MRI

Autopsies, for all the useful information they provide, have significant downsides. They are often upsetting to the deceased's family, they prevent people from receiving certain kinds of religious burials, and they leave a bit of a mess. To correct for those problems and more, a team at the University of Bern, Switzerland, has developed a robot that can perform virtual autopsies.

[ Read Full Story ]

Medicine has increasingly looked to the placebo effect's seemingly mysterious power to make people feel better in the absence of painkillers or pharmaceutical drugs. Now researchers have used fMRI scanners to pinpoint specific cells in the spinal cord that they believe are responsible for this ability to deaden pain.

[ Read Full Story ]

The problem of people who take more than their fair share of public services is as old as public services themselves. On a small scale, the problem merely blends into all the other inefficiencies in the system. But if freeloading becomes too pervasive, it can imperil the entire society. This may seem like an abstract economics or social sciences problem, but the tendency of people to request social services without demanding that they pay a fair amount for those services led directly to California bankrupting itself.

[ Read Full Story ]

Brain cancer is a classic double whammy: the extremely invasive form of cancer is both deadly and difficult to treat. Fortunately, there's a promising solution on the table: tumor painting.

Because brain cancer tends to invade surrounding healthy brain tissue, it blurs the line between tumor and non-tumor tissue, and makes it difficult for surgeons to circumvent the healthy parts of the brain when they saw away at the tumor. On top of that, current imaging techniques produce fairly imprecise representations of the tissue, which only compounds the problem.

[ Read Full Story ]

Ever wondered what your brain sounds like on the inside? Trinity College philosophy professor Dan Lloyd has created a program that orchestrates our brainwaves. Scanning brains on an MRI, Lloyd can watch as certain areas of the brain light up and then assign different frequencies to the areas of the brain used, correlating the intensity of usage with volume. The results are bizarrely beautiful.

[ Read Full Story ]

Neuroscientists are already able to read some basic thoughts, like whether an individual test subject is looking at a picture of a cat or an image with a specific left or right orientation. They can even read pictures that you're simply imagining in your mind's eye. Even leaders in the field are shocked by how far we've come in our ability to peer into people's minds. Will brain scans of the future be able to tell if a person is lying or telling the truth?

[ Read Full Story ]