Even in patients with advanced Alzheimer’s Disease, familiar music from long ago can awaken memories and prompt interactive behaviors. But how does that happen? A U.C. Davis researcher is working to unravel the neural mechanisms within the brain.

Much of the research that has been done so far on how music stimulates the brain has used musical samples that are not particularly stimulating. Dr. Petr Janata, associate professor of Psychology at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain, says that a new round of studies should work with recognizable samples, and could discover that the brain encodes different types of music in different ways or areas.

That’s one area of research that Janata hopes to explore himself, along with expanding the studies he’s done on Alzheimer’s patients to include different age groups.

Dr. Peter Janata will discuss his research into “Music, Memories and the Brain"  in a public presentation Friday, Feb. 19 at 8 pm in the Glaser Center in Santa Rosa, a benefit event for the Sonoma County Bach Society.

You can read more about research into the associations between music, memory and Alzheimer's Disease in this Wall Street Journal article.

While the major automakers are getting ready to roll out the next generation of electric cars, a North Bay company is demonstrating how that technology could be applied to such utilitarian vehicles as mail trucks.

Zap—the name is an acronym for “Zero Air Pollution”— recognizes that they are not positioned to compete with major American and international carmakers who are readying electric models for the broad consumer market. But company founder Gary Starr says they are setting their sights on a specific sort of vehicle, and the mail truck prototype is a strong step in that direction.

Zap founder Gary Starr (right) explains the mail truck  gas-to-electric conversion project to North Bay Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey at the company's Santa Rosa workshop on Tuesday, as CEO Steve Schneider (left) looks on. The array of lithium batteries that will power the vehicle instead of a gasoline engine are on the platform in the foreground. (Photo by Margot Duane)

Earthquake researchers are turning to a new tool to help them quickly gauge the location and severity of newly occurring temblors—Twitter.

The USGS has developed a prototype application to search and capture Twitter feeds that make reference to earthquakes, according to Paul Earle, at the agency’s Earthquake Information Center in Colorado. But it’s still in the beta testing mode.

Longer term plans for making use of the quake-related tweets may include publishing maps showing where they originated, but Earle says that’s still well off into the future.

Still, as the graphic below shows, there is strong evidence already available to suggest that there will be plenty of content for the USGS program to work with as soon as it is fully operational.

Electrons move faster than earthquakes, giving new automated alert systems a few key seconds to warn outlying areas that some shaking is on the way.

This project is moving forward as quickly as possible, says Doug Given, but to be fully effective it requires the installation of many more sensors along the biggest known fault lines.

In setting all this up, priority has been given to the San Andreas Fault, one of the longest and most active in all of California.

Read more here about plans for broadcasting earthquake alerts to cell phones in Japan.