Word: nodes
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Students at Harvard were disappointed with NASA’s announcement that Node 3 of the International Space Station will be called Tranquility, even after the name “Colbert” received the most votes during the online contest to name the component. “Colbert” won because Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report encouraged his viewers to write his name in for the contest. Nearly 1.2 million votes were made in this online contest, over 230,000 of which voted for the name “Colbert.” The name Serenity came...
...Picture this: a Federalist fortress in the Financial District of Manhattan, whose members represented 52 national and state banks, as well as the U.S. Treasury itself. Not the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, not the Federal Reserve System, not any central bank—this node of finance was the New York Clearinghouse. Established in 1853, the Clearinghouse pooled reserves so that member banks could clear debits and credits daily. It also functioned as a private central bank, which took care of its own in the many banking panics of the late 19th century—especially...
...signal in the “mesh” network jumps from node to node, but the signal weakens as it travels further from the central sources, according to Mary P. Hart, the chief of the Cambridge Information Technology Department...
Small and his colleagues have been trying to understand this difference. Small's hunch--now proven--was that a node of the hippocampus different from the one affected in Alzheimer's was breaking down in normal memory loss. "In humans, monkeys and rats," he says, "normal aging targets a node called the dentate gyrus, while a different node--the entorhinal cortex--is relatively spared. But in Alzheimer's disease, it's almost exactly reversed." Small has gone deeper, pinpointing a protein molecule known as RbAp48 that is lower in the brains of people suffering ordinary age-related memory loss...
...well, dimmer. That, however, is not the case. It is now known that the brain continues to produce neurons throughout the life cycle, but only in two places: the olfactory bulb and the hippocampus. And not just anywhere in the hippocampus but in the dentate gyrus, the very node that Small has identified as the site of impairment in normal memory loss. So why should memory fade at all? The answer may come from...