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Text while you walk (safely this time)

If you’re ever twisted your ankle off a curb, bumped a stranger, or walked into a street post while texting—you need this app. ‘Transparent Screen’ for Android allows you to look through your device so you can anticipate any dangerous obstacles in your way while you’re texting on-the-go by harnessing the power of your camera to create the illusion of transparency. Just watch out for your battery life while using the app, as it’ll drain quickly.

Full story at GeekOSystem.

All the top tech.

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Nintendo and Converse collaborate on an amazing sneaker

Clear out room in your closets, gamers. Converse is releasing their ‘One Star Super Mario Bros.’ shoe this March!

Via Like Cool.

Get your Nintendo fix.

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Scientists Boost Memory by Stimulating Key Site in Brain

Mechanism holds potential for improving recall in dementia patients. Have you ever gone to the movies and forgotten where you parked the car? New UCLA research may one day help you improve your memory. UCLA neuroscientists have demonstrated that they can strengthen memory in human patients by stimulating a critical junction in the brain. Published [...]

Why Congress is way richer than you [infographic]

Via Online Schools.

Depressing infographics.

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The bookcase that’s always ready for more

The thing about bibliophiles is that, before you know it, the bookcase is full and it’s time to drag in a few more boards and cinder blocks to accommodate the newcomers.

With the REK, such worries are a thing of the past, as the system accordions out when more space is needed and collapses into a handy rectangle when it’s time to pack up shop and move on to greener pastures.

Unfortunately, the price is listed as “on request” meaning the 99% is out of luck, but perhaps it’ll inspire you to hit the workshop for a little DIY action if you can drag your nose out of that book.

Full story at Reinier De Jong via Boing Boing.

Handy design.

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How Harvard spends student tuition [infographic]

Via Online Universities. (H/T Muhammad Saleem)

The scoop on education.

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Explorers Use Uncertainty and Specific Area of Brain

As they try to find the best reward among options, some people explore based on how uncertain they are about the outcome of the options. Those who employ that thought process, unlike people who use other strategies, uniquely harness the computational power of the rostrolateral prefrontal cortex, a new study finds. Life shrouds most choices [...]

Lab-Made Neurons Allow Scientists To Study A Genetic Cause Of Parkinson's

By reverse engineering human skin cells to become induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and then coaxing them to become neural dopamine cells, scientists in the US have developed a way to study a genetic cause of Parkinson's disease in lab-made neurons...

Gene therapy for inherited blindness succeeds in patients' other eye

Gene therapy for congenital blindness took another step forward, as researchers further improved vision in three adult patients previously treated in one eye. The patients were better able to see in dim light, with no adverse effects.

Gene Therapy for Inherited Blindness Succeeds in Patients’ Other Eye

In three adults, repeat dose safely improves vision. Gene therapy for congenital blindness has taken another step forward, as researchers further improved vision in three adult patients previously treated in one eye. After receiving the same treatment in their other eye, the patients became better able to see in dim light, and two were able [...]

Sound rather than sight can activate 'seeing' for the blind, say researchers

Scientists have tapped onto the visual cortex of the congenitally blind by using sensory substitution devices (SSDs), enabling the blind in effect to "see" and even describe objects. SSDs are non-invasive sensory aids that provide visual information to the blind via their existing senses. For example, using a visual-to-auditory SSD in a clinical or everyday setting, users wear a miniature video camera connected to a small computer (or smart phone) and stereo headphones. The images are converted into "soundscapes," using a predictable algorithm, allowing the user to listen to and then interpret the visual information coming from the camera.

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Flipping a light switch in the cell: Quantum dots used for targeted neural activation

By harnessing quantum dots, researchers have developed a new and vastly more targeted way to stimulate neurons in the brain. Being able to switch neurons on and off and monitor how they communicate with one another is crucial for understanding -- and, ultimately, treating -- a host of brain disorders.

Former Welders Suffer Increased Clumsiness

Welders who are exposed to manganese from welding fumes, risk developing increased clumsiness - and the result may remain decades after exposure has ceased. This is the finding of a study at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, of former shipyard workers...

