Free Republic

As reported by United Kingdom New Sources such as the London Telegraph and UK Daily Express, Extended use of cellular phones could lead to elevated risks of developing cancer according to a 10 year long study. A report overseen by the World Health Organization which surveyed 12,800 people in 13 countries and will be published later this year, has allegedly found that heavy use of cellular phones can contribute to the development of brain cancer. According to the study, those who regularly used mobiles for longer than 10 years were almost 40 percent more likely to develop nervous system tumors...

Using the internet for just a few days alters our brains – and may help improve cognitive function in the elderly, according to new research. Scans of the brains of adults who had been immersed in the internet for the first time found that activity in parts of the brain used in memory and decision-making had increased.

MONDAY, Oct. 19 (HealthDay News) -- Surfing the Internet just might be a way to preserve your mental skills as you age. Researchers found that older adults who started browsing the Web experienced improved brain function after only a few days. "You can teach an old brain new technology tricks," said Dr. Gary Small, a psychiatry professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of iBrain. With people who had little Internet experience, "we found that after just a week of practice, there was a much greater extent...

Playing the classic puzzle game Tetris can boost your brain power, according to a new study. The three-month study, by the Mind Research Network, found adolescent girls who played Tetris not only displayed greater brain efficiency, but developed a thicker brain cortex, a sign of increased grey matter. Clinical neuropsychologist Dr Rex Jung said one of the most surprising findings of brain research in the past five years was that juggling game play increased grey matter in the motor areas of the brain. Study co-author Dr Richard Haier said Tetris had proved useful for brain researchers. "Tetris for the brain...

By carefully analyzing brain activity, scientists can tell what number a person has just seen, research now reveals. They can similarly tell how many dots a person was presented with. Past investigations had uncovered brain cells in monkeys that were linked with numbers. Although scientists had found brain regions linked with numerical tasks in humans - the frontal and parietal lobes, to be exact - until now patterns of brain activity linked with specific numbers had proven elusive. Scientists had 10 volunteers watch either numerals or dots on a screen while a part of their brain known as the intraparietal...

Scientists at Georgia State University have uncovered the mechanisms of how pain in infancy alters how the brain processes pain in adulthood. Research is now indicating that infants who spent time in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) show altered pain sensitivity in adolescence. These results have profound implications and highlight the need for pre-emptive and post-operative pain medicine for newborn infants. The study, published online in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, sheds light on how the mechanisms of pain are altered after infant injury in a region of the brain called the periaqueductal gray, which is involved in...

The standard explanation for what causes Alzheimer's is known as the amyloid hypothesis, which posits that the disease results from of an accumulation of the peptide amyloid beta, the toxic protein fragments that deposit in the brain and become the sticky plaques that have defined Alzheimer's for more than 100 years. Billions of dollars are spent yearly targeting this toxic peptide — but what if this is the wrong target? What if the disease begins much earlier, fueled by a natural process? Reporting in the current edition of the journal Neurobiology of Aging, UCLA professor of psychiatry George Bartzokis argues...

WASHINGTON (AP) - More than 35 million people around the world are living with Alzheimer's disease or other types of dementia, says the most in-depth attempt yet to assess the brain-destroying illness—and it's an ominous forecast as the population grays. The new count is about 10 percent higher than what scientists had predicted just a few years ago, because earlier research underestimated Alzheimer's growing impact in developing countries. Barring a medical breakthrough, the World Alzheimer Report projects dementia will nearly double every 20 years. By 2050, it will affect a staggering 115.4 million people, the report concludes.

Miami, FL (AHN) - Babies fed formula supplemented with an essential fatty acid found in breast milk have higher cognitive skills than babies fed formula alone, according to a new study. Previous research already showed the cognitive benefits of breastfeeding, but University of Texas researchers and scientists with the Retina Foundation of the Southwest said they have discovered that the fatty acid docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, could be the reason. The scientists studied 229 infants receiving either formula or a combination of formula and DHA. The babies were given the different formulas either shortly after they were born, after six...

Unlike any man-made computer, the brain is made of living cells that must constantly change as we acquire new skills and information. It appears that the physical architecture of the brain itself changes in response to our experiences. Such a marvelous design makes it possible for us to grow and adapt to our changing environment...

