New generation of Web sites for travel planning

-by Associated Press

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Sure, you can go online to one of the biggies like Orbitz, Expedia and Travelocity for hotel, rental car and air fare. But there's a whole new collection of Web sites for savvy travelers. Some are aggregators, following the successful model of Kayak.com, which pulls data from a variety of sources so you can compare airfares. Others combine social networking and consumer reviews, such as VibeAgent.com. Some are improved versions of old favorites, like OrbitzTLC Traveler Update, which allows travelers to share information about conditions at more than 40 airports in the U.S.
Here is a guide to some of the new or reincarnated sites, with one important caveat: Some of these sites do not yet offer the comprehensive database of reviews and information available on older sites like TripAdvisor. So don't be surprised to find minimal listings and reviews for some destinations, especially obscure ones, as you explore what's new in the next generation of travel Web sites.
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boo.com (no connection to the defunct fashion Web site): Offers travel reviews from consumers, search capabilities for 2,500 destinations in 170 countries, comparison hotel prices, and booking through boo or hotel Web sites. Includes restaurants, bars and other interesting things to do in chosen destinations.
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vayama.com: An online booking agency for international air travel with flight and fare options to about 190 countries. Allows travelers to enter preferences for connecting airports and travel time. Also has information about obtaining visas, passports and immunizations.
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VibeAgent.com: Combines user-generated reviews, meta-search capabilities, and social networking (think TripAdvisor plus Kayak plus Facebook) for personalized hotel recommendations and booking at the best prices. Personalizes hotel searches via three categories: ''Ambience,'' ''Activities,'' and ''Recommended For,'' such as a romantic hotel near the beach for gays and lesbians. Users can create custom groups, or become members of existing groups, such as marathon travelers, to exchange stories, tips and recommendations. Connects you to the Web site with the best price for booking from among 120,000 hotels.
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YELLOWPAGES.travel: Searches up to 12 travel Web sites, including Orbitz, Kayak, Expedia and SideStep. Users click on each site's logo at the top of the page for the results. SearchBoth.com, a subsidiary of YELLOWPAGES.travel, allows users to search two travel sites at the same time and places the results from the sites on a split screen.
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ProfessionalTravelGuide.com: Offers reviews of hotels and restaurants from professionals - journalists and expert reviewers from the travel industry - including insider tips and specific, detailed information about more than 159,000 hotels. These reviews are more like what you would find in a guidebook than in an anecdotal consumer review. Also has a customized guide for users who are traveling to several cities.
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yapta।com: Stands for Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant. Enables travelers to tag flights from several airlines, including American, United, Delta and Continental, and alerts them when the fare drops. But unlike farecast.com, which predicts whether prices are rising or dropping, yapta can continue tracking prices even after you purchase the ticket. If the price drops below what you paid, you may be eligible for a refund or credit from the airline. (Other rules may apply - for example, some airlines charge a re-booking fee to capture the travel credit, so check the details.)

TripIt.com: Organizes travel plans into one master online itinerary. Forward flight, hotel, rental car, and other confirmations to an e-mail account, and TripIt will e-mail travelers with the link so they can see and manage the itinerary. Includes weather, maps and city guides. Users can customize the itinerary with additional information, such as directions to a restaurant or tourist attraction.
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Orbitz.com: Offers a new social networking component -- OrbitzTLC Traveler Update -- with real-time updates from travelers about security wait times, traffic and parking, taxis, etc. at more than 40 airports. Travelers can post the information on the Web site or send a text message. Orbitz encourages people to send information by giving out perks to people who send in tips and updates, such as a free pair of airline tickets.
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BestTripChoices.com: Matches travel personalities with best destinations. Travelers take a test and are classified into one of six travel personalities, ranging from ''Venturers,'' people who are extreme risk takers, to ''Authentics,'' people who want a relaxing, lazy vacation. The site recommends travel destinations based on the results. The destinations have been rated by travelers with similar personalities who have visited those places.
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fabsearch.com: For the fashion-conscious traveler. Fabsearch features blurbs on hip restaurants and trendy hotels from media mentions in sources ranging from Vogue and Town and Country magazine to DailyCandy.com, the Financial Times and Wallpaper. Saves the mentions in a ''my clippings'' file.
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Yahoo! Trip Planner (travel.yahoo.com): Helps travelers create a personalized guide for an upcoming trip, with information on hotels, attractions and restaurants, and share the details of their trip with friends and other travelers. Coming soon: Yahoo! Travel will roll out a revamped version of My Travel with an interactive world map that will allow travelers to mark the places they have been and the places they want to go and connect users with others who share similar travel interests.
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americanexpress.com: Click on Travel, then Local Color, a one-stop shop for travel information. Combines Lonely Planet Guides, IgoUgo reviews and Travel + Leisure magazine articles to give travelers ''local color'' about a place. (Travel + Leisure is published by American Express Publishing Corporation).
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travelocity.roadtripwizard.com: Helps travelers plan U.S. road trips, with maps and step-by-step directions. The site gives the 411 on shopping, restaurants, festivals and other attractions, with directions on how to get there. Online booking of air, car, hotels and attractions is provided through Travelocity Partner Network.
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cfares।com: Bills itself as the Costco of travel. Searches airline and travel Web sites. Users can purchase a platinum membership for $50 a year, which provides access to the site's best priced wholesale fares and special fares from the airlines.

