Waves

BALTIMORE -- This is starting to look familiar. When the Titanic sank, there was a Guggenheim on board. Benjamin Guggenheim's family went on to found an investment company that now owns the Dodgers, who are watching water gush into the corridors of their star-adorned, $230-million ocean liner. The Dodgers extended their losing streak to six games on Saturday at Oriole Park, losing both games of their doubleheader against the Baltimore Orioles, 7-5 and 6-1. BOX SCORE: Orioles 7, Dodgers 5 The most expensive team in baseball history has a 7-10 record, already six games behind the first-place Colorado Rockies in the National League West.

Marc Maron slips into a chair and plunks a tattered, spiral-bound notebook onto the table. The cover, folded back, reveals dense, tight scribbling on ruled paper. Pen in hand, Maron hunches over the notes, looks up for a second to lock eyes by way of greeting, then drops his head back down. "This bit," he says, "I'm struggling with the ending. " He runs a finger over a line from his latest stand-up routine, then pops a guacamole-tipped chip in his mouth. "Anyway, hi," he says at last.

Babies wise up fast. By the time infants are 3 months old, their unfinished brains are laced with a trillion connections, and the collective weight of all those firing neurons triples in a year. But the indecipherable babbling and maladroit wiggling so beloved by parents just leave scientists in baby labs scratching their heads. What do those little people know, and when do they know it? A team of French neuroscientists who compared brain waves of adults and babies has come up with a tentative answer: At 5 months, infants appear to have the internal architecture in place to perceive objects in adult-like ways, even though they can't tell us. "I think we have a pretty nice answer," said Sid Kouider of the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, whose findings were published Friday in the journal Science.

COLONIA DEL SACRAMENTO, Uruguay - Straddling the crest of a sand dune, my back to the Atlantic Ocean, I watched a Uruguayan boy net fish in a river lagoon. He waded through the chest-high water, dragging behind him the reflection of the setting sun. The world was still drying from an earlier rain, but a young couple managed to sled down a damp dune onto the empty beach. Perched on the highest point between two fishing villages in this corner of eastern Uruguay, I felt as though I had stepped off the map and disappeared.

Ellen DeGeneres will "just keep swimming" in her new "Finding Nemo" sequel, "Finding Dory. " The talk show host, who voiced the friendly-but-forgetful blue tang fish of 2003's "Nemo," has been lobbying Disney and Pixar for years for a follow-up for the Academy Award-winning ocean adventure. On Tuesday, Disney made it official, announcing that the film would be released Nov. 23, 2015, Movies Now reported . And DeGeneres couldn't be more excited. "I have waited for this day for a long, long, long, long, long, long time," she said in a statement.

Russian officials pressed ahead Wednesday with a sweeping wave of inspections on nonprofit foundations, human rights groups and other NGOs that has troubled activists in Russia and abroad. In the latest round, state inspectors showed up at the offices of Human Rights Watch and Transparency International. Four government officials -- two from the Moscow prosecutor's office, one from the Ministry of Justice and one involved in tax inspection -- arrived at Transparency International with a letter seeking office policies, financial documents and other papers, director Elena Panfilova said Wednesday.

The Strokes "The Comedown Machine" RCA Records 1 star One of the key axioms of the acting trade is to never seem desperate for a role. To be a hot commodity, behave like you couldn't care less; those who appear to need a job are at a disadvantage. "The Comedown Machine," the fifth album by New York band the Strokes, exudes nervousness; you can almost see beads of sweat forming on the band's foreheads as it works, and fails, to stay relevant while tossing off harmless 1980s-style ditties.

Even here in the world capital of far-fetched ideas, this one is more outlandish than most. Two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, frustrated by the shortage of visas that keep some of the world's brightest science and engineering minds from building companies on dry land, have hatched a plan to build a start-up colony in the middle of the Pacific. Max Marty and Dario Mutabdzija say they plan to park a cruise ship 12 nautical miles off the coast of Northern California in international waters.

With just two days to go, Lat Ware reached his Kickstarter goal of raising $40,000 that will allow him to finish work on a video game played using brain waves.   "Sometimes dreams come true," Ware said in an e-mail.  PHOTOS: Tech we want to see in 2013 As of Monday night, his project, called "Throw Trucks With Your Mind," had raised $41,062 from 495 backers. Ware has said he plans to use the money to hire a handful of people to complete the game within the next year.  The game is played by wearing a NeuroSky headset that reads brain waves.

Gary Vitti has seen a lot in his 29 years as the Lakers' athletic trainer. This is his most trying season yet. He has felt the weight of the team's struggles, the Lakers standing at 32-31 and tied with Utah for the eighth and final playoff spot in the Western Conference despite meteoric expectations. He also experienced the strain in the trainer's room, Pau Gasol and Steve Nash missing a total of 51 games because of injuries, not to mention major hip surgery for Jordan Hill and Steve Blake's 37-game absence because of abdominal and groin issues.