Finding could offer insight into autism and other disorders Related Links: Dr. Ralph Adolphs Pasadena, Calif.—In a finding that sheds new light on the neural mechanisms involved in social behavior, neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have pinpointed the brain structure responsible for our sense of personal space.The discovery, described in the August 30 issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, could offer insight into autism and other disorders where social distance is an issue.The structure, the amygdala—a pair of almond-shaped regions located in the medial temporal lobes—was previously known to process strong negative emotions, such as anger and...

A new study finds obese people have 8 percent less brain tissue than normal-weight individuals. Their brains look 16 years older than the brains of lean individuals, researchers said today. Those classified as overweight have 4 percent less brain tissue and their brains appear to have aged prematurely by 8 years. The results, based on brain scans of 94 people in their 70s, represent "severe brain degeneration," said Paul Thompson, senior author of the study and a UCLA professor of neurology. "That's a big loss of tissue and it depletes your cognitive reserves, putting you at much greater risk of...

> "The huge finding is, the more media people use the worse they are at using any media. We were totally shocked," Clifford Nass, a professor at Stanford's communications department, said in a telephone interview. >

Seeking. You can't stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges' instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for information we don't even care about. Nina Shen Rastogi confessed in Double X, "My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping...

Michael Jackson's brain has been returned to his family in a move that could finally see him buried. The organ was removed from the 50-year-old singer's body following his death on June 25. Pathologists then carried out tests in an attempt to discover what killed him.

Scientists have long searched for a biological basis for psychopathy, a behavioral disorder attributed to chronic immorality. While previous studies have found no clear evidence, Professor Declan Murphy of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London believes he has found an area of the brain that is decidedly different in a psychopath as compared to a normal person. It is unsurprising that much of the research to date has focused on the amygdale (the part of the brain involved with emotions and aggression) and the orbitofrontal cortex (which deals in decision making). However, an unstudied area is the uncinate...

July 28, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Scientists are stunned to discover that a ten-year-old German girl's brain has rewired itself to allow her to see out of one eye as though she has two, even though half of her brain tissue was entirely missing from birth. In a report published this week in the online version of the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Lars Muckli, a neuroscientist at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, said, "Despite lacking one hemisphere, she's capable of living a normal life."The girl, called AH in the study, was born with only one...

When we daydream about the future, we tend to focus on the fabulous belongings we're going to have. Jet packs, flying cars, weapons to kill aliens, cell phones that make today's sleek models look clunky -- you name it, we're going to have it. We don't tend to focus, however, on who we'll be in the future. Most of us probably picture ourselves exactly the same, though maybe thinner, as surely we'll all have robot personal trainers by then. While we see the world's technology evolving to meet our needs, we may not think about how we ourselves might be...

The parents of Sam Esquibel know him only as a miracle baby. The Colorado Springs infant survived surgery to remove what was believed to be a tumor when he was just 3 days old. "The doctors said to us, 'This one is for the books,' " mom Tiffnie Esquibel said. Inside the microscopic tumor was what looked like the formations of two feet, a hand and thigh. "To find a perfectly formed structure (like this) is extremely unique, unusual, borderline unheard of," said Dr. Paul Grabb, the veteran pediatric neurosurgeon who performed the operation on Sam at Colorado Springs' Memorial...

Almost four decades ago, the 26th Amendment lowered the US voting age to 18.  At the time, most neurologists believed that the human brain was fully developed by about age 12, so allowing Americans to vote at 18 seemed like a safe move. But parents of teenagers knew that was nonsense, and new research is confirming those parental observations.  Since the voting age was lowered in 1971, scientific advancements such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) allowed researchers to get detailed three-dimensional images of developing brains. Although human brains typically reach their adult size by age 12, they are far from...

July 16, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - 30-week-old babies in the womb already have short-term memory capabilities, a new study from the Netherlands, published in the July/August 2009 issue of the journal Child Development, has found.Researchers at Maastricht University Medical Centre and the University Medical Centre St. Radboud examined 93 healthy pregnant Dutch women and their unborn children, measuring changes in how the child responds to repeated stimulation. The children were tested at 30, 32, 34, and 36 weeks, and again at 38 weeks gestation.  The study showed that the unborn children would initially respond to a "vibroacoustic" stimulus. The stimulus would...