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Gore goes green computing ...

-by AP

Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Vice President Al Gore announced Monday he's joining Silicon Valley's most prestigious venture capital firm to guide investments that help combat global warming.

Gore, an environmental activist who won an Academy Award for his global warming documentary ''An Inconvenient Truth,'' joins Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as it and dozens of other venture firms headquartered in Silicon Valley expand beyond software, computer hardware, the Internet and biotechnology to so-called ''clean-tech'' investments worldwide.
Gore is expected to be a high-profile, active partner at Kleiner Perkins. He's already a senior adviser to Google Inc. and a member of the board at Apple Inc. Alliance for Climate Protection, the advocacy group he co-founded, is based in Palo Alto.
Also Monday, Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr announced he's joining the advisory board of Generation Investment Management, the $1 billion investment firm that Gore founded with David Blood, who previously managed $325 billion in assets out of Goldman Sachs' London office. Doerr is one of Silicon Valley's most outspoken clean-tech advocates.
Clean technology encompasses alternative fuels, water purification, renewable energy and recycling programs and other eco-friendly initiatives, as well as products ranging from electric cars to microbes that search for oil in seemingly tapped-out wells.
North American and European venture capitalists invested $1.9 billion in clean-tech companies in the first half of 2007, a 10 percent increase from the first half 2006, according to Ann Arbor, Mich.-based trade group Cleantech Network.
Last year, Menlo Park-based Kleiner Perkins earmarked $100 million of its $600 million investment fund to startups that work on reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The firm expects to dedicate one-third of new funding to clean tech by 2009.
In 2005, Kleiner Perkins named former Secretary of State Colin Powell a ''strategic limited partner,'' but the moderate Republican hasn't played a prominent role in the firm's affairs.
Gore said in a statement that he'll donate 100 percent of his salary as a Kleiner Perkins partner to the Alliance for Climate Protection, which focuses on accelerating policy solutions to the climate crisis.
For years, Gore, 59, has been good friends with Doerr, a former Intel salesman who became a billionaire thanks to early investments in startups such as Netscape Communications, Amazon.com Inc. and Google.
They palled around together so much in the 1990s that fellow venture capitalist and former InfoWorld editor Stewart Alsop II created spoof political buttons that said ''Gore and Doerr in 2004.''

Bill Gates's email: The Age of Software-Powered Communications

-by Bill Gates
Tue, 16 Oct 2007






If you've been in the work force for 20 years or more, you can remember a time when the pace of business-and life in general-was quite a bit slower than it is today. Back then we read newspapers and magazines and watched the network news to stay informed. Faxes were just becoming a common way to share written business information. A phone call might elicit a busy signal or no one would answer at all. In those days, no one expected to send documents to coworkers on the other side of the globe instantly, collaborate in real-time with colleagues in distant cities, or share photographs the very day they were taken.
These and similar advances have delivered remarkable results. The ability to access and share information instantly and communicate in ways that transcend the boundaries of time and distance has given rise to an era of unprecedented productivity and innovation that has created new economic opportunities for hundreds of millions of people around the world and paved the way for global economic growth that is unparalleled in human history.
But few people would argue that there is no room for improvement. Although we have once-unimaginable access to people and information, we struggle today to keep track of emails and phone calls across multiple inboxes, devices, and phone numbers; to remember a growing number of passwords; and to synchronize contacts, appointments, and data between desktop PCs and mobile devices. The fact is that the proliferation of communications options has become a burden that often makes it more difficult to reach people than it used to be, rather than easier.
In 2006, I wrote about how unified communications innovations were already beginning to transform the way we communicate at work. Because you are a subscriber to executive emails from Microsoft, I want to provide you with an update on the progress we're making toward achieving our vision for unified communications. I also want to share my thoughts on how rapid advances in hardware, networks, and the software that powers them are laying the foundation for groundbreaking innovations in communications technology. These innovations will revolutionize the way we share information and experiences with the people who are important to us at work and at home, and help make it possible to put the power of digital technology in the hands of billions of people around the globe who have yet to reap the benefits of the knowledge economy.

