Chinese researchers have made another new discovery while studying data acquired from China's Zhurong Mars rover, confirming that wind and sand activities on the Martian surface have recorded changes in the ancient Martian environment. The discovery, scientists said, may shed light on predicting future climate changes on Earth.

The research findings have been published online in the science journal Nature on Thursday, the China Lunar Exploration Project (CLEP) said on its official WeChat account on Monday. 

Among planets in the solar system, Mars is considered to be the most similar to Earth. Scientists believe that the current state and evolutionary history of Mars may represent the "future of Earth." Therefore, the study of Martian climate evolution has long been a topic of great interest, and wind and sand activity have shaped the extensive distribution of sand dune features on the Martian surface.

"Wind and sand activities can be said to have recorded the characteristics of the late evolution and recent climate environment of Mars, as well as the process of its climate change. However, due to the lack of detailed and systematic scientific observations in situ and at close range, we still know very little about the process," said Li Chunlai, a research fellow at the National Astronomical Observatory of China, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

In order to address this scientific question, researchers used high-resolution cameras, navigation terrain cameras and multispectral cameras among others on the Zhurong rover to conduct joint remote sensing and close-range investigations in the landing area on the Red Planet. 

Through in-depth analysis, the researchers discovered significant evidence of changes in the wind regime in the Zhurong landing area. 

The evidence shows good consistency with the ice-dust cover layers found in high latitudes on Mars, indicating that the Zhurong landing area may have experienced two major climate stages marked by changes in wind direction, with a nearly 70-degree shift from northeast to northwest. 

The wind-sand accumulation transformed from crescent-shaped bright dunes to longitudinal dark sand ridges.

This climate change occurred approximately 400,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age on Mars, scientists said, according to the CLEP. It is believed to have been caused by variations in the axial tilt of Mars, which resulted in a global climate transition from an ice age to an interglacial period.

Li said that this research has contributed to our understanding of the ancient climate history of Mars, providing a new perspective for the study of Mars' ancient climate and important constraints for global climate simulations on Mars. It may even provide insights for the future climate evolution of Earth, Li said. 

The Chinese Embassy in Pakistan and the Chinese Consulate General in Karachi have strongly condemned an attack on a convoy of Chinese engineers working on a project at Gwadar port, Pakistan on Sunday morning. 

The convoy was ambushed by bombs and gunshots on their way from the airport to the port at 9:17 am Sunday local time, according to a statement released by the Chinese Consulate General in Karachi on Sunday. No injuries or casualties were reported in the attack. 

The convoy of three SUVs and a van, all bulletproof, carried 23 Chinese personnel, the Global Times learned from one of the Chinese personnel. 

An IED exploded during the attack and the van was shot at. A picture obtained by the Global Times shows the bulletproof glass on the window of a van belonging to the Chinese convoy cracked from the attack, and there were bullet holes on the windows. 

All the personnel concerned have been properly relocated, according to the Chinese Embassy in Pakistan.

The Embassy and the Chinese Consulate General in Karachi on Sunday night strongly condemned the act of terrorism, and asked the Pakistani side to severely punish the attackers and to take practical and effective measures to ensure the safety of Chinese nationals, institutions and projects. 

The Consulate General activated the emergency response plan immediately, reminding local Chinese nationals, enterprises and projects to be more vigilant, upgrade security initiatives, prevent security risks, closely monitor the security situation and ensure safety.

The Chinese Embassy and Consulate General urged Chinese nationals in Pakistan to maintain high vigilance, safeguard life and property safety, and strictly control large-scale gathering activities due to the severe security situation. 

China will continue to work with Pakistan to jointly address the threat of terrorism and effectively protect the security of Chinese personnel, institutions and projects in Pakistan, said the embassy in a statement. 

Pakistani security forces killed one terrorist and three others were injured during a security clearance operation in Gwadar, local media outlet Daily Pakistan reported Sunday. After getting intelligence about the presence of militants, security forces cordoned off the area and started a search operation to find other militants, according to Daily Pakistan. 

The Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), a militant separatist group, claimed responsibility for the attack, according to media reports.

Chinese personnel have been targeted by terror attacks by Baloch militant groups many times. 

