“This is the first real direct insight into how the brain, on a cellular level, changes the strength of its connections during sleep,” Frank says.

According to Frank, the brain is fundamentally different– in terms of biochemical, enzymatic changes– when sleeping than when awake. “To our amazement, we found that these enzymes never really turned on until the animal had a chance to sleep,” Frank explains, “As soon as the animal had a chance to sleep, we saw all the machinery of memory start to engage.”

This research focuses on how memories are formed or stored, not how they are recalled. But if you want to correctly recall Spanish vocabulary, it needs to be stored first. So, if you want to remember what you’re working to learn, sleep on it.

Source: Penn Study Shows Why Sleep is Needed to Form Memories

Texans whose homes will be bulldozed and whose properties will be decimated to make way for the 18 foot steel and concrete border fence want to know why the fence will skip the properties of the rich and connected.

From the Texas Observer:

Along the border, preliminary plans for fencing seem to target landowners of modest means and cities and public institutions such as the University of Texas at Brownsville, which rely on the federal government to pay their bills.

Local landowners realized that the fence’s location had everything to do with politics and private profit, and nothing to do with stopping illegal immigration.

A 2007 congressional report estimates the cost of maintaining and building the fence could be as much as $49 billion over its expected 25-year life span.

“They are just going to push this problem on the next administration, and nobody is going to talk about immigration reform, and that’s the illness,” Foster says. “The wall is a Band-Aid on the problem. And to blow $49 billion and not walk away with a secure border—that’s a travesty.”

Without even getting into the pros and cons of the fence, and superior solutions to the illegal immigration problem, my question is: How will 370 miles of fence (what they’re planning to build) along a 1900+ mile border increase security?

Read the full story. Photo credit: june+raul.

José Saramago is a Portuguese writer who has won the Nobel prize and has just enraged his fellow countryfolk with his ideas about merging Portugal with Spain. He’s not just shooting from the hip. He has obviously spent some time thinking this through and claims that Portugal could be just another one of Spain’s autonomous regions, just like Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque country.

I honestly don’t see this happening, but obviously some people are taking him seriously.

Here are a couple of pictures from Mexico.

This is a breaker switch that was in the open air on the outside of a house. Luckily it was up high enough that kids couldn’t reach it. Note the old round screw-in fuses.

Light switches often have an electrical outlet too. The outlets are very rarely polarized and do not have the third ground plug that we’re used to in the States. Note also the wire coming out from behind the cover.

So you want to see some of these newly accepted words?

ABS, as in brakes
abducir, to abduct
abrefácil, “easy-to-open”
acoso moral,
acoso psicológico, phychological harrassment
amniocentesis
autogobierno, self-government
bulímico, bulimic, as in the eating disorder
bungaló, what other than a bungalow
castrante, this doesn’t sound very healthy, but it actually doesn’t have anything to do with the verb “castrate”, it’s used to refer to a dominating woman.
chat, do I need to explain?
cuentarrevoluciones, that sounds kind of like a tachometer
digitalización, a cognate
droga de diseño, designer drugs- BTW, what are designer drugs anyway?
gol de oro, a really good goal?
internet, hmmm the tubes
montenegrino, of or relating to the Republic of Montenegro, a tiny country in Europe
mulá, anyone have any idea of what this is?
pósit, posit or axiom
rap, rap music
reproducción asistida
salvapantallas, computer screensaver
tarifa plana, flat rate
terapia ocupacional, occupational therapy
vaca sagrada, sacred cow
zódiac

It’s nice to see dictionaries become descriptive reflections of natural language change, instead of mandating and trying to control language.

Via these three articles.

Peter Kuper has moved along with his wife and family to Oaxaca, Mexico for a 1 year stay, where a drawn out teacher’s strike has caused mounting conflicts and riots in the colonial city. Here’s a link to some email updates the Kuper has sent out, including what it’s like to live just 10 blocks from where the worst of the riots is. There’s also lots of up-close photos and drawings depicting life in Oaxaca City.

Here’s a current article from “El Universal” in Oaxaca concerning the situation. More can be found on Google news in Spanish.

Update: More information on The Beat.

Here’s the story.

On a concrete and mud street of the small town of Banelos, there appeared a pothole due to heavy rains. Family #1 decided to close the street and fill in the hole. Meanwhile Family #2, whose business involves transporting things by truck, wanted to get their truck out of the blocked-off street.

Their arguing culminated in both sides pulling out firearms to resolve the dispute, including an AR-15 rifle, which according to Wikipedia is a “lightweight, air-cooled, magazine-fed, autoloading centerfire rifle”.

When the smoke cleared, 4 were dead and others injured.

Runner-up in the recent Mexican presidential election, Andrés Manuel López Obrador refuses to give up. Here he’s waving from his tent in Mexico City’s Zócalo plaza.