Outside of science fiction and fantasy, no one has ever been able to reach into another person’s mind and extract those unspoken words. But that may change in the future, because modern technology is making it possible to see what happens in the brain when we hear someone talking—and because this activity is thought to be pretty much the same whether we hear someone say a sentence, or think that sentence ourselves, it may not be long before we are able to turn hidden thoughts into spoken words via computer.

(Sound familiar? Back in September, I wrote about similar work that used brain activity to recreate images people saw.)

New Scientist recently ran an article, written by Helen Thomson, on the work of a research team at the University of California, Berkeley. Led by Brian Pasley, the team presented spoken words and sentences to 15 people undergoing surgery for epilepsy or a brain tumor, while recording neural activity from the surface of a portion of the brain near the ear that’s involved in processing sound. Then they tried to associate different aspects of speech to different kinds of brain activity in the recordings.

The brain breaks down speech in terms of frequency (pitch), frequency fluctuation, rhythm and more. And sure enough, the team was able to correlate many of these aspects of speech to the neural activity they recorded in their subjects’ brains.

Next, they trained a computer program to interpret the neural activity and turn it into a spectrogram, a graphical representation of sound that shows how much of what frequency is occurring over a period of time. To test the spectrograms, they compared the ones they created from neural activity with spectrograms they created from the original sounds.

A second computer program converted the reconstructed spectrogram into audible speech. The result? “Coarse similarities” between the real words and the reconstructed words, says Pasley, that human listeners can kind of pick up on, but which computers were able to analyze more accurately.

Recording brain activity and turning it into spoken language via a computer would have one very obvious and very exciting application: helping those who have lost the ability to speak through paralysis or some other physical problem to once more communicate with the outside world.

Nor is Pasley’s team the only one working toward this goal. At Boston University in Massachusetts, Frank Guenther interprets the brain signals that control the shape of the mouth, lips and larynx to try to figure out what a person is trying to say. So far, all they’ve managed to produce are a few vowel sounds; nothing more complex. But it’s a start.

Steven Laureys at the University of Liege, Belgium, is seeking ways to distinguish brain activity corresponding with “yes” and “no” to help those who cannot speak.

Pasley is anxious to try to develop technology to make the thought-patterns-to-speech translation happen. He’d like to develop safe, wireless, implantable devices suitable for long-term use.

Of course, having anything implanted in your brain is going to be a tough sell, and to begin with, at least, only people already undergoing essential brain surgery would be likely candidates. And the words-from-brain-activity software is still in its infancy, anyway.

But the concept certainly seems viable, and exciting…although I don’t think it’s something most of us would want installed, no matter how safe, cheap or effective it might become.

“It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt,” goes an old saying

If the day ever comes when our every passing thought is revealed to the world, the number of people revealed to be fools will surely astound.

Although, now that I think about it, hasn’t that already happened with Twitter?

These days, your car may even listen to you, if you have a voice-activated music system or phone. But generally, cars don’t pay much attention to what you say to them.

It could be that you just don’t have anything to say they’re very interested in. Perhaps what cars would really enjoy is conversation with others of their kind…and it may not be too long before they get it.

It’s called “vehicle-to-vehicle communication,” or “V2V” for short.  It is, literally, cars and trucks talking to each other. And starting this August, automakers will take part in a year-long field trial of the technology, a study being undertaken in conjunction with the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute and the U.S. Department of Transportation.

For the trial, 3,000 cars will be outfitted with equipment that allows them to broadcast their position, speed of travel and direction to other vehicles, and receive signals from those other vehicles in return, over a Wi-Fi network.

In an article about the “digital car,” Technology Review magazine compares the Wi-Fi signals to an alert passenger able to see in all directions at once. A V2V-equipped car could warn the driver if another V2V-equipped car was about to run a red light, or if there’s a V2V-equipped motorcycle in the blind spot.

A study sponsored by the U.S.’s National Highway Transportation Safety Administration looked at the scenarios involved in police-reported crashes involving unimpaired drivers, and found that V2V systems could potentially address a whopping 79 percent of those kinds of crashes: 81 percent of light vehicle crashes and 71 percent of heavy-truck crashes.