In April 2022, a terror attack against the shuttle bus used by Karachi's Confucius Institute killed three Chinese teachers and their local driver, for which the BLA took responsibility.

In August 2021, two children were killed and three were wounded in an attack targeting Chinese nationals in Gwadar.

In July 2021, a shuttle bus blast in Pakistan that killed nine Chinese and four Pakistanis was confirmed to be a terrorist attack. 

In April 2021, a deadly car bomb explosion that rocked a hotel which was hosting the Chinese ambassador in Quetta, Bolochistan province killed five people, for which Pakistan Taliban claimed responsibility. 

In 2018, the BLA attacked the Chinese Consulate-General in Karachi in south Pakistan, during which two police officers were killed. In May 2017, 10 workers were killed by two gunmen on motorbikes, which the BLA claimed was a response to the development of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

The purpose of this BLA-planned terrorist attack is no different from the previous terror attacks against Chinese personnel, mainly because it wants to impact China-Pakistan cooperation, especially the CPEC, Qian Feng, director of the research department at the National Strategy Institute at Tsinghua University, told the Global Times.

The terrorist group deliberately set the attack in August as the CPEC had just celebrated the 10th anniversary of its cooperation in July and was hoping to take advantage of a period of change in the administration in the country.

Qian noted that although the ongoing unrest in Balochistan has limited the Pakistani government's presence in the province, the Pakistani government managed to protect Chinese personnel from being harmed in this attack, which demonstrates the strength of their protection. The attack will not affect the continued construction of CPEC in the future, he said.

Together with other nine departments, the National Health Commission (NHC) has launched a one-year campaign to crack down on corruption in the healthcare sector across the country, focusing on "key few" and key positions in the pharmaceutical industry to ensure high-quality development of the medical and healthcare sector, the NHC announced on Tuesday.

Since China started the sweeping anti-corruption drive in the public health sector in mid-July, at least 176 Party secretaries or heads of hospitals had been put under investigation as of Saturday, according to media estimates.

Strengthening the anti-corruption work in the healthcare field is an important content of promoting the high-quality development of the pharmaceutical industry, and an important part of improving the construction of the pharmaceutical governance system.

In recent years, some people in key positions have been guilty of accepting kickbacks, bribery and profiteering, among other crimes, thereby seriously diluting the dividends gained from the reform and development of the pharmaceutical industry and eroding the rights and interests of the people. This not only hinders the reform and development of medical, insurance and pharmaceutical undertakings, but also jeopardizes the interests of the vast majority of people in the field of medicine and health, the NHC said on Tuesday.

The one-year campaign covers the entire chain of production, circulation, sales, use and reimbursement in the pharmaceutical industry, as well as pharmaceutical administrative departments, industry associations, medical and health institutions, pharmaceutical production and operation enterprises, and medical insurance funds, according to the NHC.

This concentrated campaign will focus on six aspects: administrative departments in the field of medicine using power for profiteering; the "key few" and major key positions in medical and health institutions; sales representatives for drugs, equipment, and consumables; social organizations that accept the management and guidance of administrative departments that use their position for self benefit; illegal acts by pharmaceutical enterprises during purchases and sales; and medical staff in violation of the standards for integrity, the NHC said.

Recently, some media outlets have reported on the suspension and postponement of some academic conferences due to the anti-corruption campaign. However, the NHC responded that what needs to be remedied is the illegal behavior of fabricating academic conferences out of thin air, carrying out illegal benefits transmission, or illegally sharing the sponsorship fees of academic conferences.

Medical experts said that the anti-corruption campaign in the sector this year is different from previous campaigns, as it is sweeping and more vigorous than ever.

Corruption in the medical sector is a serious issue that affects the credibility of the healthcare system and the interest of patients, said Zhong Chongming, an expert from the China Health Culture Association.

As the medical anti-corruption campaign has received widespread attention, some social platforms have exposed several corruption cases. In one case, Xu Bo, the director of the cardiac catheterization room at Fuwai Hospital, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, was investigated by the discipline inspection team of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the NHC of the State Supervisory Commission for suspected serious violations of discipline and law. At present, the case is still under investigation.