Zinc Control Mechanisms Could Be Key To Aggressive Breast Cancer Treatments

The body's control mechanisms for delivering zinc to cells could be key to improving treatment for some types of aggressive breast cancer. New research by Cardiff University and King's College London has identified the switch which releases zinc into cells, with important implications for a number of diseases. Zinc has long been known to play a vital part in human health...

Working Memory And The Brain

Researchers have long known that specific parts of the brain activate when people view particular images. For example, a region called the fusiform face area turns on when the eyes glance at faces, and another region called the parahippocampal place area does the same when a person looks at scenes or buildings...

Strategy Shift With Age Can Lead To Navigational Difficulties

A Wayne State University researcher believes studying people's ability to find their way around may help explain why loss of mental capacity occurs with age. Scott Moffat, Ph.D...

Molecular Path from Internal Clock to Cells Controlling Rest and Activity Revealed

The molecular pathway that carries time-of-day signals from the body’s internal clock to ultimately guide daily behavior is like a black box, says Amita Sehgal, PhD, the John Herr Musser Professor of Neuroscience and Co-Director, Comprehensive Neuroscience Center, at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. Now, new research from the Sehgal lab is [...]

Neuroscientists link brain-wave pattern to energy consumption

Emery Brown, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and health sciences and technology, left, and ShiNung Ching, a postdoc in Brown’s lab.
Photo: M. Scott Brauer

Different brain states produce different waves of electrical activity, with the alert brain, relaxed brain and sleeping brain producing easily distinguishable electroencephalogram (EEG) patterns. These patterns change even more dramatically when the brain goes into certain deeply quiescent states during general anesthesia or a coma.

MIT and Harvard University researchers have now figured out how one such quiescent state, known as burst suppression, arises. The finding, reported in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Feb. 6, could help researchers better monitor other states in which burst suppression occurs. For example, it is also seen in the brains of heart attack victims who are cooled to prevent brain damage due to oxygen deprivation, and in the brains of patients deliberately placed into a medical coma to treat a traumatic brain injury or intractable seizures.

During burst suppression, the brain is quiet for up to several seconds at a time, punctuated by short bursts of activity. Emery Brown, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and health sciences and technology and an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, set out to study burst suppression in the anesthetized brain and other brain states in hopes of discovering a fundamental mechanism for how the pattern arises. Such knowledge could help scientists figure out how much burst suppression is needed for optimal brain protection during induced hypothermia, when this state is created deliberately.

“You might be able to develop a much more principled way to guide therapy for using burst suppression in cases of medical coma,” says Brown, senior author of the PNAS paper. “The question is, how do you know that patients are sufficiently brain-protected? Should they have one burst every second? Or one every five seconds?”

Modeling electrical activity

ShiNung Ching, a postdoc in Brown’s lab and lead author of the PNAS paper, developed a model to describe how burst suppression arises, based on the behavior of neurons in the brain. Neuron firing is controlled by the activity of channels that allow ions such as potassium and sodium to flow in and out of the cell, altering its voltage.

For each neuron, “we’re able to mathematically model the flow of ions into and out of the cell body, through the membrane,” Ching says. In this study, the team combined many neurons to create a model of a large brain network. By showing how both cooling and certain anesthetic drugs reduce the brain’s use of ATP (the cell’s energy currency), the researchers were able to generate burst-suppression patterns consistent with those actually seen in human patients.

This is the first time that reductions in metabolic activity at the neuron level have been linked to burst suppression, and suggests that the brain likely uses burst suppression to conserve vital energy during times of trauma.

“What’s really exciting about this is the idea that the metabolic regulation of cell energy stores plays a role in the observed dynamics of EEG. That’s a different way to think about the determinants of EEG,” says Nicholas Schiff, a professor of neurology and neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medical College who was not involved in this research.

The developing brain

Burst suppression is also seen in babies born prematurely. As these babies get older, their brain patterns move into the normal continuous pattern. Brown speculates that in premature infants, the brain may be protecting itself by conserving energy.

“When you’re looking at these kids develop, we can easily start to suggest ways of tracking their improvement quantitatively. So the same algorithms we use to track burst suppression in the operating room could be used to track the disappearance of burst suppression in these kids,” Brown says.