Your car might not just talk to other cars, either. There is also something called V2I, which stands for “vehicle-to-infrastructure.” That communication between vehicle and roadway, the study found, potentially dealt with 26 percent of all crashes: 27 percent of light-vehicle, and 15-percent of heavy-truck. Putting the two together raised the potential reduction in (or at least reduction in the severity of) all kinds of crashes to 81 percent.

If this year’s field trial and other studies produce favorable results, the U.S. government could start developing rules as early as next year that would mandate the inclusion of V2V systems in all new vehicles: pretty much a necessity if the technology is to be as effective as possible, since a one-sided conversation between a V2V-equipped car and one that’s effectively deaf and dumb won’t help anyone.

Of course, “talking cars” may talk not only to other cars, but to the entire world, via the Internet. For example, Ford has a made a deal with Google to use the search engine’s prediction algorithms, software that analyzes large data sets to spot trends. The idea, presented by Ryan McGee, a technical expert in Ford’s Vehicle Controls Architecture and Algorithm Design research group at the annual Google I/O conference in San Francisco last year, is that your car would send data to Google’s data centers, where software would predict where you are headed, based on past trips. Technology Review describes it this way: “Google might predict, say, that there’s a 59.24 percent chance you’re headed over to Bob’s house. A hybrid car might use a map of low-emission zones to determine when to switch to battery power as you drive. Or the algorithm could pick a fuel-efficient path with few hills, no rain, and the least traffic.”

This isn’t coming soon, if it comes at all: it’s probably four to eight years away. But it’s only one example of the possibilities inherent in cars that are no longer big dumb objects, but essentially rolling computers with network connectivity.

K. Venkatesh Prasad, senior leader for open innovation at Ford Motor Company, puts it this way in that Technology Review article. “The first billion vehicles in this world are like [un-networked] desktops—each doing their own little thing. The next billion cars should talk to each other and share intelligence.

“Think of how the World Wide Web changed the world,” he goes on. “The automotive sector is ripe for a similar change.”

(The photo: A Ford Mustang California Special.)

The landing pod settled in the middle of the alien battlefield in an expanding cloud of copper-colored dust, its antigrav moaning away to nothing and its liftjets sighing into silence.

Vultor Caruso watched the pod’s descent through binoculars from the ancient camouflaged pillbox buried in the nearest hill, his lips set in a thin, tight sneer. “Damn claim-jumpers,” he muttered; after years of working on his own, he talked to himself. He thumbed the magnification control to max so he could read the registration markings on the pod’s side. “Oh, that’s clever,” he snarled. “Too bloody damn clever. ‘Interstellar Red Cross’ my ass.” He squinted through the binoculars. What was that smaller text underneath…? “‘Retrieval and Rescue,’” he read, and jerked the binoculars down so hard the strap cut into the back of his neck. “As if any of us coyotes would ever need to be retrieved. As if we’d let them.”

Something whined in his ear like a demented mosquito; he slapped a control on the harness of his multisuit and the sound died. The emergency call signal—he should’ve seen that coming. They’d play this ‘Interstellar Red Cross’ crap to the hilt, try to talk him into coming down to the pod, then grab him, lock him up, and strip-mine the site. He’d bet there was a full-sized digship waiting in orbit for the all-clear once they had him.

But they weren’t going to get him. And they couldn’t do a thing here until they did, because like any coyote worth his gravjuice, he’d seeded the whole battlefield perimeter with alarms and nanocameras. Anybody but him set foot in it, his ship would take their pictures, ID them, and squawk-burst it straight to the Patrol through one of the four quantamitters he’d left tucked in orbit—two t be found, and two for redundancy.

They had to grab him and his multisuit so they could deactivate that stuff, or else they might as well get the hell off. And there was no way they were going to grab him, not someone who’d spent the last twenty subjective Earth years salvaging alien materials and technology from the battlefields of some ancient interstellar war.

He saw movement, and raised the binoculars again. Two people emerged from the pod in white multisuits, and he ducked down quickly when he realized they had their own binox. He didn’t need to see them, anyway. He knew what they’d do. They’d set down right where he’d stuck his dummyship, shouting out an ID signal identical to the one his real ship would have been sending out, if he’d been stupid enough to leave it on. They’d poke around, scan the horizon, maybe even yell if they were desperate enough—and right on cue, he heard a faint cry of “Mr. Caruso! Vultor Caruso!”

