I love sifting through my memories.

Laying a careful groundwork for their undercover identities... picking out items from old newspaper files... weighing and sifting them.

Painstaking sifting and searching... until O'Brien began to wonder if the trail were cold... or too faint to follow.

It was my ex girlfriend. While I was breaking the record underwater for the first time, she was sifting through my Blackberry, checking all my messages.

At CERN, two independent teams of physicists recently announced that their data were consistent with detection of a Higgs particle, though there remained a 1 in 2,000 chance that the signal came from mundane, non Higgs processes. So the teams will continue smashing protons together, gathering more data, and sifting for signs of a Higgs.

You can think of the paradox in another way we live in an era when knowledge in the sense of information is constantly available in real time through computers, smart phones, electronic tablets, and book readers. And yet we still lack the basic skills of reflecting on such information, of sifting through the dirt to find the worthy nuggets.

In addition to those lists detailed in the UK's first report to the Committee, the list of pathogens and toxins in Schedule 5 of the Anti Terrorism Crime and Security Act is used by HSE, for national security purposes, as a tool for sifting its public register (of GM premises and activities) to exclude the whereabouts and activity details of those same pathogens and toxins from the public domain.