Beaker Hill: Virus-Assembled Batteries, Sleep-Enhanced Memory

Whether it's self-navigating robotic cars, hacking Charlie, or cracking the game of blackjack to win millions from Vegas casinos, the kids at MIT tend not to leave any stone unturned, and last week continued the trend. A team of MIT engineers announced the development of a tiny batteries partially assembled by viruses. The batteries, checking in at a scant 4 micrometers wide (compared to the 17-181 micrometer width of human hair), have similar performance characteristics to standard lithium-ion batteries. The MIT team hopes eventually to produce wholly virus-assembled batteries that can be implanted into living tissue for use in medical devices. No doubt the next step will be to use these virus-batteries in a device to make the female population of campus resemble fictional MIT student Kate Bosworth. The study will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with considerably fewer references to 2008 movies based on card-counting.

Not to be outdone, a report in Psychological Science from Harvard researchers affiliated with Beth Israel Deaconess and Boston College examines the nature of memory. It's been established for years that rote memory is improved by sleep, so pulling an all-nighter may not give you quite the edge you expected on that midterm. However, the Harvard team examined the role that sleep plays in remembering events, in particular emotionally-jarring ones. The subjects who had slept after viewing a strongly negative scene remembered the emotional aspect of the image (in this case, a horrific car accident) with crystal clarity, while forgetting the other parts of the picture, such as the details of the street the accident was on. Those who viewed the image and did not sleep tended to be equally hazy on both the emotional and neutral aspects of the scene. Thus the effect of sleep on emotionally-significant memories appears to be in downplaying unimportant portions of an event while enhancing the crucial bits for later recall. So the next time your late night at the bar ends with a scene you'd rather forget, going to sleep and pretending it never happened may not be your best course of action.

Post contributed by Matt Feltz. Beaker image from Muppet Wiki.