Idiots, he thought, and stayed put for the next three hours, never looking out. It’d taken him two days to find the hidden entrance to this pillbox. There was no way these clowns would find it before dark.

He was mildly surprised when he heard the rising howl of antigravs winding up, but kept his head down in case it was another trick. Only when the liftjets roared did he poke his eyes back up to the level of the weapons slit.

The pod was gone, leaving behind only another cloud of coppery dust.

Vultor crawled out of the pillbox and brushed off his multisuit. He spat on the ground, the spot of moisture turning the alien dust as bright-red as freshly spilled blood. Damn claim-jumpers had eaten up the best part of his day. He’d be lucky to get back to his ship by nightfall.

Damn stupid claim-jumpers, he amended to himself as he clambered down the back side of the hill. He surveyed the vast battlefield with satisfaction. Littered with the decayed remnants of ships, the crumbling exoskeletons of the long-dead aliens, and anonymous dust-covered mounds that might hold anything, it was the richest site he’d ever found. No wonder the claim-jumpers came after it, but to think a wily old wolf like him would come crawling out like a whipped puppy just because they pretended to be some kind of rescue team…rescue from what? Monsters? Nothing bigger than a rat lived on this dump of planet. He snorted, and set off across the battlefield.

He was halfway home, and the planet’s tiny, brilliant star had just slipped behind the horizon, when he heard the moan of antigravs again. “Dammit, can’t you take a hint?” he roared, and turned around, expecting to see the landing pod descending behind him.

For a long moment, nothing made sense. Lights wove through the stars in an intricate pattern, throwing off eye-searing flashes like fireworks. Antigravs moaned, rockets shrieked, explosions thundered the air.

It wasn’t until the hulking ships thudded heavily down two hundred metres away and the insectoids swarmed out that he really understood.

The war had returned. And as the aliens raised their weapons in unison, as though driven by a single mind, Voltor had time for only one last thought:

What scavengers, he wondered, would pick his bones clean?

The key to keeping a resolution is willpower, obviously. But what is willpower? Is it some mysterious quality that some people have and others don’t? Is it a virtue we can build in ourselves with practice? Is it what separates saints from sinners?

None of the above, say some scientists. According to Roy F. Baumeister, a social psychologist at the University of Florida, willpower is simply a form of mental energy, fueled, like all brain functions, by glucose in the bloodstream. And that means that like any other form of mental energy, it can be used up.

Baumeister, in a 2007 experiment, gave students an attention-taxing task (watching a boring video while ignoring words at the bottom of the screen), then rewarded them with a glass of lemonade. Half got lemonade made with real sugar, while the others got lemonade sweetened with Splenda. They were then given tests of self-control—and the students who had drunk Splenda-sweetened lemonade consistently performed worse. Their willpower was literally unfueled.

Baumeister has co-written a book on the subject, Willpower, with John Tierney, science columnist for the New York Times. He calls this state of mental fatigue “ego depletion,” and there’s really nothing we can do about it: it’s just the way our brains work. So the real key to keeping resolutions, Baumeister and others believe, is, as Jonah Lehrer put it in a recent article for Wired.com, “to recognize the inherent weakness of the will.”

Nothing displays that weakness better than New Year’s resolutions. A 2002 study by John C. Norcross and other psychologists at the University of Scranton found that by the end of January 26 percent of resolvers had broken their resolutions. Half had broken them by March. By July, that had risen to 56 percent. A 2007 survey found that eventually 88 percent of all resolutions end in failure.

Bad statistics perhaps, but there’s actually a flip side. Sure, only 44 percent of those who made resolutions continued to cling to them by July, but only four percent of a control group who had the same goals (i.e., losing weight) had made progress in that same amount of time. Resolutions, in other words, made it ten times more likely people would actually change what they wanted to change.

And despite the odds, some people do succeed at sticking to efforts at self-improvement. How do they do it?

A new study says it’s not by any great feat of willpower, of which they have no more than anyone else. Rather, it’s by application of careful strategy.

