memory

You can walk into any toy store and buy a robot these days. No big deal. Back in 1939, a robot was an incredible oddity. That's why crowds flocked to see Elektro, a robot built by Westinghouse Electric for the New York World's Fair.

The talking Elektro described himself as a "smart fellow" with a "fine brain" consisting of 48 electrical relays that worked like a telephone switchboard.

Elektro was a bit of a smarty-pants, making lame jokes, smoking cigarettes, and blowing up balloons. Elektro could walk (slowly), move his mouth, and turn his head. This was pretty advanced stuff for the day. The 7-foot-tall creation took voice commands via a telephone handset.

Elektro lies low Elektro disappeared into obscurity after touring the country and then passing time as a minor attraction at a California amusement park. Elektro's story could have ended there, but the big metal guy is now in line for a revival. Elektro's head turned up in a basement and his body in a barn. … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week people wrote in with questions about the best way to move data from an old user account to a new one, the purpose for the key given to you when you enable FileVault, and how to add new menu extras to the menu bar. Others asked how to manage exceptionally large virtual memory used by programs, and how best to move an OS installation to a new partition. We welcome alternative approaches and views from readers, so if you have any suggestions, post … Read more

In a famous surgery in the early 1900s, Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, trying to treat epilepsy, found that stimulating specific neurons while patients were under local anesthesia caused them to vividly recall complex events. The mind, then, is based on matter, Penfield concluded.

Now researchers at MIT say they put this observation to the test in a rigorous study showing that the direct reactivation of specific hippocampus neurons can lead to very specific memory recall. And to do this, all they used was light.

"We demonstrate that behavior based on high-level cognition, such as the expression of a specific … Read more

Toshiba has announced new SDXC and SDHC cards that support the UHS-1 high-speed interface--and the new Exceria brand name to go along with them.

The Exceria name is meant "to reflect a combination of 'excellent' and 'experience,'" Toshiba said in a statement this week, but I wouldn't have guessed that without being told. Too bad Sony got there first with Xperia.

The new cards come in three varieties. At the top of the heap are models that will arrive in July with read speeds of 95MBps and write speeds of 90MBps; they'll come in 8GB, 16GB, … Read more

One of our biggest disappointments with Barnes & Noble's original 16GB Nook Tablet was that while it was ostensibly twice as capacious as the 8GB Kindle Fire only 1GB of its internal memory was accessible for side-loaded user content. So, unless you invested in a microSD expansion card, you couldn't drag and drop a lot of music and movies for those times where streaming Netflix or Pandora wouldn't cut cut it, such as when you're on a long flight.

Now Barnes & Noble is giving users the option of reallocating the memory partition to leave room … Read more

Adding more RAM to your Mac is one of the easiest ways to increase the capability of the system. In addition, at around $40 for an 8GB upgrade these days, it is quite cheap to do so.

By upgrading to at least 4GB or preferably 8GB, you can see a notable decrease in load times for programs and files, especially when you already have a number of applications open. You may also notice a reduction in slowdowns and the presence of the spinning color wheel, both of which largely happen when applications have to wait for the system to manage … Read more

If Apple wants to go after the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 then Apple should make a home console. The iPad is not a home console. It's a portable tablet that can play casual games. The same way an automobile is not a cup holder. It can just hold your coffee while it gets you from point A to B.

It would be just as silly if Microsoft or Sony came out and said their controllers have 15 times the button-pressing capability than the new iPad. They wouldn't be wrong, but it would cause every eye in the house to roll. So here's why Apple's jab at the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 was misleading and cheap.… Read more

Numecent is rolling out its "cloud paging" technology today. It's an interesting way to add some client/server technology to virtual machine setups. What it really means: You'll be able to play big games over the Web more quickly than if you had to download them, and with better performance than if you're streaming the game's video (as OnLive does).

Numecent is a virtual machine technology, but instead of downloading the whole "machine" to the client (end user) computer before it can run it, it uses a network-based virtual memory manager that … Read more

Scientists have long been puzzled to explain short-term memory loss that results from marijuana smoking. But while an open-and-shut explanation still remains elusive, a couple of neuroscientists may be getting close.

Writing in the journal Cell, Xia Zhang of the University of Ottawa Institute of Mental Health Research, and Giovanni Marsicano of the University of Bordeaux, France, came up with a working explanation by focusing on a kind of signalling mechanism called astrocytes that previously had only been considered important for protecting neurons.

"Our study provides compelling evidence that astrocytes control neurons and memory," Zhang told the journal … Read more