After confirming with related departments, the NHC said that online rumors about Xu using the opportunity of surgeries, consumables, and participation in the procurement of medical equipment bidding to accept bribes of up to 1.2 billion yuan ($165.6 million) are seriously inconsistent with the current investigation of the case.

As telecom fraud has become increasingly rampant along the southwestern border of China, multiple regions in Southwest China's Yunnan Province have launched a new round of intensive anti-fraud campaigns. Officials warned that if individuals are lured to scam dens on the border, they may be sold "like pigs" and subjected to torture, or even face life-threatening situations. 

To combat cross-border crime, the Mekong River joint patrol consisting of law-enforcement authorities from China, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand are actively taking action, which experts said are necessary and crucial in cracking down on illegal activities, given the complex security situation in border areas and the high mobility of criminal gangs. 

With the exposure of a series of scams under the guise of high-paying overseas jobs and the surprise hit movie No More Bets revealing the inner workings of online gambling fraud, the topic has drawn widespread attention among the Chinese public and particularly from public security services in Yunnan, which neighbors Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam and has been one the main locations of these crimes. 

According to data released by Yunnan's capital city of Kunming, from January to December 2022, the proportion of fraud cases involving overseas phone numbers accounted for 22 percent of the total in the city. So far in 2023, these cases have reached 14 percent of the total.

Various localities in Yunnan have issued warnings in recent days, noting that once people are smuggled to foreign countries, it is not well-paid jobs that are waiting for them but scam dens, where they will be forced to engage in illegal activities. Personal freedom is certainly restricted, and they will be required to complete large amounts of fraud tasks every day. Failure to complete the tasks may result in torture such as forced fasting, electric shocks and beatings. 

If they want to return to China, they are required to pay exorbitant "compensation" and "ransom" up to millions of yuan; if they fail to complete their tasks, they may be sold "like pigs" and even face life-threatening situations, said the warnings.

A Chinese national who has been living in Myanmar for almost 10 years told media on Wednesday that Chinese students studying abroad have become the new targets for scams, as they may not have timely access to the latest information at home and in turn have lower vigilance against scam calls.

Joint patrols with neighboring countries were launched on Tuesday as a fleet consisting of five law-enforcement vessels - three from China, one from Laos and one from Myanmar - departed from the Jingha Port in Yunnan as part of efforts to combat cross-border crimes arising from gambling scams in the Mekong River basin, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

Six suspects of telecom fraud were handed over by Myanmar to the Chinese police at Yangon International Airport and escorted back to China on Wednesday. One of the suspects is a key figure in a gambling fraud syndicate and a prime target in the crackdown, media reports said.

In June, the first batch of six suspects involved in fraud cases in Myanmar were returned to China.

Experts noted that as transnational gambling fraud is even more lucrative than drug trafficking and very difficult to eradicate, it is necessary and crucial for countries in the region to collaborate in targeted operations. 

Wu Fei, an expert on Southeast Asia studies, pointed out that some fraud groups are scattered in remote areas of northern Myanmar and have connections with gangs involved in the "Golden Triangle" drug trade, making it more difficult to combat them. After they establish a foothold in underdeveloped regions, these fraud groups can "stimulate" local economies and thus prompt the protection and even involvement of local officials, Wu told the Global Times on Wednesday. 

As many hideouts are located in border areas with strong mobility and networks in Southeast Asia, it is extremely challenging for a single country to conduct operations such as victim rescue or gathering information about crime hotspots, Wu noted. 

The importance of combating cross-border fraud and related crimes lies not only in maintaining a country's image but also in ensuring the development of tourism and international trade. 

This is particularly concerning as the tourism industry is a vital sector for many Southeast Asian countries, the expert said.

What's more, the worrisome security situation may also hamper the timely restoration of people-to-people exchanges in the post-pandemic period, causing unnecessary misunderstandings and conflicts.

The Chinese, Thai, and Laotian ambassadors to Myanmar held a trilateral meeting to coordinate efforts in combating gambling fraud, according to a notice issued by the Chinese Embassy on Tuesday.

The three parties unanimously agreed that the current prevalence of gambling fraud in the region seriously undermines the safety of people's lives and property. They are fully coordinating with Myanmar authorities to conduct investigations and rescue operations, as well as assisting Myanmar in intensifying efforts to combat fraud syndicates. 