Such tracking could help doctors determine whether premature infants are moving toward normal development or have an underlying brain disorder that might otherwise go undiagnosed, Ching says.

In future studies, the researchers plan to study premature infants as well as patients whose brains are cooled and those in induced comas. Such studies could reveal just how much burst suppression is enough to protect the brain in those vulnerable situations.

Researchers Increase Understanding of Gene’s Potentially Protective Role in Parkinson’s

Treatments for Parkinson’s disease, estimated to affect 1 million Americans, have yet to prove effective in slowing the progression of the debilitating disease. However, University of Alabama researchers have identified how a specific gene protects dopamine-producing neurons from dying in both animal models and in cultures of human neurons, according to a scientific article publishing [...]

Gaining insight into a gene's protective role in Parkinson's

Researchers have identified how a specific gene protects dopamine-producing neurons from dying in both animal models and in cultures of human neurons.

Study of live human neurons reveals Parkinson's origins

Parkinson’s disease researchers have discovered how mutations in the parkin gene cause the disease, which afflicts at least 500,000 Americans and for which there is no cure.

My connectome, myself

The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each of which is connected to many others. Neuroscientists believe these connections hold the key to our memories, personality and even mental disorders such as schizophrenia. By unraveling them, we may be able to learn more about how we become our unique selves, and possibly even how to alter those selves.

Mapping all those connections may sound like a daunting task, but MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung believes it can be done — one cubic millimeter of brain tissue at a time.

“When you start to explain how difficult it would be to find the connectome of an entire brain, people ask, ‘What’s the point? That seems too far off.’ But even finding or mapping the connections in a small piece of brain can tell you a lot,” says Seung, a professor of computational neuroscience and physics at MIT.

Even more than our genome, our connectome shapes who we are, says Seung, who outlines his vision for connectome research in a new book, Connectome, published this month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. “Clearly genes are very important, but because they don’t change after the moment of conception, they can’t really account for the effects of experience,” he says.

A streambed of consciousness

Seung envisions the brain’s connections as the “streambed” through which our consciousness flows. At a molecular level, that streambed consists of billions of synapses, in which one neuron sends signals to the next via chemical neurotransmitters. While scientists once believed that synapses could not be changed after formation, they now know that synapses are continuously strengthening, weakening, disappearing and reforming, as we learn new things and have new experiences.

While neuroscientists have long hypothesized that the key to our unique selves lies in those connections, this has proven impossible to test because the technology to map the connections did not exist. That is now changing, due to the efforts of Seung and a handful of other neuroscientists around the world.

At the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany, neuroscientists in the laboratory of Winfried Denk have taken extremely thin slices of brain tissue and generated electron-microscope images of all the neural connections within each slice. Similar high-resolution images are being acquired in the laboratory of Jeff Lichtman at Harvard University. However, the next step — mapping those connections — is extremely time-consuming. Seung estimates that it would take 100,000 years for a lone worker to trace the connections in one cubic millimeter of brain tissue.

To help speed that up, Seung and his colleagues have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system, which they presented at the International Conference on Computer Vision and the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference in 2009. However, the system still requires human guidance, so the researchers are enlisting the help of the general public through a website called eyewire.org. “The brain is like a vast jungle of neurons,” Seung says. “They’re like trees that are all tangled up together, and people can help us explore that.”

Participants in the Eyewire project will help guide the computer program when it loses track of where a neuronal extension goes amidst the tangle of neurons.

“The person can click the mouse and say color here, and the computer starts coloring again, and keeps going, and then stops again when it’s uncertain. So you’re guiding the computer,” Seung says. Furthermore, the AI system becomes “smarter” as people guide it, so it will need less and less help as it goes on.

Rather than tackling the human brain right away, the researchers are beginning with a 300- by 350- by 80-micron slice of mouse retinal tissue. Images of just this small piece of tissue take up a terabyte of data, or enough to hold 220 million pages of text.

In a review published in New Scientist, Terrence Sejnowski, the Francis Crick Professor of Computational Neurobiology at the Salk Institute, says the book “gives a sense of the excitement on the cutting edge of neuroscience.” Sejnowski points out that connectomics, just like genomics, will be aided by the rapid advance of technology. “Once a certain threshold has been achieved, something that seemed impossible becomes possible, and soon becomes routine,” he writes.

