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- Category: News
by Ingfei Chen
Will advances in neuroscience make the justice system more accurate and unbiased? Or could brain-based testing wrongly condemn some and trample the civil liberties of others? The new field of neurolaw is cross-examining for answers.
In August 2008, Hank Greely received an e-mail from an International Herald Tribune correspondent in Mumbai seeking a bioethicist's perspective on an unusual murder case in India: A woman had been convicted of killing her ex-fiancé with arsenic, and the circumstantial evidence against her included a brain-scan test that purportedly showed she had a memory—or "experiential knowledge"—of committing the crime.
Read more: The Court Will Now Call its Expert Witness: the Brain
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- Parent Category: Imaging
- Category: Optics
by Anne Trafton
Quantum mechanics could help build ultra-high-resolution electron microscopes that won't destroy living cells, according to MIT electrical engineers.
Electron microscopes are the most powerful type of microscope, capable of distinguishing even individual atoms. However, these microscopes cannot be used to image living cells because the electrons destroy the samples.
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- Category: Medical
James Oliver picked up an Xbox game controller, looked up to a video screen and used the device's buttons and joystick to fly through a patient's chest cavity for an up-close look at the bottom of the heart.
And there was a sight doctors had never seen before: an accurate, 3-D view inside a patient's body accessible with a personal computer. A view doctors can shift, adjust, turn, zoom and replay at will. Software that uses real patient data from CT and MRI scans. Software doctors can use to plan a surgery or a round of radiation therapy. Software that can be used to teach physiology and anatomy. Software that puts virtual reality technology developed at Iowa State University to work helping doctors and patients, teachers and students. Software that's now being sold by an Ames startup company, BodyViz.com.
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- Parent Category: Imaging
- Category: Medical
A recently devised method of imaging the chemical communication and warfare between microorganisms could lead to new antibiotics, antifungal, antiviral and anti-cancer drugs, said a Texas AgriLife Research scientist.
"Translating metabolic exchange with imaging mass spectrometry," was published Nov. 8 in Nature Chemical Biology, a prominent scientific journal. The article describes a technique developed by a collaborative team that includes Dr. Paul Straight, AgriLife Research scientist in the department of biochemistry and biophysics at Texas A&M University in College Station, Dr. Pieter Dorrestein, Yu-Liang Yang and Yuquan Xu, all at the University of California, San Diego.
Read more: New imaging technique could lead to better antibiotics and cancer drugs
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Common experience tells us that particular scents of childhood can leave quite an impression, for better or for worse. Now, researchers reporting the results of a brain imaging study online on November 5th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, show that first scents really do enjoy a "privileged" status in the brain.
"We found that the first pairing or association between an object and a smell had a distinct signature in the brain," even in adults, said Yaara Yeshurun of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. "This 'etching' of initial odor memories in the brain was equal for good and bad smells, yet was unique to odor." Sounds did not have the same effect, the research showed.
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- Category: Medical
by Debra Kain
A study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine reports a significant breakthrough in explaining gaps in scientists’ understanding of human brain function. The study – which provides a picture of language processing in the brain with unprecedented clarity – will be published in the October 16 issue of the journal Science.
Read more: Rare Procedure Documents How the Human Brain Computes Language