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A region of the brain called the hippocampus plays an important role in this process. Ford referred to the hippocampus when questioned by Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., about how she was so sure that Kavanaugh was the perpetrator of the alleged assault.In Thursday's testimony at Judge Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings, Christine Blasey Ford alleged Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party in 1982, when she was 15 years old and he was 17.

Kavanaugh staunchly denied these allegations.

But memory is fallible. A question on many people's minds, is how well can anyone recall something that happened over 35 years ago?

Pretty well, say scientists, if the memory is of a traumatic event. That's because of the key role emotions play in making and storing memories.

How Trauma Affects Memory: Scientists Weigh In On The Kavanaugh Hearing

Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

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On Thursday, the Senate unleashed yet another iteration of its effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, and with it came another analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. If your head is spinning, you've got plenty of company, us included.

So, we made you a chart that breaks out the differences between the Affordable Care Act (ACA/Obamacare), the American Health Care Act (AHCA), the Senate’s Better Care Reconciliation Act, and the Senate’s Repeal-Only proposals.

With So Many Obamacare Repeal Options In Play, Confusion Reigns

Graphic: Alyson Hurt/NPR

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It took an explosion and 13 pounds of iron to usher in the modern era of neuroscience.

In 1848, a 25-year-old railroad worker named Phineas Gage was blowing up rocks to clear the way for a new rail line in Cavendish, Vt. He would drill a hole, place an explosive charge, then pack in sand using a 13-pound metal bar known as a tamping iron.

But in this instance, the metal bar created a spark that touched off the charge. That, in turn, "drove this tamping iron up and out of the hole, through his left cheek, behind his eye socket, and out of the top of his head," says Jack Van Horn, an associate professor of neurology at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California.

Gage didn't die. But the tamping iron destroyed much of his brain's left frontal lobe, and Gage's once even-tempered personality changed dramatically.

"He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity, which was not previously his custom," wrote John Martyn Harlow, the physician who treated Gage after the accident.

This sudden personality transformation is why Gage shows up in so many medical textbooks, says Malcolm Macmillan, an honorary professor at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences and the author of An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage.

"He was the first case where you could say fairly definitely that injury to the brain produced some kind of change in personality," Macmillan says.

Why Brain Scientists Are Still Obsessed With The Curious Case Of Phineas Gage

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

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'One Of A Kind' Collection Of Animal Eyeballs Aids Research On Vision Problems

Most of the 56,000 eyes sent to the little lab in Wisconsin come from vets who want help diagnosing dogs, cats and horses. But the repository also has eyes from sloths, elephant seals and dragonflies.

There is a little room at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that is filled with the eyeballs of animals — everything from the duck-billed platypus to the two-toed sloth to the boa constrictor.

"We think we're the largest collection of animal eyeballs," says Dick Dubielzig, who founded the Comparative Ocular Pathology Laboratory of Wisconsin in 1983, but he admits that this is hard to prove. "Maybe we should go to the Guinness people and see if they have an answer to that."

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House Speaker Paul Ryan from Wisconsin has been complaining about the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) for so long that his list of grievances sounds like a refrain of some pop song.

"Obamacare is collapsing," he said on Feb. 28. "The Democrats got too far ahead on their ideology and they gave us a system where government runs health care. They gave us a system where costs went up, not down. They gave us a system where choices went away. They gave us a system where people lost the plans they liked, they chose."

And Ryan's not the only one. Republicans in Congress have spent the past several years detailing what is wrong with the ACA. And in every election since it passed, nearly every Republican candidate, including President Trump, has vowed to get rid of the law and put something better in its place.

On Monday evening, House Republicans finally released their own health care proposal. It would replace Obamacare's mandate to buy insurance and his subsidies to bring down the cost with a fixed refundable tax credit that people can use to buy coverage. Nobody's required to have a health plan. But if you don't get covered at the outset, you'll pay a penalty to buy it later.

So does it fix the problems Republicans have laid out? Likely not.

Analysis: GOP Health Plan May Not Fix The Problems They Want To Fix

Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

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Being overweight can raise your blood pressure, cholesterol and risk for developing diabetes. It could be bad for your brain, too.

A diet high in saturated fats and sugars, the so-called Western diet, actually affects the parts of the brain that are important to memory and make people more likely to crave the unhealthful food, says psychologist Terry Davidson, director of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at American University in Washington, D.C.

He didn't start out studying what people ate. Instead, he was interested in learning more about the hippocampus, a part of the brain that's heavily involved in memory.

He was trying to figure out which parts of the hippocampus do what. He did that by studying rats that had very specific types of hippocampal damage and seeing what happened to them.

In the process, Davidson noticed something strange. The rats with the hippocampal damage would go to pick up food more often than the other rats, but they would eat a little bit, then drop it.

Davidson realized these rats didn't know they were full. He says something similar may happen in human brains when people eat a diet high in fat and sugar. Davidson says there's a vicious cycle of bad diets and brain changes.

The Wrong Eating Habits Can Hurt Your Brain, Not Just Your Waistline

Illustration: Katherine Streeter for NPR

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Tampon or pad? That's all you get when you stroll through the feminine care aisle of any big supermarket chain.

But times are a changin'.

This year has been epic for menstruation, with news and social media catapulting the once hush-hush topic into the open.

There's the woman who ran the London marathon without using feminine hygiene products, and the #PeriodsAreNotAnInsult hashtag that erupted after presidential candidate Donald Trump referred to GOP debate moderator Megyn Kelly as having had "blood coming out of her wherever."

"In America we have a new iPhone every year, but in the past two centuries there have only been three innovations in menstrual care. It's baffling," says Kiran Gandhi, Los Angeles-based musician and feminist, and “free-bleeder” who during the London Marathon.

Why 2015 Was The Year Of The Period, And We Don't Mean Punctuation

Illustration: Mouni Feddag for NPR