Miswired brains

While everyone’s connectomes are different, extreme differences may account for mental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. Neuroscientists have long speculated that autism and schizophrenia are caused by problems in brain wiring, but haven’t been able to test that theory. Once a typical human connectome has been mapped, scientists will be able to compare it to the wiring diagrams of small chunks of the brains of mice engineered to express autism or schizophrenia symptoms, in the hopes of figuring out why those disorders arise and, potentially, how to treat them.

“Finding those differences, of course, is not a cure or treatment, it’s just a starting point. But I would argue that being able to see those differences would be a huge step forward,” Seung says. “Imagine studying infectious diseases before there were microscopes. You could see the symptoms, but you couldn’t see the microbes. That’s why, for a long time, people didn’t believe schizophrenia had a biological basis, because they looked at the brain and there was nothing obviously wrong.”

In the last section of Connectome, Seung addresses some futuristic applications of connectomics, drawn directly from science fiction — ideas such as uploading human brains into computers or freezing bodies to preserve them until technology is developed to bring them back to life.

“My goal in those chapters is to point out that we can start to examine those dreams in a critical way,” Seung says. For example, he suggests that cryogenics is only a feasible plan if it can be shown that the connectome survives the freezing and thawing intact. “My point in those chapters is to introduce a dose of science into science fiction.”

James DiCarlo to head Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

James DiCarlo, associate professor of neuroscience, has been named head of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. His five-year term will begin March 1.

DiCarlo succeeds Mriganka Sur, who will leave his position as department head to become the director of the Simons Center for the Social Brain at MIT, a new initiative that aims to catalyze innovative research on the social brain and translate that work into the improved diagnosis and treatment of autism spectrum disorders.

“Mriganka Sur has led BCS through a period of spectacular growth,” says Marc Kastner, dean of the School of Science. “He developed strong working relationships with the new McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the new Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. He has hired a distinguished and diverse faculty, which has led the department into the very top rank in neuroscience and cognitive science, and consolidated the department in its new home in Building 46. It has been an honor and pleasure for me to work with him as a fellow department head and as dean, and I look forward to our continued collaboration in his role as director of the Simons Center for the Social Brain.”

DiCarlo’s research aims to discover how a complex network of brain regions enables rapid and effortless visual recognition of objects, and to translate that new knowledge into computational models of the brain. The ultimate goal of his research is to build a systematic, quantitative understanding of the neuronal computations that underlie the brain’s remarkable capacity for object recognition. This understanding will underlie new machine vision systems, will provide a basis for neural prosthetics to restore or augment lost senses, and might ultimately support an understanding of how perceptual processing is altered in human conditions such as agnosia, dyslexia and autism.

“Jim DiCarlo is an accomplished systems neuroscientist who has a deep appreciation of all aspects of research in the department — cognitive science, computational, systems, cellular and molecular neuroscience,” Kastner says. “He is deeply committed to the educational programs of the department and enhancing its cohesiveness as a community. I am committed to helping him reach his goals in these areas while maintaining the great intellectual strength of BCS.”

DiCarlo earned his BS from Northwestern University with highest distinction in biomedical engineering in 1990, and his PhD and MD in 1998 from Johns Hopkins University. Upon completion of his doctoral degrees, he spent a year as a postdoc at the Krieger Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins and continued his research at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Division of Neuroscience at the Baylor College of Medicine.

Since joining MIT in 2002, DiCarlo has received several awards for his research, such as the McKnight Scholar Award in Neuroscience, the Pew Scholar Award in Biomedical Sciences, the Surdna Research Foundation Award, and the Sloan Research Fellowship. He has also won the MIT School of Science Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

MIT faculty speak at the World Economic Forum in Davos

MIT President Susan Hockfield and about a dozen members of the MIT faculty traveled to Davos, Switzerland, last week to participate in the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The five-day meeting, which brings together leaders in business, politics, academia and other areas, hosted a variety of discussions revolving around this year’s theme: “The Great Transformation: Shaping New Models.”