China has dealt with more than 36,000 corruption-related cases impacting the public interest in the first half of 2023, with more than 52,000 individuals receiving criticism, education, assistance, or punishment, China's highest supervisory and anti-corruption authority announced on Monday.

Discipline inspection and supervisory authorities at all levels have consistently strengthened their inspection covering the implementation of policies supporting the public interest while punishing acts of embezzlement, misappropriation, false reporting and extortion, according to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the National Commission of Supervision.

The top anti-graft watchdog vowed to eliminate corruption at the grassroots level in areas such as employment and entrepreneurship, education and healthcare, pensions and social security, ecological and environmental protection, workplace safety, food and drug safety, law enforcement, and judicial fields. 

The top anti-corruption authority emphasized the need to strengthen frontline research and closely monitor prominent issues which impact people's livelihoods to address public concerns, giving the example of solving the corruption problem in handing out subsidies to villagers in the city of Baoshan of Southwest China's Yunnan Province and providing financial relief to low income people in the city of Longyan in East China's Fujian Province.

Anti-corruption authorities in East China's Zhejiang Province and Southwest China's Guizhou Province have made full use of big data to deepen grassroots governance of public interest issues. On an updated online supervision platform, the public can submit requests and understand how cases are processed. 
As China highlighted dealing with corruption as it related to public interest, the National Health Commission launched a one-year campaign to crack down on corruption in the healthcare sector across the country earlier in August, focusing on a "key few" in the pharmaceutical industry to ensure high-quality development of the country's medical and healthcare sector.

China's top cyberspace regulator announced on Monday the launch of a two-month nationwide special campaign to regulate the network environment for the 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang Province, addressing problems such as fan conflicts involving insults and comment manipulation.

According to the notice released by the secretary bureau of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the Copyright Management Bureau of the Central Publicity Department and the office of the Organizing Committee of the 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou, the campaign kicked off on Monday and will run through October 29. The campaign will focus on eight categories of prominent problems.

Issues to be addressed include the incitement of insults among fans and the manipulation of comments.

The cyberspace regulator will also rectify the problem of excessive sensationalism and "fan circle culture" in the sports event coverage.

The campaign will target "human flesh search" activities that deliberately expose personal information of athletes, referees and coaches, leading to online violence, as well as the release of unlawful and harmful information that spreads insults, defamatory, abusive and attacking content, causing harm to individuals' physical and mental health.

The authority will also regulate internet news and information service activities without authorization or permission, as well as activities that create and disseminate fake sports event videos with generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Other behaviors that will be rectified during the campaign include spreading false information about the Hangzhou Asian Games and Asian Para Games, the related regional public policies and social and livelihood issues, fabricating rumors about disasters and accidents, illegal activities, food and product quality issues, and other false information that could cause panic.

Besides, unlawful marketing activities that promote commodities and services or collect personal information, private identification or biometric information in the name of the sports events will also be targeted.

The notoriously intricate strategy game Go has a new champion.

AlphaGo, Google’s Go-playing computer program, has topped Lee Sedol, the world’s reigning player, in a five-game match played over a week in South Korea.

The program, a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, learned to play Go by watching human experts and by playing millions of games against itself. It stepped into the world spotlight in January, when it beat Fan Hui, the European champion, 5 games to 0. Victory wasn’t certain against Sedol, though, a player often described as “legendary.”

But by March 12, Sedol was officially sunk. AlphaGo had defeated the human in three consecutive games. The only question left was whether the program would sweep the match. In game 4, however, Sedol defied expectations and pulled out a win. In game 5, AlphaGo made a big mistake early on, but clawed its way back in a match that Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis tweeted was “nail-biting.”

Google DeepMind, the artificial intelligence company that developed AlphaGo, will give away the $1 million in prize money, splitting it amongst UNICEF, science, technology, engineering and math charities, and Go organizations.

As Superstorm Sandy threatened the East Coast of the United States in fall of 2012, people stocked up on bread and batteries. They boarded their windows. And they tweeted. During the height of the storm and its impact, between October 26 and November 10, people sent more than 20 million hurricane-related tweets.

