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Like many diet-based internet trends, 'fibremaxxing' takes nutrition to an extreme that your microbiome might not thank you for

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Houston, we have a homicide

Recall is a bit like that game at the fun fair, the one where little yellow ducks bob around in the water and you have to fish them out with a flimsy rod. Our current understanding of memory and forgetfulness is that, to a degree, you don’t actually lose your memories: it just gets harder to fish them out. Once you encode something to your brain, it pretty much remains there, you just need the right hook – psychologists call them cues – to extract the memory. It could be a smell, a song, even a word that can tug the memory and haul it directly into the present. Which is all to say that remembering everything is getting harder as we get older. But there are ways we can tend to our memory to keep it working well, which is where Christian Jarrett, our psychology expert, steps in for this issue.

You probably still wouldn’t want to come face to face with them, though

The results could uncover new ways to delay or prevent dementia

Primate society is less patriarchal than we thought

Could we find a volume control for intrusive thoughts about food?

At the border between Earth's core and the mantle above, scientists are discovering a hidden world