It looks like the days of shampoo bottles striking fear into the hearts of airport security everywhere might be numbered. Thanks to Los Alamos scientists, a new type of detection technology could give airports the tools they need to finally tell if a liquid is a potential threat—all with one simple scan.
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The idea has been tossed around in science fiction yarns for years now, but researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands have actually found a way to read people’s minds. Or, more specifically, decode what letters of the alphabet a subject is looking at by analyzing MRI scans with a special mathematical model they developed. Freaky.
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A team of scientists claim to have developed techniques which allows them to read dreams via brain scans—and it could help us better understand what goes on in the brain while we sleep. More »
Have you watched Minority Report before? What if you lived in a society where it is possible to be deemed by some sort of computer algorithm that you are more prone to committing a certain type of crime? Life’s definitely not a beach then, as having a potentially heinous intent is very different from carrying out the crime itself. Well, Wired has brought us word that there are select individuals in the world who were discovered to have approximately double the likelihood of being rearrested within four years after being released to society.
This study involved the use of mobile MRI scanners, where brain scans were performed on inmates to test for impulsivity; pressing a button whenever they saw the letter X appear on a screen, and to simply drop everything and do nothing when they saw K. The letter K appeared 16% of the time, so that there is that element of surprise. Just how conclusive is such a study? Surely it should not be taken seriously in its context, as predicting human behavior is not an exact science, even until now.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Man Solves Three Rubik’s Cubes While Juggling, Hulu Could Have Possible Buyers, 
For the first time, scientists have been able to use data from brain scans to identify who patients are thinking about. More »
You’ve almost certainly seen the dancing gorilla video which demonstrates the theory of change blindness—a phenomenon which means we don’t see changes we’re not expecting. Now, an updated experiment shows that the same may be true of radiologists analyzing CT images. More »
War dogs. They are equal parts badass and cute. And on top of that, they’re smart. They need to be to get the job done. In the interest of finding the cleverest canines for potential war-doggery, DARPA’s got a plan to start scanning puppy brains in an MRI machine. But rest assured, those brains are still in the puppies in question. More »
Doctors have managed to communicate with a patient who’s been in a vegetative state for more than a decade by using brain scans—and he even told them he wasn’t in pain. More »
As a species, we’ve spent a lot of time learning how the human brain works, but we’ve had to go without a true, thorough map of how genes manifest themselves in our craniums; previous maps have been limited to the simpler minds of mice. The Allen Institute for Brain Science is now known to have solved that mystery by recently finishing an extensive, detailed 3D atlas of genetic expression within our own brain tissue. Accomplishing the feat required no small amount of resources, including the definition of 900 subdivisions, conducting over 62,000 gene expression probes and producing the MRI scans of two and a half brains, but the result is a potentially vital tool for neuroscience and education. Curious web users can see a visual map of gene expression based on virtually any criteria they need, whether it’s a physical region of the brain, a disease type or the exact gene they’d like to track down. For many, the best news about the map may simply be that it’s free and public: anyone with enough experience in genetics can learn more about what makes the mind tick through their browsers, and what they find might just lead to new discoveries.
Allen Institute completes gene expression map of the human brain in high-resolution 3D originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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