Scientists have long held that seven items—be they images, numbers, or tasks—was the best a brain could manage to hold at once, but LiveScience points out that, without specific practice, the best-case scenario for most people is three or four. It's a good explanation why phone numbers are written and spoken as three and four-digit groups, and a better reminder that if you've got a lot to do or remember, writing it down is probably the only way to hit 100 percent. What's your personal limit on non-practiced memory? How do you break up tasks and must-remember items into small groups for better recall? Share your successes in the comments, and check out our top 10 memory hacks for some pointers on augmenting your grey matter's somewhat paltry RAM.

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Wired science reporter Alexis Madrigal is doing an interesting experiment into using social networking technology to aid in the creation and formation of news stories. Alexis will be posting story ideas and updates on Twitter, as well as sharing blogrolls via Google Reader, with the aim of letting readers "chime in with suggestions, new ideas, and story angles" which they hope will help readers get the kind of news they're interested in.
It's a nice proposition for readers who are keen to share their ideas and tips, but that's not really so new. Most news outlets rely on user feedback and tips for shaping the direction they go in. But given that Alexis makes it clear in the comments on that article that Wired is interested in breaking news, I wonder how they plan on balancing this transparency with the need for keeping things quiet until they're ready to publish and break a news story. I'll be watching with interest. :)

My Outboard Brain is Your Chance to Shape News (Wired)

Beer batteries create energy from bacteria that feed on waste water. The technical term for them is "microbial fuel cells" (MFCs), and they earned the nickname beer batteries because beer company Fosters has funded the development of MFCs in Australia that run on waste water produced by the beer-making process. The best part about beer batteries, though, is that you can make them at home, based on instructions developed by a high school student named Abbie Groff. She won an international science fair prize for her work. Image by Abbie Groff.

Apparently the tradition of great engineers not having college degrees goes back 2,500 years. Harvard classics researcher Mark Schiefsky has shown that many great technical innovations of antiquity, such as the balance and steelyard, were created by craftspeople with no theoretical training in mathematics. A steelyard is a balance with unequal arms, whose operation is based on ancient mathematician Archimedes' law of the lever. Schiefsky poo-poos the idea that you need a fancy law to make a steelyard, and in fact has proven that steelyards were in use long before Archimedes explained it.

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With fears of an avian flu pandemic on the rise, a group at Georgia Tech has made it easy for researchers in the field to identify and analyze the virus using nothing more than a laptop and a small suitcase-sized biosensor (demonstrated by scientist Jie Xu at left). Usually it takes several hours in a wet lab to identify strains of avian flu, but the new biosensor works in minutes. Now researchers can rapidly determine whether a sick bird is carrying the dangerous H5N1 strain of the virus that has occasionally jumped to humans.

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