A troubled global economy with high unemployment dominated many of the meeting’s conversations. In a panel on the future of economics, economists including Peter Diamond, Institute Professor Emeritus and a winner of last year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, and MIT graduates Bob Shiller and Joe Stiglitz agreed that many economic models failed to recognize the nature of the current economic crisis because they largely ignored the effects of contagion and connectedness — unable to factor in the financial connections between institutions and the global risk of bankruptcy cascades. Panelists said more attention to models recognizing the role of collateral and new models, such as those incorporating behavioral economics, may offer a more accurate outlook.

MIT researchers also said that basic research in neuroscience will play a significant role in shaping societies, behavior and economic progress. MIT President Susan Hockfield spoke at Davos of the importance of basic brain research in fields other than neuroscience.

“New findings from neuroscience will have profound implications in fields far beyond the brain and mind, and well beyond psychology or medicine,” Hockfield said.

An analysis of how human nature could improve society was the topic of discussion among faculty members H. Robert Horvitz, the David H. Koch Professor of Biology and a Nobel laureate; Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience; Alex “Sandy” Pentland, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences; and Tomaso Poggio, the Eugene McDermott Professor in the Brain Sciences and Human Behavior. One example is what the group termed “trust networks”: communities, such as open-source software users, that combine technical know-how with a certain amount of trust. Code creators, sharers and users need to trust each other in order to build on and propagate a software program. The researchers argued that understanding how trust plays into such large-scale networks may foster more successful innovations for society.

The researchers also discussed new advances in brain imaging, exploring the ever-closing gap between artificial and human intelligence. In the near future, they said, neuroscientists may be able to construct a precise model of the human brain, which could serve as a testing ground for potential therapies as well as a blueprint for artificially intelligent machines.

Yossi Sheffi, the Elisha Gray II Professor of Engineering Systems, moderated a panel on vulnerabilities in the global supply chain. Piracy, the effects of climate change, and weaknesses in cybersecurity are significant risks to the global trade of goods and services; panelists suggested that governments work together to reduce the impact of such risks.

Other MIT researchers who participated in Davos this year included Ed Boyden, the Benesse Career Development Associate Professor of Research in Education; Neil Gershenfeld, Director of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms; Carlo Ratti, Associate Professor of the Practice in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and Director of the SENSEable City Laboratory; Adèle Naudé Santos, Dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning; and Tim Berners-Lee, 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Ed Boyden participated in a panel on leadership, in which panelists looked at the complex pressures that leaders face, including rapidly changing environments, technology, and social crises. Carlo Ratti presented a project for a new, interactive urban design in Mexico, called Ciudad Creativa Digital, with Mexican president Felipe Calderon. Adèle Naudé Santos and Neil Gershenfeld contributed to a broad discussion on innovations in social and technological models. Gershenfeld noted that smart materials and the digital revolution have made it possible for ordinary people to create new technologies, while Santos argued that the physical environment — particularly modern cities — is essential to making connections between people.

Susan Hockfield and MIT hosted three private events: a breakfast discussion about neuroscience moderated by Nature Editor in Chief Philip Campbell and featuring Bob Horvitz, Nancy Kanwisher and Tomaso Poggio; a dinner discussion about the fate of the Eurozone featuring Peter Diamond and Nouriel Roubini, a Professor of Economics and International Business at New York University’s Stern School made famous for having predicted the housing crisis; and a reception for friends of MIT.

Hockfield, who serves as a Director of the WEF, said, “The large number of MIT faculty in attendance covered a lot of academic ground, but one message they all sent to Forum attendees was this: solving the toughest problems in the world requires science, mathematics and engineering. It’s an important message in any era and particularly important in times of fiscal austerity.”

Seeking the neurological roots of conflict

MIT postdoc Emile Bruneau has long been drawn to conflict — not as a participant, but an observer. In 1994, while doing volunteer work in South Africa, he witnessed firsthand the turmoil surrounding the fall of apartheid; during a 2001 trip to visit friends in Sri Lanka, he found himself in the midst of the violent conflict between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan military.

Those chance experiences got Bruneau, who taught high school science for several years, interested in the psychology of human conflict. While teaching, he also volunteered as counselor for a conflict-resolution camp in Ireland that brought Catholic and Protestant children together. At MIT, Bruneau is now working with associate professor of cognitive neuroscience Rebecca Saxe to figure out why empathy — the ability to feel compassion for another person’s suffering — often fails between members of opposing conflict groups.