In this study, led by Wilhelm Hoffmann at the University of Chicago, 205 participants in Wurtzburg, Germany, received specially designed smartphones. Over a week, they were pinged seven times a day and asked to report whether they were experiencing a strong desire: if so, they were then asked to describe it, how strongly they felt it, and whether it caused an “internal conflict.” If it did cause a conflict, they were asked about their ensuing success at controlling it: did they successfully thwart their desire to, say, eat a whole container of ice cream?

About half the desires were reported as causing internal conflict. In about 40 percent of those cases, the subject attempted to actively resist the desire. Resistance was not futile: only 17 percent of those desires that were resisted were acted upon, whereas 70 percent of desires that were not resisted were consummated.

The key finding, though, was that the best way to thwart self-conflicting desires isn’t through the application of weak willpower, but by avoiding temptation in the first place. As Lehrer puts it, “unsuccessful dieters try not to eat the ice cream in their freezer, thus quickly exhausting their limited willpower resources,” whereas “those high in self-control refuse to even walk down the ice cream aisle in the supermarket.”

The latest scientific findings, to be sure: but what it all boils down to for me is an old saying I heard many times growing up: “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

If you don’t want to yield to temptation, better to avoid it altogether: and maybe, just maybe, you’ll actually keep your New Year’s resolution.

(The photo: A dessert table at the International Festival of Wine & Food, Banff Springs Hotel.)

Aside from those keeners who have set up combination desks/treadmills (Arthur Slade, I’m looking at you), a poor choice for those of us who cannot walk and chew gum at the same time, much less walk and type at the same time, most writers do little but sit on their rear ends and tap on a keyboard.

It was therefore with great interest that I read a press release describing a study just published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, which indicates that one key to losing weight might be, not physical exercise, but a writing exercise.

The study was conducted by Christine Logel of Renison University College at the University of Waterloo and Geoffrey L. Cohen of Stanford University.

The researchers recruited 45 female undergraduates who had a body mass index of 23 or higher. A BMI within the range of 18.5 to 24.9 is considered normal weight; a little more than half of the women (58 percent) fell outside that range and thus would be considered overweight or obese.

Each woman was weighed, and then provided with a list of important values: i.e., creativity, politics, music, and relationships with friends and family members. Each woman was asked to rank the values in the order of how important they were to her.

With that established, half the women were told to write for 15 minutes about whichever value they had ranked most important, while the other half (the control group) were told to write about why a value they personally ranked low might be valuable to someone else.

Between one and four months later, the women came back to be weighed again, and, rather astoundingly, the women who had written about an important value had lost an average of 3.41 pounds, while the women in the control group had (as is typical of undergraduates at university) gained an average of 2.75 pounds.

Why? Well, Logel’s theory is that the women who wrote about values that were important to them felt better about themselves, and that led to better habits: perhaps writing about an important value made a particular woman feel so good that she went home and, for once, didn’t snack; and that, in turn, helped derail a snacking habit that had been contributing to her weight gain.

The results tie in with previous studies that have found that thinking about values, even briefly, can have a big effect. For example, Cohen has used the same technique with minority seventh-graders who were underperforming relative to their white peers. The results: those who did the exercise continued to perform better for years thereafter.

“We have this need to feel self-integrity,” Logel is quoted as saying. “We can buffer that self-integrity by reminding ourselves how much we love our children, for example.”

So does that mean the key to losing weight is as simple as writing about something you value, once, for just 15 minutes?

Naturally, the researchers urge caution, and say it’s too soon to tell. They point out that the women in the study didn’t know that writing about values was supposed to help them live healthier, although they may have twigged, since most psychological studies don’t require a weigh-in.

Logel herself, however, is a firm believer in the benefit of focusing on things of value. She carries a keychain that reminds her of one of her own important values (although the press release doesn’t say exactly what it is, personally, not forgetting my keys is something I value).

And, Logel says, the ultimate goal of all her research along these lines is to find out what people can do to deliberately benefit from this fascinating effect.

In the meantime, she says, “There’s certainly no harm in taking time to reflect on important values and working activities you value in your daily life.”

Personally, I just like the idea of a writing exercise to help you lose weight.

It sure beats that other kind of exercise…although somehow I suspect the panting-and-sweating kind would still be a good idea, too.