Belmont Club July 12th, 2009 4:36 amLeft brain, right brain <a href="http://harvest.AdGardener.com/noscript.aspx?s=167&c=a9b065f5-2460-de11-908e-001a4befa6a0" target="_blank"><img src="http://harvest.AdGardener.com/noscript.aspx?s=167&w=300&h=250&c=a9b065f5-2460-de11-908e-001a4befa6a0" width="300" height="250" border="0" /></a> A 2005 study by the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining described the state of the political blogosphere in 2004 Presidential elections, at a time when this medium was beginning to be important. It was a period when 9% of Internet users categorized themselves as ‘frequent’ or ’sometime’ readers of blogsites, a number significant enough to warrant attention.  Howard Dean famously issued his information bulletins through them and “the Democratic and Republican parties further signaled the established position of...

Michael Jackson's brain will be returned to his family for burial after tests to ascertain the cause of death have been completed, US officials in Los Angeles said.

Enlarge Caffeine treatment removed the beta amyloid plaques from the brains of the Alzheimer's mice. Credit: Photo courtesy of Florida Alzheimer's Disease Research Center Coffee drinkers may have another reason to pour that extra cup. When aged mice bred to develop symptoms of Alzheimer's disease were given caffeine - the equivalent of five cups of coffee a day - their memory impairment was reversed, report University of South Florida researchers at the Florida Alzheimer's Disease Research Center. Back-to-back studies published online today in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, show caffeine significantly decreased abnormal levels of the protein linked to...

Scientists have uncovered powerful evidence that caffeine not only helps to stave off the disease but can treat it. They hope soon to follow up the initial results from animal experiments with human patient trials. US neuroscientist Dr Gary Arendash, who led the research, said: "The new findings provide evidence that caffeine could be a viable 'treatment' for established Alzheimer's disease, and not simply a protective strategy. "That's important because caffeine is a safe drug for most people. It easily enters the brain, and it appears to directly affect the disease process." A key aspect of Alzheimer's is sticky clumps...

Michael Jackson will be buried this week– without his brain. As his family tries to finalise details for the King of Pop’s funeral on Tuesday they have been told it will be held back for tests. They faced the grim choice of waiting up to three weeks for Jackson’s brain to be returned to them or go ahead and bury him without it – which they have decided to do. Los Angeles Coroner’s spokesman Craig Harvey confirmed that neuropathology tests will be carried out to see if it holds any clues to the exact cause of his death. But the...

A piece of research has shown that anger or mental stress can increase the flow of blood in the brain. Led by Tasneem Naqvi and Hahn Hyuhn from the University of Southern California and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the study involved a series of ultrasound experiments. It showed that mental stress causes carotid artery dilation, and increases brain blood flow. The researchers say that that dilatory reflex was absent in people with high blood pressure. They evaluated carotid artery reactivity and brain blood flow in response to mental stress in 10 healthy young volunteers (aged between 19 and 27 years), 20...

LONDON: The smell of fear really does exist, according to a new study, which also suggests that being terrified is infectious. The study, conducted by Dr Bettina Pause and colleagues at the University of Dusseldorf in Germany, suggests that people subconsciously detect whether others are scared by picking up chemicals they release from their bodies. Researchers believe the signals can be contagious and can spread around a group. For the study, researchers put cotton pads under the armpits of 49 student volunteers before they were due to start a university exam, reports the Telegraph. Pause and colleagues also collected sweat...

The human body, much like a computer, contains myriad data processors. They include, but are not limited to, the chemical-electrical activity of the brain, heart, and peripheral nervous system, the signals sent from the cortex region of the brain to other parts of our body, the tiny hair cells in the inner ear that process auditory signals, and the light-sensitive retina and cornea of the eye that process visual activity.[2] We are on the threshold of an era in which these data processors of the human body may be manipulated or debilitated. Examples of unplanned attacks on the body's data-processing...

Researchers have found convincing evidence that using a tool for just a few minutes can have a lasting effect on how someone perceives the size and position of their body. A team led by Alessandro Farnè and Lucilla Cardinali of Claude Bernard University in Lyon, France, assessed the effects of using a grabber tool, similar to those used by litter collectors, on volunteers' body schema -- the brain's sense of where different body parts are in space... Farnè points out that the effects are subtle -- a difference of a few millimetres in estimated length -- and not enough to...

