Scientists studying how sleep affects memory have found that the whiff of a familiar scent can help a slumbering brain better remember things that it learned the evening before: Research has shown that regions of the cortex, the thinking and planning part of the brain, communicate during deep sleep with a sliver of tissue deeper in the brain called the hippocampus, which records each day's memories of odors and memory responses.

The hippocampus encodes odors and memory responses by firing sequences back in the cortex, consolidating the memory.

Olfactory sensing pathways of odors and memory responses in the brain which lead more directly to the hippocampus than visual and auditory ones. That may be why smell can be linked so closely to memory.

Dear John:

I read your e-mail on the deplorable state of education in the United States.

Having taught both high school and college, I must admit that the comments are quite accurate. I must say that I am certainly doing my best to maintain high standards both at the university and high school levels and your newsletters have been a great help in helping me achieve this.

Best regards,
James

John,

I enjoyed your latest newsletter about the problem of cheating and the watering down of the curricula in most academic areas. In my first teaching position almost forty years ago, I took a boy's History Regents paper away from him . . . along with his copious "cheat notes" and went to the Principal.

The result? I almost lost my job for daring to ruin this young person's life. The same Principal later asked me to remark the State Regents exams and see if I couldn't upgrade some of them because "they weren't going to be reviewed at the state capital that year and who would know the difference."

I'm happy to report I didn't, but it wasn't easy and the pressure on teachers to bend the rules has only grown worse. I don't know what the answers are, but you are right to highlight the problem.
Best wishes,
Ray

Hi John:

You have made some excellent points about education and Americans. I see this all the time. I have a Montessori Pre-school and we have "before and after-school kids" from three districts and it's amazing what they don't know and yet bring home "A's" and "B's".

Have you ever read the Leipzig Connection? I ran across it in a thrift store and it's the story of how America's education came to be what it is now.

Thanks for the wonderful newsletter. I don't say much about it but I do love getting it. You do a great job.

Pam

If you read “Newsletter #5”, you know that there was an extensive discussion about the important field of “tribology”. Geoff, in the United Kingdom, sent me information that led to the following internet article about a “TRIBOPEN (tribo + pen)” a Plastic Identifier:

“The automotive industry has moved a step closer to maximum car recyclability following the development of two innovative plastic identifiers by Ford Motor Company and Southampton University.

“The biggest problem when recycling plastics is the sorting and grouping according to material type,” said Professor Walter Brandstetter, Director of Environment and Safety, Ford of Europe.

“Although many plastics look alike, just one percent of an incompatible plastic can be enough to ruin an entire batch of recyclate.”

The Spectrometer unit is the larger of the two. When its nozzle is placed against the plastic part in question, it will identify the exact type of plastic from which it was made. The unit compares the spectroscopic fingerprint with its own integrated database, which consists of more than 200 types of plastic.

The second, pen-shaped hand-held unit, known as the Tribopen, works on the basis of tribo-electric charges that occur when a metal or plastic surface is rubbed against the part. A wide range of different heads are available to cover all possible plastics, from car bumpers to cable shrouding. The portable Tribopen has been designed predominantly for use by dismantlers and recyclers.

Based on information from the University of Southampton with reference to Wolfson Electrostatics.

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Since so many subscribers are from non-English speaking countries, the following may answer a question that has puzzled so many, including a few “native speakers”. Nichola of France, wrote:

“A Turkish friend of mine asked if I knew why English is one of the few languages of the world where ‘I’ is always capitalised. ”

Other than making it stand out in a sentence I couldn’t give him a satisfactory answer, could you help, is it based on historical use?"

Scribe answers:

Well, Nichola, and anyone else who is interested, William and Mary Morris, in their Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage explain:

“English is one of the few languages in which the pronoun for the first person, singular, is capitalized. For example, the French ‘je’ and the Spanish ‘yo’ are not capitalized unless they are the beginning of a sentence.

“This has nothing to do with egotism on the part of English-speaking people. Printing and handwriting have everything to do with it. In Middle English the first person singular was ‘ich’ with a lower-case ‘i.’ When this was shortened to ‘i,’ manuscript writers and printers found that it often became lost or attached to a neighboring word. So the reason for the capital ‘I’ is simply to avoid confusion and error.”

Scribe’s note: I would like to add that in English, the first person, “I” (referring to the person who is writing or who is quoted as the speaker), should always be capitalized, whether it is the first letter of a sentence or anywhere within the sentence.