A fifty-year-old, obese man had tried absolutely everything short of surgery to lose weight. Finally, he decided to have electrodes implanted inside his brain. All he had to do was hit a button, and zap!, his hunger was supposed to disappear.

This procedure is called deep brain stimulation, and has been used to treat Parkinson’s disease. It’s not a normal treatment for obesity, but an almond-sized area of the brain called the hypothalamus helps control hunger. So neuroscientists thought they could use this procedure to help control his appetite too. While a team of neuroscientists led by Andres Lozano, of the Toronto Western Hospital in Ontario, Canada, were trying to identify the best spot on the hypothalamus to place the electrodes, they stumbled upon something amazing. When they stimulated a certain spot, the patient vividly experienced a memory from about thirty years before! The more electrical voltage they applied, the clearer the memory became. After three weeks of continuous stimulation, the patient took learning tests with and without stimulation. With the electrodes switched on, he scored three times higher. The team is now testing deep brain stimulation on patients with Alzheimer’s, a disease that affects memory.

Did deep brain stimulation cure the man’s obesity? Nope. The procedure worked -- with the electrodes turned on, the man’s appetite disappeared -- but he had the button to control those electrodes, and he turned them off at night, then ate to his heart’s content!

Electrodes -- Tiny objects that emit electric charges

Parkinson's Disease -- A progressive nervous system disease that causes muscle tremors, movement difficulty, and weakness

Don’t reach for the fly swatter -- this prehistoric bug was big enough to swat you around with just one of its claws!

The giant sea scorpion Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae lived about 400 million years ago, and grew to be up to eight feet long! That’s longer than the tallest professional basketball players.

“We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, super-sized scorpions, colossal cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies,” said Dr. Simon Braddy of the University of Bristol, England. “But we never realized until now just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were.” Why were they so big? There are several theories. Maybe there was more oxygen in the air back then. Or maybe there was less competition from vertebrates like us. The explanation I like best, though, is that these sea scorpions liked to fight and even eat one another, so the biggest, baddest bug won all the battles!

vertebrates -- Creatures with a backbone

Sure, you’ve all heard of the Nobel Peace Prize, but what about all those scientists studying sword-swallowing, cow dung, and wrinkled sheets? To honor the wackiest of all the unconventional research out there, the magazine The Annals of Improbable Research invented the Ig Nobel Prize. The “Ig” is short for ignoble, which means “silly,” and these prizes are for “achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think,” according to the Improbable Research Web site (http://improbable.com/).

The 2007 winner for medicine was a study in the British Medical Journal on the side effects of sword-swallowing. Did you know putting a long, pointed, metal object in your mouth can cause a sore throat? The prize for chemistry went to a Japanese scientist, Mayu Yamamoto, who figured out how to extract vanilla from cow dung. An ice cream shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, named a new flavor “Yum-a-moto vanilla twist” in his honor.

The physics prize went to two mathematicians from Chile who can predict just how many wrinkles will show up on different kinds of cloth when you stretch them. While you’re thinking about wrinkled sheets, think about the biology prize: A professor in the Netherlands counted how many mites, insects, spiders, bacteria, algae, and fungi share our beds each night.

Other achievements are just downright bizarre. This year’s prize for linguistics went to three Spanish scientists who showed that rats can’t tell the difference between someone speaking Japanese backwards and someone speaking Dutch backwards. Try speaking English backwards to your pet rat and let us know if it makes a difference. Maybe you’ll win an Ig Nobel Prize someday!

But please talk beforehand. Spend just ten minutes talking to a friend before your next test, and you may get a better grade. No, you don’t have to talk about history or math or whatever you’re studying; some plain old socializing could help keep your memory sharp. So go ahead -- discuss your favorite music, the movie you watched last night, or your dog’s new trick. Just make sure you stop talking when the teacher passes out the test!

Researchers from the University of Michigan gave three groups of college students a test of mental processing speed and memory. Beforehand, one group did math and crossword puzzles, another watched a TV show, and a third group talked about a social issue. The results? Talking with friends kept the students’ brains just as sharp as doing a difficult crossword puzzle. In a related study, over 3,000 participants ages 24 to 96 took an exam measuring general knowledge and working memory, then answered questions about how often they talk to friends, neighbors, and relatives. Regardless of age, gender, or income, the more socially active people tended to score higher on the exam. This doesn’t mean it’s bad to be an introvert -- plenty of geniuses didn’t get along so well socially -- but it does mean that spending time with your friends may help keep your mind smart and healthy. Just don’t take this as an excuse to hang out instead of doing your homework!

Introvert -- A person who gains energy from his or her inner world

Let’s pretend you took a bath with skunk-scented soap. What would your friends at school do? They’d probably all stand far away and say, “Peeeww! What happened?” Well, now imagine you’re a fish, and you take a swim through water where someone has dumped old laundry detergent boxes. When you encounter your fishy school mates, they take one whiff and swim away from you, leaving you alone and defenseless.

But detergent is just soap, you might argue. Well, soap smells sweet to us, but many detergents and other cleaners contain 4-nonylphenol (4-NP), a pollutant that stinks to some kinds of fish as badly as a skunk does to us.

Suzanne Currie and her colleagues at Mount Allison University in Sackville, Canada, tested how a low level of 4-NP pollution affects schools of banded killifish. “Fish don’t like to associate with other fish that smell like nonylphenol,” Currie told the Web site nature.com. So what if smelly fish get rejected? A school of fish swimming together, or shoaling, offers extra protection from predators. A fish alone is an easy meal.

What do you think? There are limits on the amount of pollution people are allowed to dump in bodies of water. But even very low levels of 4-NP can affect fish behavior. What could be done to solve this problem? Send your ideas to odysseymagazine@caruspub.com or write to A FISHY FIX, ODYSSEY, 30 Grove Street, Suite C, Peterborough, NH 03458.

Introvert -- A person who gains energy from his or her inner world

You wake up one morning with blank spots in your brain. Something, or someone, is erasing your memories! Is this a science fiction nightmare, or a scientific breakthrough?

Science is still far away from erasing specific memories, but a team led by Roberto Malinow of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York found a certain molecule, glutamate receptor 1 (GluR1), that seems to be partially responsible for collecting strong, emotional memories. You probably remember that time you broke your arm, or got stung by a bee, or won a raffle, but do you remember what you ate for breakfast the first day of February last year? Emotional experiences cause your body to produce the stress hormone norepinephrine, which helps make lasting memories.

The new research discovered how norepinephrine helps attach a small molecule called a phosphate group to GluR1. The phosphate group helps GluR1 molecules move to the surface of a nerve cell faster, where they send and receive signals from other nerve cells. If those phosphate groups don’t attach, the GluR1 won’t be able to do its job.

It’s scary to think about messing with memory, but some people wish they could forget scary events. “In post-traumatic stress disorder, where you have too much emotionally charged memory, this [GluR1] could provide a molecular target for possible treatments,” Malinow told Science News.

If you’ve read Lois Lowry’s famous science fiction book The Giver, you may remember that it’s about a society where bad memories are kept by one special person, and no one else has to think about those things.

What do you think? If science finds a way to do it, would you want to erase your painful memories? How would the ability to erase memory change our lives?

Email your response to odysseymagazine@caruspub.com or write to MIND TRICKS, ODYSSEY, 30 Grove Street, Suite C, Peterborough, NH 03458.

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