Scientists at the University of Alberta have found that there are significant differences in the way our brains function depending on whether we're early risers or night owls. Neuroscientists in the Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation looked at two groups of people: those who wake up early and feel most productive in the morning, and those who were identified as evening people, those who typically felt livelier at night. Study participants were initially grouped after completing a standardized questionnaire about their habits. Using magnetic resonance imaging-guided brain stimulation, scientists tested muscle torque and the excitability of pathways through the...

No direct impact caused Paul McQuigg’s brain injury in Iraq three years ago. And no wound from the incident visibly explains why Mr. McQuigg, now an office manager at a California Marine base, can get lost in his own neighborhood or arrive at the grocery store having forgotten why he left home. But his blast injury — concussive brain trauma caused by an explosion’s invisible force waves — is no less real to him than a missing limb is to other veterans. Just how real could become clearer after he dies, when doctors slice up his brain to examine any...

NORTH AMERICANS of my generation grew up with the 1970s children’s record Free to Be...You and Me, on which Rosey Grier, an immense former football star, sang ‘It’s Alright to Cry’. The message: girls could be tough, and boys were allowed not to be. For almost 40 years, that era’s Western feminist critique of rigid sex-role stereotyping has prevailed. In many ways, it has eroded or even eliminated the kind of arbitrary constraints that turned peaceable boys into aggressive men and stuck ambitious girls in low-paying jobs. Feminists understandably have often shied away from scientific evidence that challenges this critique...

WASHINGTON, June 10, 2009 – When Army Col. (Dr.) Kenneth Lee began evaluating more than 3,000 Wisconsin Army National Guardsmen called to duty last fall in the state’s largest operational deployment since World War II to ensure their medical readiness, he approached the task with unique and personal insights. Army Col. (Dr.) Ken Lee applies his own experience with a traumatic brain injury to his work as the Wisconsin National Guard’s state surgeon and as chief of spinal cord injury division at the Zablocki Veterans Administration Medical Center in Milwaukee. DoD photo by Donna Miles  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution...

Seeking signs of genius, a researcher recently reconstructed the shape of Albert Einstein's brain with techniques normally used to analyze fossils. This mold of thought, she believes, reveals the imprint of a rare intelligence that transformed our understanding of space, time and energy. By studying photographs of Einstein's brain taken at his death in 1955, paleoanthropologist Dean Falk at Florida State University identified a dozen subtle variations in its surface that may have heightened his ability to see physics in a new way. Her research suggests how the brain shaped the inner life of the 20th century's most famous mind....

A DAILY dose of the “wonder drug” aspirin can cause bleeding in the brain, researchers have found. Brain scans on more than 1,000 patients revealed a 70 per cent higher incidence of microscopic bleeding among those taking the drug. The shock findings will be of major concern to the millions of Britons who take aspirin every day to stave off fatal heart attacks and strokes. The drug is used to thin the blood, which reduces the risk of dangerous clots forming in key blood vessels. Previous research has already shown that anti-clotting medicines can increase the risk of bleeding in...

Scientists may one day be able to find out what a young child’s personality will be like by simply scanning their brain, new research has shown. New research has found that the shape of your brain gives a clue to what type of person you are. The differences in the shape of the brains of 85 people were scanned and measured. They found that larger or smaller amounts of tissue in certain areas of the brains were linked to specific personality traits...

Man was hit by his own spear that ricocheted off rocks during dive

BANGALORE: In a breakthrough that could allow detection of brain defects in foetuses, researchers from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS), have discovered a gene that causes microcephaly, a disorder in which the brain is of reduced size, affecting mental and intellectual faculties. The finding will help thousands of expectant mothers in detecting the deformity (by identifying the gene) at the foetal stage, something that can prevent children with brain disorders from being born. This is the first time that the gene, named STIL, has been shown to cause...

Is marijuana less dangerous than alcohol? (PhysOrg.com) -- It appears that when it comes to teen brain development, parents should be more worried about alcohol abuse than marijuana abuse. Two recent studies have been published showing that alcohol -- a legal substance (though not legal for teens in the U.S.) -- is considered more dangerous than marijuana, which is illegal in many countries. One study has been published in the U.S., in the journal Clinical EEG and neuroscience: official journal of the EEG and Clinical Neuroscience Society (ENCS), and shows that alcohol has a stronger effect on teen brain...