Moving Beyond Disconnected Communications

A fundamental reason that communicating is still so complex is the fact that the way we communicate is still bound by devices. In the office, we use a work phone with one number. Then we ask people to call us back on a mobile device using another number when we are on the go, or reach us on our home phone with yet another number. And we have different identities and passwords for our work and home email accounts, and for instant messaging.
This will change in the very near future. As more and more of our communications and entertainment is transmitted over the Internet thanks to email, instant messaging, video conferencing, and the emergence of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), and other protocols, a new wave of software-driven innovations will eliminate the boundaries between the various modes of communications we use throughout the day. Soon, you'll have a single identity that spans all of the ways people can reach you, and you'll be able to move a conversation seamlessly between voice, text, and video and from one device to another as your location and information sharing needs change. You'll also have more control over how you can be reached and by whom: when you are busy, the software on the device at hand will know whether you can be interrupted, based on what you are doing and who is trying to reach you.
One of the best examples of how communication is changing-and how technology is integrating the way people share experiences across devices-starts in the world of video games. With Xbox Live, the online gaming and entertainment network for Xbox 360, people can play games with friends who are in distant locations. Xbox Live also provides a comprehensive range of communications options including video chat and instant messaging, as well as text, voice, and picture messaging, all seamlessly integrated into the video game experience. With more than 7 million subscribers, Xbox Live is quickly redefining the way people access entertainment of all kinds. And it is enabling them to share experiences with each other in real time without being constrained by the limits of location.
But that's just the start. We recently launched Games for Windows - Live, which links Xbox 360 gamers with the millions of people who play games on their PCs. Now, Windows and Xbox 360 video game players can compete and communicate with each other without being constrained by the limits of devices.
The communications expectations that young people-and anybody else who has adopted the latest digital communications tools-bring to the workplace are already changing how we do business. To them, the desk phone is an anachronism that lacks the flexibility and range of capabilities that their mobile device can provide. A generation that grew up on text messaging is driving the rapid adoption of instant messaging as a standard business communications tool. Accustomed to forming ad hoc virtual communities, they want tools that facilitate the creation of virtual workgroups. Used to collecting and storing information online, they look for team Web sites, Wikis, and other digital ways to create and share information.
All of these expectations are prompting companies to adapt by implementing new communications strategies and technologies. Those that do are already seeing a wide range of benefits including significant cost savings and important productivity gains. At Microsoft, for example, we replaced our old voice mail system with Exchange Server 2007 unified messaging, a move that is saving the company $5 million annually by lowering hardware and maintenance costs. More importantly, Exchange Server 2007 provides a software solution that enables integration of traditional telephone infrastructure and VoIP with corporate messaging, calendaring, and directories. This convergence of telephony and messaging increases employee productivity and decreases the administrative workload for IT professionals.

The Next Wave of Communications Technologies

Today in San Francisco, Microsoft is launching the next wave of enterprise VoIP and unified communications products for business. Among the products we'll launch are Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, which bring together a broad range of communications options including voice, instant messaging, and video into a single, consistent experience. Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator make it easier for employees to communicate and collaborate with each other in real-time by letting them see at a glance if the people they want to contact are available. They will also be able to initiate a conversation by email, voice, video, or instant messaging from within Microsoft Office system applications, making communication and collaboration an integral part of day-to-day work processes, rather than an interruption. In addition, when they use the new version of Office Communicator Mobile that is launching today, they will be able to stay connected using Windows Mobile-powered devices.
We're also announcing the availability of Microsoft RoundTable, an advanced video and VoIP conferencing device that provides a 360-degree view of a meeting room, along with wideband audio and video that tracks the flow of conversation between multiple speakers. With RoundTable and Office Live Meeting or Office Communications Server, meeting participants in different locations will be able to converse and share information as if they were in the same room. RoundTable also enables companies to record meetings for later use.
All of these products are important steps toward achieving our long-term vision for streamlined, integrated communications that will enable people to be more productive, more creative, and to stay in touch more easily without being limited by the device they have at hand or the network they are connected to.