Alcohol is a very odd thing for us to imbibe, when you come right down to it. It is, after all, the waste product of another life-form: namely, yeast. There are very few other life forms whose waste products we willingly take into our body. So why do we do it?

The answer, of course, is that this particular waste product produces interesting side-effects when ingested: side-effects that humans discovered very, very early on (beer and wine-making were already well-established in the Middle East by 1500 B.C.).

Although alcohol, like barbiturates, tranquilizers and anesthetics, is a depressant (in that it depresses the central nervous system, not in that it makes you depressed, although, of course, it may), at low doses it actually acts as a mild stimulant, producing exhilaration, loss of restraints and inhibitions and talkativeness—which is what makes it popular at parties.

At higher doses you begin to see things like slurred speech, sensory disturbance, poor balance and impaired judgment, and as the blood-alcohol concentration continues to increase, you eventually reach fun things like unconsciousness, coma, and, ultimately, death. Which are not so popular at parties.

Alcohol is easily absorbed into the bloodstream through the walls of the small intestine. How quickly it is absorbed determines how quickly its effects are felt. (Drinking while eating is less intoxicating than drinking on an empty stomach, because the fat and protein in the foods in the stomach delay alcohol absorption.)

Alcohol is metabolized by the liver, at a rate of about 3/4 to one drink per hour. Drink more rapidly than that, and your blood alcohol concentration rises. Unfairly (but nothing says physiology has to be fair), if a man and a woman drink the same amount, the woman will usually become more intoxicated. Men have more of an enzyme called dehydrogenase that breaks down alcohol, and also tend to have more body water than women, which means the alcohol is more diluted than in women. Also, men tend to be larger.

As I noted earlier, every year new alcohol-related stories emerge just in time for the festive season. It’s almost as if writers expect people to imbibe more at this time of year than others. Go figure.

This year’s most interesting example: a press release about new research indicating that alcohol tastes sweeter when loud music is playing.

At the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., psychologist Lorenzo Stafford asked 80 participants (69 females and 11 males, all regular drinkers, aged between 18 and 28) to rate a selection of drinks on the basis of strength, sweetness and bitterness. While they were doing so, they were subjected to four different levels of distraction, from none all the way up to loud club-style music playing at the same time as someone was reading a news report.

The participants rated drinks significantly sweeter overall when they were listening to music alone: which is interesting, because it indicates it’s not the level of distraction but music specifically that makes alcohol taste sweeter. Since we tend to drink more of things that are sweet than things that are bitter, this could explain why, as previous research has shown, we tend to drink more and faster when loud music is playing.

Ah, you may say, but even if I drink a little too much, I always walk home rather than drive, so I’m all right, right?

Not so fast. Also appearing just in time for the holidays: an article detailing the dangers of walking under the influence. According to the journal Injury Prevention, from 1986 to 2002, 410 pedestrians in the U.S. were killed on New Year’s Day. Of those, 58 percent had high blood-alcohol concentrations. In 2008, says the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, 38 percent of fatally injured pedestrians 16 and older had blood-alcohol concentrations at or above 0.08 percent. Never mind people who fall down the stairs or trip at home.

So this New Year’s Eve, remember this sage advice: even though you’re imbibing another life form’s waste product, you don’t have to get wasted.

(The photo: Beer in winter. Big Rock Traditional, for those who really, really need to know.)

Case in point: the release last week of a research report on exciting new progress in gene therapy for hemophiliacs.

Back in 2001, I wrote a book on hemophilia for the Enslow Publishers series Diseases and People (<brag>School Library Journal called it: “An excellent resource for basic research for personal or academic use.”</brag>).

Gene therapy—the insertion of genes into living cells in the human body to treat disorders—has always seemed to hold particular promise for the treatment of hemophilia because it is a genetic disease: you can’t catch it, you can only inherit it.

