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.

A new foreign insect pest has been found in a north coast vineyard, and extensive trapping is underway to see how widespread the European Grapevine Moth may already be.

The European Vineyard Moth and the Light Brown Apple Moth have a very similar appearance, which isn’t really surprising. As Lucia Varela, an Integrated Pest Management specialist with the University of California Cooperative Extension, explains, both are members of the family of Tortricid moths, which is well known to California agriculture.

Non-native plants and animals that proliferate outside their usual range are often characterized as “invasive” species. Varela prefers the more neutral term, “exotics” to describe the moth pests, but concedes they may well come to be considered invasive, depending on how much of a threat to the area’s vines they become.

This picture shows two tell-tale signs of the European Vineyard Moth, the white “webbing” between the individual grapes, and the shriveled and wrinkled skin, which indicates that the worm has already eaten its way into the fruit.

For more information about the European Vineyard Moth, go to the UC Davis Integrated Pest Management website.

The Hatian earthquake has left at least half a million survivors displaced and homeless, and as relief efforts continue now, some aid workers worry that the coming hurricane season may compound the disaster.

The enormity of the immediate crisis in Haiti has captured and held the world’s attention for the past two and a half weeks, but Chloe Gans-Ruggebregt, a north coast native who is on the Red Cross health staff in Haiti, is worried that global concern will soon move on to other areas, while  the Hatian people will need years of assistance to recover from the disaster.

Chloe has been living and working in Haiti for the past four year, and her parents visited her there just last summer. They’ve  been talking with her almost daily since the quake, and her father, John Ruggebregt of Santa Rosa, says that for him, those conversations have given the humanitarian crisis an individualized human face.

The local Red Cross office is maintaining a list of events in Sonoma and Mendocino Counties to raise money to support  relief efforts. You can also view a slideshow of Red Cross photographs from Haiti. To make a donation, click here.

When the quake struck, Chloe was more than 100 miles away in rural Haiti. She promptly returned to Port au Prince (where she, too, lived) and emailed her first impressions not long after arriving there:

I was on the fourth floor of the house in Trou du Nord when the earthquake started. It probably lasted about 20 seconds. The whole house was shaking and people started yelling and running outside. There was however no major damage in the NE. The phone promptly went out as did our Internet which relies on the same system.

I drove to PAP [Port au Prince] today thinking that I wouldn't be able to get back just because it had been raining for two weeks in the north and the planes weren't flying. There was no way I nor my driver could have predicted what we would see when we drove into PAP.

We started to see large cracks in the highway about an hour outside PAP and as we got closer and closer the chaos mounted. PAP probably has tens of thousands dead and no aid [organization] can even respond. Matt [Marek, head of the American National Red Cross Haiti delegation] was out with half our team all night and day just giving basic first aid, but the hospitals are closed or full, the government has many dead, the head of the UN is dead and many of the UN are unaccounted for as are six of our staff.

We are sure they are fine but they have no way to communicate and many roads are blocked. I  haven't been home but will go tomorrow to see if my house is still there. As far as I know we will only be able to do first aid but teams are on the way. I am in shock along with the entire city. The city has been reduced to a concrete pile of rubble. Everyone is sleeping outside because they are scared of more.

A unique instance of hands-on philanthropy, Tom Pringle’s Shovel Project is making life a little better for random households around Tijuana, Mexico.

Perhaps surprisingly, Pringle (seen here  in his home workshop) says the germ of the idea for his shovel project was inspired, not by the need or a desire to “make a difference,” but by a high profile public art project.

Tom Pringle will present a slide show and report to the community oh his shovel project at the Peace and Justice Center, 467 Sebastopol Avenue  in Santa Rosa, January 28th at 7 pm.