A Foundation for Future Innovation

It would be hard to overstate the magnitude of the changes that are coming. Standardized, software-powered communications technologies will be the catalyst for the convergence of voice, video, text, applications, information, and transactions, making it possible to create a seamless communications continuum that extends across people's work and home lives. This will provide the foundation for new products, services, and capabilities that will change the world in profound and often unexpected ways.
This will happen not only in developed countries where access to digital technology is the norm, but also in emerging economies around the world. Currently, about 1 billion of us have a PC, just a fraction of the world's 6 billion people. As we make technology more accessible and simpler to use-often in the form of affordable mobile devices-we can extend new social and economic opportunities to hundreds of millions of people who have never been able to participate in the global knowledge economy. And as more and more of the world's people are empowered to use their ideas, talents, and hard work to the fullest, the results will be new innovations that make everyone's lives richer, more productive, and more fulfilling.

The future of facebook: Mark Zuckerberg talked to TIME

Caption: Facebook hype

Caption: Mark Zuckerberg speaking.

-by Laura Locke


In his first interview with TIME, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down with reporter Laura Locke to talk about Facebook's rapid growth spurt, IPO rumors, future plans and the pressures of being a 23-year-old CEO in Silicon Valley.

TIME: Facebook is undergoing a huge period of growth. With more than 150,000 new users signing up daily, it is growing three times as fast as rival MySpace. What do you attribute that spike to?

Zuckerberg: For a while we actually constrained our growth. We made it so that only people in college could sign up. Initially it was only available to people at Harvard, where I was at college. We rolled it out to all the colleges, all the high schools, then a bunch of companies could sign up, and now everyone can sign up. It may seem like the growth is really accelerating at a crazy rate, but it's actually been growing and doubling about once every six months for quite a while.

TIME: Is Facebook's popularity connected to its focus on authenticity? On your site, misrepresentation of your real self is a violation of company policy.

Zuckerberg: That's the critical part of it. Our whole theory is that people have real connections in the world. People communicate most naturally and effectively with their friends and the people around them. What we figured is that if we could model what those connections were, [we could] provide that information to a set of applications through which people want to share information, photos or videos or events. But that only works if those relationships are real. That's a really big difference between Facebook and a lot of other sites. We're not thinking about ourselves as a community — we're not trying to build a community — we're not trying to make new connections.

TIME: Why do you describe Facebook as a "social utility" rather than a "social network?"

Zuckerberg: I think there's confusion around what the point of social networks is. A lot of different companies characterized as social networks have different goals — some serve the function of business networking, some are media portals. What we're trying to do is just make it really efficient for people to communicate, get information and share information. We always try to emphasize the utility component.

TIME: In September you rebuffed Yahoo's offer to buy Facebook for nearly $1 billion. Before that, Viacom put up a $750 million bid. And about two months ago you clearly said Facebook would stay independent. Is that still the plan?

Zuckerberg: That has always been the plan. As a company we're very focused on what we're building and not as focused on the exit. We just believe that we're adding a certain amount of value to people's lives if we build a very good product. That's the reason why more than half of our users use the product every day — it's a more efficient way for them to communicate with their friends and get information about the people around them than anything else they can do. We're not really looking to sell the company. We're not looking to IPO anytime soon. It's just not the core focus of the company.

TIME: So, if Facebook isn't for sale and there's no IPO in the works, how do you intend to satisfy your investors who put a total of $38 million into the company?

Zuckerberg: Well, they're actually really supportive of this. What they want is to build a really great company, too. And if you think about the timeframe over which this has happened — we took our venture round from Accel Partners just about two years ago — they're not in a rush. We have plenty of time to build something good.

TIME: Facebook is looking to hire a stock administrator, isn't that a signal you're preparing for an IPO?

Zuckerberg: Well, no. [Pause.] I mean, we grant options to all of our employees. At this point we have more than 250. It's a core part of compensation, so you want to make sure you get it right for people. At some point in the future, if we get a chance to go down that [IPO] path, it will be valuable to have that — it's a part of building out the company. I think it's funny that people are paying so much attention to that.

TIME: The frenzy surrounding Facebook seems to have intensified quite dramatically over the past several months. What do you think is behind the company's newfound cachet?

Zuckerberg: I think the most recent surge, at least in the press, is around the launch of Facebook Platform. For the first time we're allowing developers who don't work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That's a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application. That provides an opportunity for them, it provides an opportunity for people who want to make money by investing in those companies, and I think that's something that's pretty exciting to the business community. It's also really exciting to our users because it means that a whole new variety of services are going to be made available.