What is hemophilia? Allow me to quote my own book:

“Hemophilia is a disease in which a person’s blood does not clot properly. People with hemophilia do not produce enough of one of several proteins in the blood called clotting factors.  The body needs these factors to stop bleeding after an injury. Without these factors, bleeding lasts longer than it would otherwise…

“Hemophilia affects males almost exclusively. About one in 5,000 boy babies has hemophilia. It is passed on from generation to generation by women who may or may not show bleeding-related symptoms themselves. In about one third of the cases, there is no family history of hemophilia…

“The primary symptoms of hemophilia are abnormal bruising and bleeding. In toddlers, falls and bumps may cause skin bruises and bleeding from the lips and tongue. In older children and adults, bleeding may involve muscles and joints, producing painful swelling and hindering movement. If early treatment is not given, this bleeding can result in permanent joint damage.  Head injuries are particularly dangerous for hemophiliacs…bleeding into the brain can be fatal. Bleeding may also occur in the face, neck, or throat, obstructing breathing. Bleeding from the mouth, gums, and the nose may be troublesome, as well…

“The standard treatment in the event of bleeding is to inject the hemophiliac with the missing blood clotting factor, made from either donated plasma or by using recombinant gene technology. This can be done on a regular preventative basis, usually three times a week, just before undertaking an activity that could cause bleeding, or as needed to treat episodes of bleeding…

Hemophilia is, in short, a nasty condition indeed. Prior to the First World War, the average lifespan for a boy with hemophilia was 11. Prior to 1968, it was only 20. By 1983 it was 64…but during the 1980s it dropped again due to the impact of AIDS, which hemophiliacs contracted through the injection of blood clotting factor made from donated, infected plasma (young Ryan White, who graces the cover of my book, was one of the most high-profile victims).

Since 1999, the average lifespan has been normal, but treatment still involves regular injections of clotting factors.

The only way to cure hemophilia would be to replace the missing genes that code for the production of clotting factors…and that’s precisely what researchers from the University College London Cancer Institute and the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis have just reported success with.

Their technique used a modified adeno-associated virus, or AAV (which infects human cells but doesn’t cause disease) to insert the gene which produces clotting factor IX (FIX), into liver cells. Their test subjects were six people with severe Hemophilia B. (About one in five people with hemophilia have Hemophilia B; the more common Hemophilia A, which involves a different clotting factor, offers a more complex target for gene therapy, so much of the research has focused on Hemophilia B.)

Before the therapy, the six patients all produced FIX at less than one percent of normal levels. After the therapy, each produced FIX at between two and 11 percent of normal. In the short-term follow-up of six to 16 months, four of the participants no longer needed infusions of FIX at all, while the other two required them less frequently than before.

Molecular Therapy magazine, reporting on preliminary results of the study back in March, enthused that it represented nothing less than the “holy grail” of hemophilia gene therapy.

It also renders my 10-year-old book out-of-date. But you know what? After researching all the tragedy and suffering hemophilia has caused down through the years, I’m okay with that.

I just hope all the other books I wrote, on Alzheimer’s disease, arthritis, meningitis and Ebola, are also rendered obsolete—the sooner, the better.

Perhaps there is a psychological reason for my avoidance of the topic of snow (and Rider losses), or perhaps it’s simply that it’s not very often there’s anything new to say about what we euphemistically call “the white stuff.”

But now there is! A scientist in California, of all places, has a lead on one of the great puzzles of snowflake science.

It’s not, as you might think, “why no two snowflakes are alike”: that’s been understood, at least in broad strokes, for decades. In fact, that was the topic of my original snow column twenty years ago. To recap:

A snow crystal typically forms when water freezes onto a particle of dust (or, if it’s below -40, just because it’s below -40, at which temperature you’d freeze, too). The crystal grows as it falls, collecting more water vapor on the way. Crystals are six-sided because of the way water molecules bind together when water freezes, but that’s the only thing that’s consistent from crystal to crystal.

Scientists have distinguished seven basic shapes: plates, stellars, columns, needles, spatial dendrites, capped columns and irregular crystals. The shape is determined by the temperature and humidity at which the crystal forms. Platelike crystals form above -3 C and between -8 and -25 C. Columns form between -3 and -8 and below -25. Very moist air at around -7 forms needles. Lower the moisture slightly and those needles become short, fat columns.

Of course, snow crystals are seldom a pure example of any of these shapes. Columns may sprout plates on their ends, which in turn develop branches or needles. Each crystal is literally a record of all the atmospheric changes it experienced on its journey from the cloud to the earth.

