Topic: Recycling

Taylor Sparks and Andrew Falkowski speak with University of Arizona researcher Marat Latypov about aluminium's transition from a scarce, expensive metal to a widely used engineering material. They discuss extraction, corrosion resistance, precipitation hardening, electrical wiring and automotive applications, and the technical difficulties of recycling mixed scrap.

In the adult brain, synapses are tightly enwrapped by lattices of extracellular matrix that consist of extremely long-lived molecules. These lattices are deemed to stabilize synapses, restrict the reorganization of their transmission machinery, and prevent them from undergoing structural or morphological changes. At the same time, they are expected to retain some degree of flexibility to permit occasional events of synaptic plasticity. The recent understanding that structural changes to synapses are significantly more frequent than previously assumed (occurring even on a timescale of minutes)