TIME: What's your grand plan for the company? How do you see it evolving over the next three to five years?

Zuckerberg: It's tough to say, exactly, what things will look like in three to five years, but there's a lot of work to do in just moving along the path that we've already set out. Right now we have 30 million active users on Facebook. There's a lot more to go. And there a lot of different applications that are going to be developed to allow people to share information in different ways. I would expect the user base will grow [and there will be] more ways for advertisers to reach people and communicate in a very natural way, just like users communicate with each other. All these things will just get more and more evolved.

TIME: Beyond Facebook's exclusive advertising deal with Microsoft, which gives the software giant the right to sell ads on the site, what are some of your ideas about monetizing your 30 million users?

Zuckerberg: Advertising works most effectively when it's in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook — they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing —so there's really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that. And I think we'll see more in the next couple months or years on that.

TIME: With more than 40 billion page views every month, Facebook is the sixth most trafficked site in the U.S., and the top photo-sharing site. What are your international expansion plans?

Zuckerberg: Right now a lot of our growth is happening internationally. We have more than 10% or 15% of the population of Canada on the site. The U.K. has a huge user base. We haven't translated the site yet, but that's something we're working on and it should be done soon. What we're doing is pretty broadly applicable to people in all different age groups and demographics and places around the world.

TIME: You recently took off for a summer vacation, what did you do?
Zuckerberg: Hang out with my family.

TIME: What's a typical day like for the guy who founded Facebook in his Harvard dorm room just three years ago before becoming a full-time entrepreneur?

Zuckerberg: I wake up in the morning, I walk to work because I live four blocks from one of our offices, and I work, meet with people, and discuss things all day, and then I go home and go to sleep. I don't have an alarm clock. If someone needs to wake me up, then I have my BlackBerry next to me.

TIME: You're a 23-year-old Silicon Valley CEO. How do you deal with all pressures that come along with running a hyper-fast paced, high-profile technology company?

Zuckerberg: I was watching an interview with Steve Jobs the other day, in which he said that 'In order to be doing something like this, you have to really, really like what you're doing, because otherwise it just doesn't make sense.' The demands and the amount of work that it takes to put something like [Facebook] into place, it's just so much that if you weren't completely into what you were doing and you didn't think it was an important thing, then it would be irrational to spend that much time on it. Part of the reason why this is fun is because we've managed to build a team of really smart people who come from different backgrounds and have different experiences and think in different ways. People constantly try to put us in a bucket: are we trying to sell the company? What are we trying to do? What is the business strategy? People are often more interested in why we're hiring a stock-options administrator. Whereas for me and a lot of people around me, that's not really what we focus on. We're just focused on building things.

Global warming: Losing Bangladesh, by degrees

Caption:
My country Bangladesh's Map, India is around three sides, Burma is in East South corner, Bay of Bengal is in South. One of the new 7 wonders 'Cox's Bazar' the largest sea beach of the universe is seen in the map.

-by Tahmima Anam
Tahmima Anam is the author of the novel 'A Golden Age'. This piece was first published in The New York Times.