In order to be identical two snow crystals would have to pass through exactly the same atmospheric conditions in exactly the same order for exactly the same amount of time, all the way down. One estimate is that each snow crystal might pass through a million different combinations of temperature and humidity, giving a possible one-with-five-million-zeroes-after-it possible sequences a crystal could pass through, each sequence altering its appearance.

Since the total number of snow crystals that have fallen in Earth’s entire history is estimated to be a one with a mere 35 zeros after it, the odds are no two of them have ever been even visually identical.

Physics professor Kenneth Libbrecht at the California Institute of Technology became interested in snow in the 1990s (before that, he’d been focused on the sun and cosmic gravitational waves). What piqued his interest was a photo of a capped column, two flat flakes joined in the middle by a hexagonal column, making it look rather like a thread bobbin.

Libbrecht grew up in North Dakota, but he’d never seen such a thing. He went back to North Dakota, and discovered it was just because he’d never looked. Intrigued, he began photographing snow crystals, and has since published seven books and built up a library of more than 10,000 photographs…and developed methods for growing and analyzing snowflakes in a lab.

Recently Libbrecht has been focusing on the thinnest, largest plate-like snowflakes, which form at around -15 in high humidity. Some are as sharp as a razor blade. What he discovered is that the sharpening effect is the result of a growth instability.

When the crystal starts to form, the top edge develops a little bump, or ledge, whose corner sticks out a bit further toward the moist air and thus grows faster than the rest of the crystal. That sets up a cycle: the corner gets sharper, and thus grows faster still, and thus gets sharper, and thus grows still faster…and pretty soon you have a flat, sharp-edged flake.

If this sharpening effect turns out to occur at other temperatures—and it likely will—then it could explain how tiny, tiny changes in temperature during the snowflakes’ fall produce such wildly varying structures, how, as Libbrecht puts it: “the ice growth rates can change by a factor of 1000 when the temperature changes by just a few degrees.”

Or, at least, it begins to explain it. More research (as always) is needed. But still, it’s a real advance in snowflake science.

Not, alas, the advance I’m looking for, which is self-shovelling snowflakes. But, hey, it’s a start.

(The photo: A stop sign in the snow near the Saskatchewan Legislative Building.)

I also like to think I’m an honest guy. Tell the truth, keep your word, don’t cheat: that’s how I was brought up, and I do my best to live up to my upbringing.

According to a new study, though, that may make me a mite unusual. Research just published by the American Psychological Association (APA)  indicates that creative people are more likely to cheat than less creative people.

The research, conducted by Francesca Gino of Harvard University and Dan Ariely of Duke University, appeared online in the APA’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology under the title, “The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest.”

Gino and Ariely first used a series of established psychological tests to measure their subjects’ creativity, and also tested their subjects’ intelligence. Then they carried out a series of five experiments.

In each, the participants received a small sum of money just for showing up. Then they were presented with various tasks and tests, each of which was designed so that they could be paid more if they cheated.

For example: they took a general knowledge quiz, circling their answers on the test paper (and were told they would be paid more for correct answers) Afterward the experimenter told them to transfer their answers to “bubble sheets”, but also told them that she had photocopied the wrong sheet and that as a result the correct answers were already lightly marked on the sheets.

So: the participants had incentive to cheat (more money for correct answers) and the impression they could cheat without detection when transferring their answers (in reality, all of the papers had unique identifiers so the experimenter would be able to tell if they’d cheated).

The results? Those whose tests indicated they were the most creative were also significantly more likely to cheat. (On the other hand, there was no link between intelligence and dishonesty, so those who were more intelligent but less creative were no more likely to cheat than those who lacked both intelligence and creativity.)

In another experiment, the subjects were shown drawings with dots on both sides of a diagonal line, and were asked to indicate whether there were more dots on the left or the right side. In half of the 200 trials, it was virtually impossible to tell: but participants had been told they’d be paid 10 times as much (five cents, rather than half a cent) each time they said there were more dots on the right side…and, sure enough, creative participants were significantly more likely to give the answer that paid more.

So why should creative people be more likely to cheat? The researchers believe it’s because creativity makes it easier for people to rationalize their actions. Or as Francesca Gino put it in the APA’s press release summing up the results, “Greater creativity helps individuals solve difficult tasks across many domains, but creative sparks may lead individuals to take unethical routes when searching for solutions to problems and tasks.”