Now, scientists have taken almost 10 million of those tweets and used them to show where Sandy hit. They also found that tweets about the storm’s damage were associated with how much financial support ended up getting handed around. The results show that social media can be used to track the damage from natural disasters. And they suggest that eventually, these social networks might be able to contribute to disaster response.

These days, if an earthquake happens miles away, you may read about it on Twitter before you even feel the tremor. In some cases, earthquake information actually travels faster via tweet than from scientific instruments. In 2009, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency held the DARPA Network Challenge — a contest designed to see how social media and the Internet could be used to solve time-sensitive problems. Manuel Cebrian, a computational social scientist now based at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Clayton, Australia, won that challenge with his colleagues by using social media to hunt down 10 red weather balloons released across the United States.

Since then, Cebrian and his colleagues have been applying social networks to other, more disastrous events.

First, they tried to see if they could predict outbreaks of contagious disease. But soon, they turned their minds to large-scale disasters. Hurricane Sandy was the perfect target. It was a disaster big enough that everyone cared about it. The storm, which made landfall in New Jersey on October 29, 2012, killed at least 147 people. It also caused $50 billion in damages and left 8.5 million people without power.

The disaster was large — and came at a time when Twitter had become “a pervasive technology that everyone was using,” Cebrian explains. This made Sandy a good storm to test the powers of Twitter.

A storm of social media
The scientists analyzed 9.7 million tweets from 2.2 million users posted between October 15 and November 12, 2012. They restricted their search to tweets where they could determine the location of the user. Cebrian and his group compared “hurricane-related” messages using keywords such as “Frankenstorm,” “Sandy,” and “hurricane” to tweets that contained vague, non-Sandy-related terms such as “weather.”

By comparing Twitter use in 50 cities in the United States, the researchers found that the closer the city was to the hurricane’s path, the more storm-related tweets were sent in the period immediately before, during and after Sandy’s big day, the researchers report March 11 in Science Advances.

Showing that tweets could track a storm’s path was “the main goal,” Cebrian explains, but then the team moved on to a more difficult question: Whether tweets were also associated with material storm damage. “It was kind of a long shot for us,” Cebrian admits. But Superstorm Sandy again had good data to offer. Using the publicly available data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and private insurance companies on how much money was spent on storm recovery, the scientists were able to show the volume of tweets about Sandy in New Jersey and New York was associated with how much money people in the area received for damages. Cebrian and his group were even able to apply their methods to 12 other natural disasters, including the South Napa earthquake and the Oso mudslide, and see similar results.

“We were surprised there was any correlation at all” between tweet volume and damage, Cebrian notes. “These are two very different processes.” On one hand, you have Twitter, something many people do when distracted, “you are looking at a million things and talking to your mom and then you tweet,” Cebrian says. “On the other hand, to know how much money goes into your house…they have to take pictures and assessment and get the numbers approved. You are looking at a well calibrated process.”

The study is much larger than many previous studies of social media and disaster, says Julia Skinner, who studies social media, political unrest and natural disasters at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. “It combines a lot of different ways that researchers have considered social media and disasters into one approach,” she explains.

The study also showed that people retweet less in the path of the hurricane, which suggests there is “more new information coming from areas close to the hurricane,” says James Bagrow, who studies social media and disaster response at the University of Vermont in Burlington. “This isn’t ‘cowboy science,’” he says. “They did a good job of supporting the decisions they made along the way.”

To tweet or not to tweet
Though Cebrian has done several analyses of Twitter, he himself doesn’t tweet. “I’ve never used Twitter,” he admits. “I’m not very good with this technology.”

But it has still proven to be a rich resource to mine. “Twitter is this weird mix of a social network where people check on their friends, but also an information network where agencies try to reach out to people,” Cebrian says.

Twitter is also useful because it’s public, Skinner explains. “Even if you don’t have an account, you can see what people are saying about a disasters, while on a platform like Facebook or Snapchat, people’s privacy settings might prevent you from seeing what they have to say.”

