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It has been four months since the last time I dyed my hair, and I believe that I’ve reached the point when almost everyone who grows out their grays says that they want to attack something. Or someone. In other words, the point when it gets really hard. Last week I came *this* close to booking a last-minute color appointment. Multiple times. The biggest challenge has been figuring out what to do about my hairline, because I have a lot of gray there, and the hairs are ever-so-slightly coarser, and therefore more unruly, than the darker hairs. Back when I...

…because I’m on a mission to try all the conditioner washes! DUUUUUDE. I’ve been co-washing since before it went mainstream, since I unraveled its secrets in a now-long-forgotten hair forum in a dusty corner on the Interwebz more than 10 ago. Finding out about it was one of the best things to ever happen to my hair. Now I do it a few times a week between regular shampoo and conditioner sessions, and my hair’s the healthiest it’s ever been. Needless to say, I’m a co-wash evangelist, and I love trying new ones and options. Here are two I tried...

Diagrams of neural activity in the hippocampus, recorded from a mouse as it learned about a new environment. Colors correspond to unique locations within the new space. Over time and continued exposure to the arena, the mouse forms stable memories by recruiting teams of neurons to encode for the location. Credit: CaltechVia Medical Xpress:  How memories form and fade Paper: Persistence of neuronal representations through time and damage in the hippocampus. (Science - paywalled; Preprint: bioRxiv - PDF)

Aloha nui loa from Oahu! Hope you’re doing well. Yesterday was a pretty fun day. We drove out to a shrimp shack on the north side of the island for lunch, then stopped by Haleiwa town for shave ice on the way back to our hotel. It’s funny, but despite this being a fairly small island, it takes a while to get around because of…traffic! Lots of cars on this little island, and it can easily take more than an hour to get anywhere. But there’s a lot to see along the way, and it’s beautiful. This morning we had...

Astronomers Witness the Birth of a Planet> Max Planck Institute for AstronomyAbove: Near infrared image of the PDS70 disk obtained with the SPHERE instrument. The young exoplanet PDS 70 b is clearly detected as a bright signal at the inner rim of the gap (dark region). The emission coming from central star was masked out. The bar to the lower right indicates the linear scale of the image at a distance of 370 light years.Below: SPHERE image of the newborn planet PDS 70b  (European Southern Observatory)Credits: Image: ESO/A. Müller, MPIA