Despite the fact that people like me - and, possibly, people like you - are under the impression that most of what we think the world needs to know it already knows it seems that this isn’t the case at all.

Apparently there’s absolutely loads of stuff out there just waiting for some egg-head to come along and prod and probe it a bit.

Science Magazine is celebrating its 125th birthday by producing a list of the top 125 questions that science needs to answer. It is, in their words, a ’survey of our scientific ignorance, a broad swath of questions that scientists themselves are asking.’

They divided the questions into two groups: the top 25 and then the next 100.

Here is a couple of the top 25 that caught my eye. You can find the top 25 - with brief accompanying articles - here. Once you’ve answered that lot, here are the next 100. Click on ‘more’, below, for my own comments on a couple of the questions raised…

What Is the Universe Made Of?

Well, that was a surprise one. I thought we knew that. Or, at least, I thought I knew that. It’s hydrogen and helium plus whatever else was added once the stars started baking their own ingredients. Maybe I ought to have told someone this?

Actually, it turns out that, “Ordinary matter and exotic, unknown particles together make up only about 30% of the stuff in the universe; the rest is this mysterious anti-gravity force known as dark energy.”

Oh, yes. Dark matter. I forgot about that…

How Are Memories Stored and Retrieved?

My understanding of memory is that we store events we were party to in our brains as a series of ‘impressions’ provided to us by our senses: events we saw, sounds we heard, emotions we experienced, odours we smelt - plus conclusions or meanings we derived from them. We later reconstruct an earlier situation by recalling these different aspects of the situation. The difference between your recollection and my recollection of the same event will be due to - amongst other reasons - the emphasis you placed on certain details of the event compared with the emphasis I placed on these details. Additionally, the unspoken - but keenly felt - meanings you attached to something that was said or something you witnessed will affect the way you recreate the past event in your mind. If I extracted different meanings from the event at the time I’ll recreate it differently later.

This is the basis of all marriage and is why a husband’s role in life is actually to learn his wife’s method of constructing meaning from events so that he stores it the same way she does. Then, he recollects it similarly and reacts accordingly. I’m more than half-serious about this!

Science magazine’s approach is actually more mechanical; it’s looking at how the brain does what it does rather than probing exactly what it does. As is usual with science, life leaves clues and the scientist must piece them together, Holmes-like, until a concrete theory reveals itself.

An interesting distinction of types of memory is made due to one discovery made in 1957. A patient suffering chronic epilepsy had large chunks of his temporal lobe removed as a last-ditch attempt at a cure. It worked, but the patient, known as H.M., could no longer remember things. And yet:

Given a tricky mirror drawing task, H.M.’s performance improved steadily over 3 days even though he had no memory of his previous practice. Remembering how is not the same as remembering what, as far as the brain is concerned.

What Controls Organ Regeneration?

This struck primarily because of its opening sentence:

Unlike automobiles, humans get along pretty well for most of their lives with their original parts.

I’m not sure if I’m being pedantic here but my understanding is that we replace all the cells in our body annually so, in fact, the liver that’s currently doing in my body whatever it is that livers do is not the same liver that was doing it a year ago. So, really, we don’t use the same parts throughout life.

And ageing, as I - no doubt very imperfectly - understood it is the breakdown in efficiency of this cell replacement process.

Anyway, this article suggests that our healing processes have at least something to do with our ability to regenerate. Disease or damage in humans is dealt with quickly by the body - at a speed that, in fact, leads to the formation of scar tissue. Whereas in animals like the salamander healing is slow but results in pristine quality tissue. The connection between healing and regenerative processes might be a key to one day people being able to “order up replacement parts for themselves, not just their ‘67 Mustangs.”

Heard about this first from Limbic Nutrition by the way….