In the paper itself, the researchers concluded that “the results from the current article indicate that, in fact, people who are creative or work in environments that promote critical thinking may be the most at risk when they face ethical dilemmas.”

Now, as I should probably point out more often than I do, it’s dangerous to draw too many conclusions from a single study. The authors themselves note that the most obvious limitation to their work is the fact that they created situations in which people were tempted by money to cheat.

They suggest further researcher into whether creativity leads people to satisfy selfish, short-term goals rather than their higher aspirations when faced with what they call “self-control dilemmas”—such as eating a slice of cake when trying to lose weight.

In other words (my other words, not theirs), if you’re creative enough, maybe you can justify anything—even things that ordinary, less-creative people would take one look at and say, “that’s just plain wrong.”

“Thinking outside the box” can lead to great discoveries and amazing advancements…but sometimes, thinking outside the box can land you in trouble.

Or potentially, if you’re particularly creative, in jail: and all the thinking in the world won’t get you out of that box.

(The photo: Nothing to do with anything, really, but it’s kind of creative.)

But gags like that are funny because they have a grain of truth in them, and increasingly, I’m finding that grain of truth sticking in my own aging gullet.

Of course, when an oyster finds an irritant in its gullet, it turns that oyster into a pearl. My equivalent is turning it into a science column. (Albeit obviously not one focusing on the biology of the oysters, since even if they have gullets, I’m pretty sure that’s not where they make pearls.)

As it turns out, this science column is even more like a pearl than I thought. After all, pearls reduce an oyster’s irritation. And I find myself far less irritated by my lapses of memory now that I’ve learned it may not have all that much to do with age. Rather, it appears the blame lies with doorways.

No, that’s not a non sequitur and even further evidence of the decay of my mental processes. Research just published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology really does indicate all of us, regardless of age, are more likely to forget things when we pass through a doorway.

The research, conducted by Gabriel Radvansky, a psychology professor  at Notre Dame University, refines some of his previous research which already indicated that  moving from room to room can make us forgetful.

In the new study, Radvansky conducted three experiments. In the first, participants used a virtual  environment like you’d find in a computer game. They selected an object from a table in one virtual room–say, a blue wedge–and either walked across the room to another table, set down the object, and picked up a different object, or walked into another room (through a doorway), set down the object, and picked up a different object. Along the way, they were “probed” with the name of an object, asked if it was either the object they were carrying or the one they had put down (they couldn’t see the object they were carrying or the one they had set down). Those who passed through doorways were more likely to have forgotten what they were either carrying or had just set down than those who had merely crossed the room.

In his previous experiments along these lines, the experience was made as immersive as possible, using a 66-inch diagonal screen the participants sat very close to. The new experiment used only 17-inch monitors, to see if what Radvansky calls the “location-updating effect” depends on how immersive the experience is. Apparently, it does not.

In the second experiment, Radvansky for the first time tested the effect in the real world, to see if it was just an artifact of a sensory-impoverished virtual world. To make sure participants couldn’t see what they were carrying or had set down, the objects were concealed in black boxes. Sure enough, walking through a doorway increased forgetfulness.

In the third experiment, once more in the virtual environment, participants passed through several rooms but ended up in the same room they had started in, to see if the ability to remember is linked to the environment in which a decision is made. The experiment showed no improvements in memory upon returning to the original room.

All of this supports the “event horizon model of event cognition and memory” that Radvansky and his colleagues have been developing. The theory holds that our brains segment events into a series of “event models” that are processed one at a time. Passing through a doorway *an “event boundary”) triggers the formation of a new event model: and information in the current event model takes precedence over the previous event model. When the brain needs to retrieve information for two event models at once, as when it is called upon to remember an object it incorporated into a previous event model but cannot now see, that “competitive retrieval” leads to “retrieval interference”–i.e., forgetfulness.

Frankly, I find not only reassuring, but inspiring. So inspiring, I think I’ll write a sequel to Nancy Ford and Gretchen Cryer’s off-Broadway musical I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking it on the Road.

I’ll call it I Finally Got My Act Together But I Forgot Where I Left It.

(Sorry, no photo: I forgot.)