Cutting Edge

Early-warning software could reduce false alarms of seizures

Of the 50 million people worldwide estimated to have epilepsy, almost a third do not respond to treatment. Those patients must rely on implantable anti-seizure devices that detect pre-seizure electrical activity and shoot small electrical impulses to the brain to interrupt the seizures.

The downside is that the tech, still early in development, also produces false positives, causing devices to send currents to the brain when a seizure is not actually occurring. One new approach, developed by a biomedical and electrical engineer at Johns Hopkins University, appears to reduce those false alarms.

Tested on real-time recordings of brain activity in more

Microfluidic chip to quickly diagnose the flu

During the H1N1 flu pandemic of 2009, which spread across more than 200 countries and killed more than 18,000 people, it became clear that flu diagnosis was often taking too long and resulting in frequent false negatives.

Today, researchers from Boston University, Harvard, and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are reporting in the journal PLoS ONE that they have built a microfluidic chip that rivals in accuracy the gold-standard diagnostic test known as RT-PCR but is faster, cheaper, and disposable.

For their four-year study, which involved 146 patients with flu-like symptoms and was funded by the National Institutes more

Living 'gut-on-a-chip' to help study intestinal disorders

After describing a living, breathing "lung-on-a-chip" in Science back in the summer of 2010, Harvard researchers are now reporting in the journal Lab on a Chip on their latest endeavor: a human gut-on-a-chip.

These bio-inspired micro devices that mimic the structures, behaviors, and environments of human organs could help scientists better understand the inner workings of a variety of diseases and disorders -- in this case intestinal ones such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis -- without resorting to often less reliable animal testing.

The latest so-called "gut-on-a-chip" is a silicon polymer device whose central chamber is lined by more

MIT study: Light alone can activate specific memories

In a famous surgery in the early 1900s, Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, trying to treat epilepsy, found that stimulating specific neurons while patients were under local anesthesia caused them to vividly recall complex events. The mind, then, is based on matter, Penfield concluded.

Now researchers at MIT say they put this observation to the test in a rigorous study showing that the direct reactivation of specific hippocampus neurons can lead to very specific memory recall. And to do this, all they used was light.

"We demonstrate that behavior based on high-level cognition, such as the expression of a specific memory, more

Gaming can inspire healthy behavior, study shows

In the video game Re-Mission, players are tasked with piloting the microscopic robot Roxxi to blast away cancer cells as she navigates the bodies of fictional cancer patients.

A new study that took real-time functional MRI scans of 57 people randomly assigned to either play the game or watch it being played has found that those who played exhibited increased activity in the brain's positive motivation circuits, while those who merely observed exhibited no increase in activity.

"Identifying a direct connection between the stimulation of neural circuits and game play is a key step in unlocking the potential for more

Not so fast, neutrinos. CERN says light's speedier still

New experimental evidence is helping disprove last year's highly surprising finding of neutrinos breaking established physics laws by traveling faster than light.

The finding involved clocking the neutrinos--tiny, nearly massless subatomic particles--as they traveled from the CERN particle accelerator near Geneva to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, about 730km away. An experiment called Opera found the neutrinos taking less time to arrive than light would, but now another Gran Sasso experiment, Icarus, showed neutrinos making the journey at a more sedate pace under light speed, CERN said.

That finding comes after news in February that a fiber-optic connection problem more

NASA: Space flight may harm your eyesight

One can imagine that flying up to space can do peculiar things to one's body. And, in the case of a couple of astronauts who have returned, to one's mind.

Yet new research from NASA suggests that prolonged periods in the bluey-black beyond might cause serious damage to your eyes.

Space.com offers a chilling view of brain scan tests performed on 27 astronauts who had spent an average of 108 days away floating up there.

As they used to say in soothing TV commercials, I am not a doctor. However, the conclusion that a third of the more

Parkinson's patients test video games as therapy (video)

An estimated 1.5 million Americans have Parkinson's disease, which causes slowness of movement, tremors, and loss of balance. Physical therapy can ease symptoms and may delay progression of the disease. Now, cutting-edge tech is transforming everyday therapy into entertaining exercises.

Parkinson's patients recently took part in a University of California at San Francisco study to see if special video games could replace their regular exercises. Scientific researchers and game developers came together to create the therapeutic games. Check out this SmartPlanet video that explores the technology.

This video originally appeared on SmartPlanet with the headline "Video games replace physical therapy for Parkinson's patients." more

Bad data connection could explain too-fast neutrinos

A relatively mundane data-link problem could explain last year's surprising finding that subatomic particles called neutrinos appeared to violate physics laws by traveling faster than the speed of light.

Problems with a fiber-optic link in the Opera experiment "could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos," CERN, the European nuclear physics center that generated the neutrinos for the experiment, said in a statement today. The fiber fed GPS location data into the experiment's master clock.

Too short a travel time to the destination--Italy's National Institute of Nuclear Physics lab at Gran more

Nifty stem-cell engineering sheds light on Parkinson's disease

Researchers at the University at Buffalo may have taken a significant step toward unraveling the way Parkinson's disease assails the human nervous system--thanks in part to a nifty bit of stem-cell engineering.

Scientists led by physiologist Jian Feng took skin cells from healthy control subjects and people with a particular type of Parkinson's disease and transformed them into a type of primordial cell--technically, an "induced pluripotent stem cell." Such iPS cells, as they're known, can be coaxed into developing as almost any type of cell in the body.

Here, they turned into brain cells. And the more