Imagine, if you will, a country marooned between a snowy mountain range and a churning sea. The country is small, a thumbprint on a vast continent. It holds the youngest and largest delta in the world. This means the landscape is fickle, the rivers often shifting and swallowing giant swaths of land.
It is cleaved by two of the world's mightiest rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. They perform vanishing acts and conjuring tricks. One day your house is dry and the chilies are airing in the courtyard. The next it has disappeared altogether. You do not want to rebuild so close to the river, but you do: there is no space; the country is full.
For whatever else it strains to hold, it is the crush of humanity that makes Bangladesh what it is: a calamitous country, a country so full of people that every slight shift in circumstance has dire consequences. The weather does not have to be extreme. It has only to be intemperate, and the country does the rest.
How does such a small place hold so much? You worry that it will burst. But your worry is misplaced. You should worry that it will sink. For as the sea level rises, its waters will flow upward like fingers into a glove, turning the sweet river water into salt. The salt will destroy the crops and kill the fish and raze the forests. At the same time, the Himalayan peaks will melt, and they, too, will flow into the country.
The rising sea and the melting mountains will meet on this tiny patch of the world, and the people who strain at its seams will drown with it, or be blown away to distant shores, casualties and refugees by the millions.
Here in the capital, winter is a festive season. The cool weather allows women to wear their heaviest saris and wrap thick twists of gold around their necks. There is little rain; the ground is solid -- good for high heels. Buildings across the city are draped with strings of lights. You can buy hot, crunchy jilapis by the roadside; the markets are full of winter vegetables.
One day this winter, I landed at Dhaka airport just before dawn. The fog that had delayed my flight clung to the ground and looked like snow; as it lifted, a milky haze took its place. On the way home I saw groups of men huddled over coal fires by the side of the road.
They wore puffy jackets and acrylic sweaters, castoffs from the sweatshops that dot the highways between the airport and the city. When they blew on their hands, I saw clouds whistling out of their mouths. Their heads were wrapped in shawls and towels and mosquito nets. The sun did not make an appearance until noon that day, and even then it was only a heatless, watery orb.
In the evening I went to the other side of town, where my uncles live by the long, pencil-shaped Dhanmondi Lake. I watched from the window as the lake appeared to go still, as though deciding whether it was cold enough to freeze over, and there were tiny dots of fish moving toward the shore, not swimming but belly up, drowned.
According to the United Nations, the temperatures this winter in some parts of Bangladesh were the coldest in 38 years. The last time it was this cold, Bangladesh was called East Pakistan. Looked at another way, however, the mean temperature was only two degrees below the average for January.
Yet in a country so precariously balanced, two degrees meant the difference between life and death. In the districts of Rajshahi, Nilphamari, Srimangal and Gaibandha, people died of the cold because they had no protection against the weather, no walls between them and the elements -- not a long sleeve or a sock.
Only two degrees, but instead of enjoying their jilapis and weddings and cauliflower, 134 people died. A mere two-degree rise in the global climate will cause large tracts of the delta to disappear, and two degrees after that, the rivers will be wider than the plains, and two degrees after that, the water will have swallowed Bangladesh.
Two degrees either way for this country is not two degrees: it is catastrophe itself, borne on the waves of our warming world.

MIT study:Maturity brings richer memories

-by Cathryn M. Delude

News Office Correspondent, August 5, 2007

MIT neuroscientists exploring how memory formation differs between children and adults have found that although the two groups have much in common, maturity brings richer memories.
In the August 5 advance online edition of Nature Neuroscience, the MIT team reports that children rival adults in forming basic memories, but adults do better at remembering the rich, contextual details of that information. The MIT study provides new insights into how children learn that are not only theoretically important, but could also inform practical learning in everyday settings.
The ability to remember factual information - who, what, where, when - emerges gradually during childhood, and plays a critical role in education. The brain systems underlying it have been extensively studied in adults, but until now little was known about how they mature during child development.
The MIT study indicates that a more developed prefrontal cortex (PFC) - an area of the brain long associated with higher-order thinking, planning, and reasoning -- may be responsible for creating richer memories in adults.
"Activation in the PFC follows an upward slope with age in contextual memories. The older the subjects, the more powerful the activation in that area," explains senior author John Gabrieli of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.
"That makes sense, because there's been a convergence of evidence that the PFC develops later than other brain regions, both functionally and structurally.... But this is the first study that asks how this area matures and contributes to learning."
For the study, Noa Ofen, a postdoctoral associate in Gabrieli's lab, forewarned 49 healthy volunteers ranging in age from eight to 24 that they would be tested on their recognition of 250 common scenes, such as a kitchen, shown to them as they lay in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. She recorded their brain responses as the volunteers tried to commit each picture to memory. Shortly after the volunteers left the scanner, she showed them twice as many scenes. Had they seen each one before, and if so, how vividly did they recall the scene?
Ofen then went back to the brain activation patterns. In both children and adults, several areas in the PFC and the medial temporal lobe (MTL) showed higher activation at the time when subjects studied a scene they would later remember. No age-related differences showed up in the activation patterns of the MTL regions in children and adults, but differences did appear in the PFC when looking at pictures that were later correctly recognized.
Those age-related differences related to the quality of the volunteers' memories. The older the volunteers, the more frequently their correct answers were enriched with contextual detail. Going back to the brain scans, Ofen found that the enriched memories also correlated with more intense activation in a specific region of the PFC.
"We found no change with age for memories without context," Ofen explains. "All the maturation is in memories with context. Our findings suggest that as we mature, we are able to create more contextually rich memories, and that ability evolves with a more mature PFC."
Susan Whitefield-Gabrieli, a research associate at MIT's McGovern Institute, contributed to this research, in addition to scientists from Harvard University, New York University, and the University of California, Berkeley.
"This study takes an important step forward in our understanding of the neural basis of memory development," comments Daniel Schacter, an expert on memory at Harvard University who was not associated with the study.The study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.

-End.