But not everyone tweets, and that means the results will end up skewed. “Twitter has great penetration in America,” Cebrian notes. But other countries might not be so well represented. “We can’t claim universality,” he says. It also depends on the natural disaster. People may be very excited about issues that are not yet local. “Twitter can be very good if you want to raise awareness, but it might not be a good tool today to see where Zika is traveling,” Cebrian notes.

So far, the associations between tweet and destruction was still only moderate. “This is the beginning,” Cebrian notes. He hopes that down the line, companies such as Twitter and Google might want to help do further research. But he also says, in the end, the emergency aid groups have many methods, and “this is only another tool.”

For Wisconsin’s snowshoe hares, climate change now ranks as an even bigger menace than the bulldozing, paving and other destructive things people have done to northern forests.

Habitat loss as humans reshape landscapes has loomed for decades as the main conservation problem for a lot of wildlife. It’s still important, says climate change ecologist Benjamin Zuckerberg of the University of Wisconsin‒Madison. But along the southern boundary of the snowshoe hares’ range, climate change bringing skimpy snow covers has surpassed direct habitat loss as a threat, Zuckerberg and his colleagues say March 30 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
North America’s Lepus americanus hares may be especially sensitive to climate change. “Almost everything about them screams adaptation to seasons of extensive snow cover,” says study coauthor Jonathan Pauli, also at Wisconsin‒Madison. The hares have outsized snowshoe feet, thick fur and an annual molt from brown to snow-white. Getting out of sync with the snow turns camouflage into a come-on for predators (SN Online: 1/26/16). In bad years, “there’s a lot of white hares on brown backgrounds,” Pauli says.

To see how the hares have fared, the researchers looked for signs of the animals at 199 sites during the winters of 2012‒2013 and 2013‒2014. Many of these locations were mentioned in a rather anecdotal 1945 study and in a more systematic one in 1979 to 1980. Satellite images showed not much change in the overall amount of hare-suitable forest since the 1980s, but snow cover averages have declined. When researchers put all their information into a computer simulation, the climate-related changes — particularly the length of the snow-cover season — did a better job of explaining the ups and downs of hare populations than just the forest changes did.
Snow cover has powerful effects on hares. For each 7.41 days that snow blankets the landscape, snowshoe hare populations become four times as likely to survive, the researchers found.

If the hares dwindle from a place, the loss may ripple through the ecosystem. “Snowshoe hares are central, really central, to prey species,” Pauli says. Lynx, great horned owls, coyotes and many more species dine on them. And regardless of any ecosystem role, hares are remarkable creatures in their own right. “It’s hard for me, a person living in Wisconsin, to imagine these northern conifer forests without snowshoe hares,” Pauli says.
To prevent such a loss, reducing greenhouse gases is important, but so is creating “climate-resilient landscapes,” Zuckerberg says. For snowshoe hares, that landscape might bristle and tangle with abundant, thick young growth, full of hiding places for too conspicuous, out-of-season-sync hares, he suggests.

White furry animals may not be the only ones that will have to cope with a shift in the balance of threats. “In a number of cold-associated butterflies, and also birds, it is becoming clear that climate change is beginning to surpass land use as the primary driver of extinction at the trailing edges of the species’ range,” says ecologist Tom Oliver of the University of Reading in England. And the threats of climate change and land-use upsets can intensify each other. “We appear to be entering a worrying time,” Oliver says.

NEW YORK — Sometimes forgetting can be harder than remembering. When people forced themselves to forget a recently seen image, select brain activity was higher than when they tried to remember that image.

Forgetting is often a passive process, one in which the memory slips out of the brain, Tracy Wang of the University of Texas at Austin said April 2 at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. But in some cases, forgetting can be deliberate.
Twenty adults saw images of faces, scenes and objects while an fMRI scanner recorded their brains’ reactions to the images. If instructed to forget the preceding image, people were less likely to remember that image later. Researchers used the scan data to build a computer model that could infer how strongly the brain responds to each particular kind of image. In the ventral temporal cortex, a part of the brain above the ear, brain patterns elicited by a particular image were stronger when a participant was told to forget the sight than when instructed to remember it.

Of course, everyone knows that it’s easy to forget something without even trying. But these results show that intentional forgetting isn’t a passive process — the brain has to actively work to wipe out a memory on purpose.