Robots, vitamins, French spacecraft

Prepare your brain cells for a tsunami of new information and science reports. The AAAS is building up to its annual meeting. This year, it's in San Francisco.

AAAS, that's the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But it's not just North America--over 120,000 scientists around the world are members. There'll be talks on the latest research from cancer to climate change, from outer space to the Earth's core.

Already press releases are flooding the AAAS Web site. There's one about the electrical circuits that help produce the aurora phenomena over Arctic and Antarctic. There's another on the Planck space mission to be launched by the European Space Agency. This space mission is going after radioactive remnants of the Big Bang over 14 billion years ago.

Out of the University of Michigan comes a robotic exoskeleton. This allows severely injured humans to control robotic muscle movement using their own nervous system. Didn't they do a TV series about that eons ago?

At my age the announcement that matters most: folate and Vitamin B12 work together to improve cognition as you age. I can show you the huge B12 bottle in my desk drawer, not sure it's helping much. Vitamin B12 is good to your brain. Repeat after me.

News.com will be covering the AAAS conference next week. So take your vitamins, limber up your brain. The world's scientists will have some worthwhile things for you to think about.