Pencil support imported from the iPad Pro. The Apple Watch may get some love in the form of new band colors and combinations, but rumors say not to expect a full hardware refresh just yet.

We'll probably also hear about a smattering of minor software updates, including iOS 9.3, OS X 10.11.4, tvOS 9.2, and WatchOS 2.2. Follow along by visiting the link below. The event begins at 10am PDT (1pm EDT, 5pm GMT).

Farmers harvest peanuts in the village of Addakal, India. (credit: ICRISAT)

A handful of years ago, Chandrakala Kongala, a farmer in the rural village of Kommireddipalli in the southern Indian state of Telangana, faced a devastating problem. In one fell swoop, an unanticipated downpour had ravaged her peanut crop.

Farming wasn’t a leisurely pursuit for Kongala; it was her livelihood. Living in a remote area with limited access to transportation, she was ineligible to enter the mainstream job market. If the crops failed, she’d be left with no source of income.

During the following growing seasons, Kongala was flourishing. She was cultivating a variety of crops, at times harvesting earlier than anticipated. Eventually, she came to own a one-acre farm yielding hundreds of pounds of crops per harvest (her rice yield, for example, has jumped from 120 to 165 pounds). By spring of this year, she was earning 20,000 to 30,000 rupees per season ($300 to $450)—a lavish sum in a community of farmers subsisting on one to two dollars a day.

(credit: Getty Images)

Alzheimer’s disease leads to tragic memory deficits, but it's not clear whether those memories are actually lost. It's also not clear whether this is a problem with memory formation and storage or a problem in memory retrieval. This is clinically relevant, since memory retrieval could potentially be restored by targeted brain stimulation.

New work using mouse models of early Alzheimer’s disease just showed that the problem at least starts with memory retrieval. Strikingly, it can also be reversed provided the correct set of neurons is activated. (The results are published in Nature.)

Engrams are the traces of the paths that memories leave as they settle in the brain. They are present both in our psyches and in biochemical alterations present in our neurons. Molecular, genetic, and optogenetic methods have been used to try to identify the population of neurons that hold onto these engrams.

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

When Fitbit announced the Blaze "smart fitness watch," it did not make the best first impression. Many thought the Blaze was a peculiar answer to its competition, namely the Apple Watch, and the company's stock immediately fell more than 13 percent.

However, the Fitbit Blaze is not a smartwatch in the same way as the Apple Watch or the Android Wear. Fitbit took what it does best—connected fitness—and put it in a device designed to appeal to the ever growing number of people interested in smartwatches. But if the idea of fun applications and sending texts from your wrist intrigues you, the $199 Blaze is not what you want. Instead, the Blaze creates and fills a weird middle-ground space. This is a wearable for the die-hard Fitbit crowd, particularly those on the more active side of the spectrum. The Fitbit Blaze is for those want to wear something that does just slightly more than an average step counter.