“What are the psychological barriers that are put up between us in these contexts of intergroup conflict, and then, critically, what can we do to get past them?” Bruneau asks.

Bruneau and Saxe are also trying to locate patterns of brain activity that correlate with empathy, in hopes of eventually using such measures to determine how well people respond to reconciliation programs aimed at boosting empathy between groups in conflict.

“We’re interested in how people think about their enemies, and whether there are brain measures that are reliable readouts of that,” says Saxe, who is an associate member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. “This is a huge vision, of which we are at the very beginning.”

Before researchers can use tools such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to evaluate whether conflict-resolution programs are having any effect, they need to identify brain regions that respond to other people’s emotional suffering. In a study published Dec. 1 in Neuropsychologia, Saxe and Bruneau scanned people’s brains as they read stories in which the protagonist experienced either physical or emotional pain. The brain regions that responded uniquely to emotional suffering overlapped with areas known to be involved in the ability to perceive what another person is thinking or feeling.

Failures of empathy

Hoping to see a correlation between empathy levels and amount of activity in those brain regions, the researchers then recruited Israelis and Arabs for a study in which subjects read stories about the suffering of members of their own groups or that of conflict-group members. The study participants also read stories about a distant, neutral group — South Americans.

As expected, Israelis and Arabs reported feeling much more compassion in response to the suffering of their own group members than that of members of the conflict group. However, the brain scans revealed something surprising: Brain activity in the areas that respond to emotional pain was identical when reading about suffering by one’s own group or the conflict group. Also, those activity levels were lower when Arabs or Israelis read about the suffering of South Americans, even though Arabs and Israelis expressed more compassion for South Americans’ suffering than for that of the conflict group.

Those findings, published Jan. 23 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, suggest that those brain regions are sensitive to the importance of the opposing group, not whether or not you like them.

Joan Chiao, an assistant professor of psychology at Northwestern University, says those brain regions may be acting as a “thermometer” for conflict. “It’s a really fascinating study because it’s the first to examine the neural basis of people’s behavior in longstanding conflicts, as opposed to groups that are distant and don’t have a long history of intergroup strife,” says Chiao, who was not involved in the research.

However, because the study did not reveal any correlation between the expression of empathy and the amount of brain activity, more study is needed before MRI can be used as a reliable measure of empathy levels, Saxe says.

“We thought there might be brain regions where the amount of activity was just a simple function of the amount of empathy that you experience,” Saxe says. “Since that’s not what we found, we don’t know what the amount of activity in these brain regions really means yet. This is basically a first baby step, and one of the things it tells us is that we don’t know enough about these brain regions to use them in the ways that we want to.”

Bruneau is now testing whether these brain regions send messages to different parts of the brain depending on whether the person is feeling empathy or not. He hypothesizes that when someone reads about the suffering of an in-group member, the brain regions identified in this study send information to areas that process unpleasant emotions, while stories about suffering of a conflict-group member activate an area called the ventral striatum, which has been implicated in schadenfreude — taking pleasure in the suffering of others.

Take it, it'll make you shoot better

Advances in could be used by the military to help make soldiers more deadly on the battlefield. Ian Sample reports. Soldiers could have their minds plugged directly into weapons systems, undergo brain scans during recruitment and take courses ...

Building a better weapon through

LONDON - Directed energy weapons that use wave beams to cause pain, and electrical brain stimulation that boosts a soldier's combat ability - it may sound like science fiction warfare, but experts say advances in mean it's on the horizon.

The Of Search & Conversion

It’s easy to think that our search visitors aren’t coming with any brain at all. How can they possibly decide against what we have to offer? If they weren’t going to take action, click on the ad? It turns out that they do have brains, and the people ...

UPDATED: AstraZeneca cutting 2,200 R&D jobs, slashing in restructuring

Hit with sliding profits, a weak late-stage pipeline and a troubling track record on clinical trials, AstraZeneca ($AZN) has decided to trigger another round of layoffs, with 2,200 R&D staffers losing their jobs in this round. Part of a broader ...