Dough, wonga, greenbacks, cash. Just words, you might say, but they carry an eerie psychological force. Chew them over for a few moments, and you will become a different person. Simply thinking about words associated with money seems to makes us more self-reliant and less inclined to help others. And it gets weirder: just handling cash can take the sting out of social rejection and even diminish physical pain. This is all the stranger when you consider what money is supposed to be. For economists, it is nothing more than a tool of exchange that makes economic life more efficient....

Symptoms of Parkinson's disease in mice disappeared when their brains were stimulated via spinal electrodes A ground-breaking medical device that eliminates the symptoms of Parkinson's disease by electrically stimulating the brain could be tested in humans as early as next year, according to scientists working on the project.The device has produced dramatic improvements in mice with a Parkinson's-like disease, raising hopes that it could transform the lives of the four million people worldwide who have the devastating condition.In tests, mice that suffered constant tremors and were barely able to walk because of the disease started moving around, groomed themselves and...

The journal New Scientist has recently run an article called Born Believers: How your brain creates God (especially in hard financial times)1… Towards the latter end of the article is a disclaimer that ‘All the researchers involved stress that none of this says anything about the existence or otherwise of gods.’ However, the tenor of the article, including the title, militates strongly that the author’s preferred reality is that, yes folks, “your brain creates God.� The article initially suggests that “God� is created in our brains as a result of “an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive�....

Former top Bush aides Karl Rove and Harriet Miers agreed Wednesday to testify before Congress under oath about the firings of U.S. attorneys, a controversy involving allegations of political interference that grew into a constitutional standoff between two branches of government. The Bush White House had fought attempts to force Rove and Miers to testify, and the agreement — steered by aides to President Barack Obama — ended that dispute. Both the White House and lawmakers, especially now that Democrat Obama has replaced Republican George W. Bush — were leery of having a judge settle the question about the limits...

Social networking websites are causing alarming changes in the brains of young users, an eminent scientist has warned. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo are said to shorten attention spans, encourage instant gratification and make young people more self-centred. The claims from neuroscientist Susan Greenfield will make disturbing reading for the millions whose social lives depend on logging on to their favourite websites each day. But they will strike a chord with parents and teachers who complain that many youngsters lack the ability to communicate or concentrate away from their screens. More than 150million use Facebook to keep in...

Days after doctors told Jenna Lester, 16, she had a virus she was dead from a brain haemorrhage. Her mum has battled for answers ever since. As Sonia Lester anxiously stroked her daughter Jenna’s hair, she hoped that the 16-year-old’s symptoms really were nothing more than a tummy bug. Jenna had suffered crippling headaches and aching eyes for weeks before she collapsed at home and was rushed to hospital. Doctors diagnosed a stomach virus – despite the family’s pleas to give her a brain scan. She was sent home but a week later suffered a massive seizure. Back at the...

Miami, FL (AHN) - The more coffee you drink, the less chance you will end up developing mental impairments later in life, a new study suggests. A team of Danish and Swedish researchers concluded in a recent study that middle-aged coffee drinkers could have a significantly less risk of developing dementia, including Alzheimer's disease, later on in life. The team tracked the coffee habits of 1,409 middle-aged men and women for 21 years. During that time, 61 participants developed dementia, 48 of whom developed Alzheimer's. The researchers controlled for socioeconomic factors and health risks like high blood pressure and high...

Anticipatory brain mechanism may be complicating MRI studies. Blood vessel activation in the brain. The dark central area is the response to a visual stimulus.Y. Sirotin & A. Das Popular brain-imaging techniques may be painting a misleading picture of brain activity, according to a new study.Scientists using techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) make the assumption that blood flow into a particular brain region is directly linked to the amount of activity in the cells of that region. This is because active cells need more oxygen, and blood ferries it to them.But a study by Aniruddha Das and...

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it's long been recognized that city life is exhausting -- that's why Picasso left Paris -- this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

A team of American researchers attracted national attention last year when they announced results of a study that, they said, reveal key factors that will influence how swing voters cast their ballots in the upcoming presidential election. The researchers didn’t gain these miraculous insights by polling their subjects. They scanned their brains. Theirs was just the latest in a lengthening skein of studies that use new brain-scan technology to plumb the mysteries of the American political mind. But politics is just the beginning. It’s hard to pick up a newspaper without reading some newly minted neuroscientific explanation for complex human...