Scientists say for the first time they have understood someone’s thoughts by looking at what their brain is doing.
The hippocampus is widely known to be integral to memory, but researchers say they now see just how images are stored and recalled in this part of the brain.
Wellcome Trust scientists trained four participants to recognise several virtual reality environments.
Discernible patterns in brain activity then signalled where they were, they wrote in the journal Current Biology.
Neurons in the hippocampus, also known as “place cells”, activate when we move around to tell us where we are.
Robin Williams has postponed the remainder of his comedy tour so he can undergo heart surgery.
Concerns were raised about Williams’ health on Wednesday when he was ordered by doctors to take a week of rest after complaining of shortness of breath.
Reports on today suggested the comedy actor has been admitted to a Miami hospital to undergo tests, prompting his spokesperson to confirm Williams is putting work on hold to be treated for a heart condition.
A wheelchair-mounted robotic arm controlled by thought alone has been created by scientists at the University of South Florida.
The device could give people with amytrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or full body paralysis the ability to perform simple day to day functions that would otherwise be impossible.
“We aren’t reading people’s thoughts,” said Redwan Alqasemi, a scientist at the University of South Florida who, along with Rajiv Dubey and Emanuel Donchin of USF, helped develop the software and hardware. “This is the first time a person with severe disabilities like ALS can perform daily activities for themselves.”
Researchers have discovered human antibodies that neutralise not only H5N1 bird flu, but other strains of influenza as well. They now hope to develop them into life-saving treatments.
The antibodies — immune system proteins that attach to invaders such as viruses —also might be used to protect frontline workers and others at high risk in case a pandemic of flu broke out, the researchers said.
In seeming contradiction to previous studies where findings supported the benign or beneficial effects of alcohol consumption, a current study by researchers at the University of Oxford in Great Britain has linked even minimal alcohol use and cancer in women. The type of alcohol consumed was irrelevant.
The so-called Million Women Study of middle-aged women in the United Kingdom found that low to moderate consumption of alcohol increased the risk of and might be responsible for 13 percent of breast, liver, rectal and certain digestive tract cancers.
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China on Saturday approved a long-awaited food safety law, state media reported, in a bid to end repeated scandals involving dangerous food products in the country.
The law has been in the works since October last year after a huge scandal erupted over contaminated milk which killed at least six children and sickened nearly 300,000 others in China.
“The law will see the establishment of a monitoring and supervision system, a set of national standards on food safety, a recall system, and severe punishment for offenders,” the official Xinhua news agency said.
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HIV is evolving rapidly to escape the human immune system, an international study has shown.
The Nature study highlights just how tough it could be to develop a vaccine that keeps pace with the changing nature of the virus.
The researchers showed HIV was able to adapt rapidly to counter human genes controlling immune system molecules that can target it for destruction.
However, they stressed this would not affect the impact of anti-HIV drugs.
The Philippines will slaughter 6,000 pigs at a hog farm north of the capital Manila to prevent the spread of the Ebola-Reston virus, health and farm officials said on Monday.
But the government has lifted a quarantine on a second hog farm after tests by experts from the World Health Organisation (WHO), World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and Food and the Agriculture Organisation (FAO) showed no more signs of the disease.
The country has more than 13 million heads of swine and the discovery of Ebola-Reston on two hog farms north of Manila was isolated, the government said.
“There is ongoing viral transmission in Bulacan … as a precautionary measure, depopulation will be carried out in the Bulacan farm,” Health Secretary Francisco Duque told reporters, referring to the farm just north of Manila.
The government said 6,000 pigs would be killed, burned and buried as experts sought to determine the source of Ebola-Reston in pigs as well as pig-to-pig and from pig-to-human transmission. Duque said 147 human samples have been tested for Ebola, but only six have tested positive. But all six remain healthy, he added.
“Ebola-Reston poses a low risk to human health at this time,” Duque said.
It is the first time the virus has been found outside monkeys and the first time it has been found in pigs. The virus had previously jumped from monkeys to humans but this was the first case of a jump from hogs.
The Ebola-Reston virus was found in the Philippines as early as the late 1980s and 25 people were found infected after contact with sick monkeys. But only one developed flu-like symptoms and later recovered.
Manila to slaughter 6,000 pigs to stop Ebola spread
A man who may be the biological father of Nadya Suleman’s octuplets says he is willing to help the single mother of 14, even though he is not certain it was his donated sperm that she used to become pregnant.
In an exclusive interview airing this Monday on “Good Morning America,” the possible father said Suleman brought him to the clinic at which she received in vitro fertilization to donate sperm, and that he made donations on two other occasions. He now believes Suleman was married at the time.
Tune in to ABC News’ “Good Morning America” Monday, Feb. 23 to learn the identity of the man who possibly fathered the Suleman octuplets.
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WASHINGTON: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the first new treatment for gout in more than 40 years, a company said Saturday.
Takeda Inc. said Uloric, a once-daily drug, was approved by the FDA on Friday to fight gout, a painful joint disease that mainly strikes middle-aged men. About 5 million people in the U.S. suffer from gout, a form of arthritis caused by a build-up of uric acid in the blood.
