Subjects lay inside an MRI scanner and were asked to make "rock, paper, scissor" shapes with their right hand. As they did this, the MRI scanner recorded brain activity during the formation of each shape and fed this data to a connected computer. After a short training period, the computer was able to recognise the brain activity associated with each shape and command the robotic appendage do the same.
Magnetic field

An fMRI machine probes activity within the brain by monitoring blood flow to different regions. It uses a powerful magnetic field combined with radiofrequency pulses to probe the magnetic state of hydrogen atoms in water molecules within body tissue.

An alternative and more portable method is to measure electrical activity inside the brain using electrodes either implanted in brain tissue or attached to the scalp. US researchers have previously used brain implants to allow monkeys to remotely operate robotic arms.

Electrodes attached to a person's skull can also be used to control the movement of a cursor across a computer screen. Klaus-Robert Mueller at the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin, Germany, has developed such a system. He says the fMRI technique is cumbersome and expensive but could help scientists better understand how the brain works because it provides higher resolution.

Reading intent

"From a practical point of view the technology is too costly and slow," he told New Scientist. "But it's very interesting that you can do something as complicated as this."

Kamitani and colleagues have previously shown that fMRI scanning can be used to distinguish between simple images that a subject is looking at and thinking about.

One day, Kamitani believes, the robot hand could be made to respond faster than a user's real one. "The next step for me is to decode faster, even before the person moves their hand, by reading the brain activity related to intention," he told New Scientist.

But he admits that fMRI scanning technology must be improved dramatically before this could be possible, and before the system could be used practically. "We will need several breakthroughs in related technologies, including those for brain scanning hardware, before this type of non-invasive systems will be used in daily life," he says.

Since the jet streams mark the edge of the tropics, in essence framing the hot zone that hugs the equator, their outward movement has allowed the tropics to grow wider by about 140 miles. That means the relatively drier subtropics move as well, pushing closer to places like Salt Lake City, where Thomas Reichler, co-author of the new study, teaches meteorology.

"One of the immediate consequences one can think of is those deserts and dry areas are moving poleward," said Reichler, of the University of Utah. Details appear in Thursday's Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science.

The movement has allowed the subtropics to edge toward populated areas, including the American Southwest, southern Australia and the Mediterranean basin. In those places, the lack of precipitation already is a worry.

Additional creep could move Africa's Sahara Desert farther north, worsening drought conditions that are already a serious problem on that continent and bringing drier weather to the countries that ring the Mediterranean Sea.

"The Mediterranean is one region that models consistently show drying in the future. That could be very much related to this pattern that we are seeing in the atmosphere," said Isaac Held, a senior research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He was not connected with the research.

A shift in where subtropical dry zones lie could make climate change locally noticeable for more people, said Karen Rosenlof, a NOAA research meteorologist also unconnected to the study.

"It is a plausible thing that could be happening, and the people who are going to see its effects earliest are the ones who live closer to the tropics, like southern Australia," said Rosenlof. Her own work suggests the tropics have actually compressed since 2000, after growing wider over the previous 20 years.

Reichler suspects global warming is the root cause of the shift, but said he can't be certain. Other possibilities include variability and destruction of the ozone layer. However, he and his colleagues have noted similar behavior in climate models that suggest global warming plays a role.

Moving the jet streams farther from the equator could disrupt storm patterns, as well as intensify individual storms on the poleward side of the jet streams, said lead author Qiang Fu, a University of Washington atmospheric scientist.

In Europe, for example, that shift could mean less snow falling on the Alps in winter. That would be bad news for skiers, as well as for farmers and others who rely on rivers fed by snowmelt.

"This definitely favors or enhances the frequency of droughts," Fu said of such a shift.

Nidom, a researcher of the Tropical Disease Centre (TDC) of theUniversity of Airlangga (Unair)'s Medical School, made the remarks in response to a statement by a World Health Organization official that bird flu infection from human to human had been found in the village of Kubu Sembelang, Tanah Karo district, North Sumatra, Indonesia.

According to Nidom, who is also a lecturer at the Unair's Medical School, the WHO official's statement was logical because the avian influenza was just like a common flu so that there was no need to be panicked.

"I have disclosed this conclusion in Pontianak last April," he added.

Seven of the nine dead victims were cluster victims who suffered from the same symptoms, WHO spokesman Peter Cordingley said in Manila on Thursday.

But the WHO conclusion was denied by Health Minister Siti Fadila Supari.

"The cluster bird flu case in Tana Karo cannot yet be said a human-to-human bird flu case because proof on the mutation of virus DNA which is identical with the H5N1 strain of virus that infected the nine victims has not yet been found. And there is no proof of epidemiological human-to-human infection," the minister said.

As the disease expands all over the world, experts fear that the virus can mutate into a certain form that easily transmits from human to human, which will kill millions of people.

Some 27 out of 33 provinces in Indonesia have been contracted with bird flu, while human fatality stands at 32 and infections at 43, according to the WHO.

All over the world, the WHO has raised the confirmed human death toll from the H5N1 bird flu strain to 122, while the total number of confirmed human infections since the current outbreak began in 2003 has reached 216.

Measles was long considered a normal childhood disease, but the virus can cause severe complications in otherwise healthy children and adults, including sometimes fatal encephalitis, pneumonia and diarrhea.

The four who were diagnosed with the disease all worked at Investors Bank & Trust, a financial services firm. Three of the workers caught the disease from a contract worker who recently traveled from India.

An initial emergency clinic was set up on May 11 after the first case emerged.

Only 37 measles cases were reported in the United States in 2004, an all-time low, according to the most recent data.

But a few cases are still imported from countries with lower vaccination rates and the disease occurs domestically as well, health officials say.

John Auerbach, Boston Public Health Commission's executive director, said hundreds of workers at Investors Bank & Trust had received vaccinations to prevent an outbreak.

While measles is very rare, Auerbach said, "there are still pockets of the population that aren't immunized."

A month ago U.S. Public health officials expressed concern about an outbreak of mumps in the Midwest and said some people may have been infected on airline flights.

John Riley, head of marketing and communications at Investors Bank & Trust -- a firm with 1,500 employees in Boston -- said all four workers had recovered.

Measles is a highly contagious illness that begins with a high fever, runny nose and watery, red eyes, and develops into a rash that spreads over the body. The illness is spread through the air when a sick person coughs, sneezes or even talks, according to a Massachusetts Department of Public Health fact sheet.

Most developed countries routinely vaccinate children against measles but the virus still killed 500,000 people, mostly children, around the world in 2003, according to the World Health Organization.

He had planned to take the rock to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas for analysis but opted not to once an amateur meteor expert examined it Tuesday night and confirmed it was not from outer space. Also, a planetary science professor at the Community College of Southern Nevada on Wednesday said the rock was asphalt, Gleicher said.

But his other theory that an airplane dropped the rock onto the building was laid to rest.

"We're not really in a flight path," Gleicher said. "We're pretty far away from any plane traffic."

Gleicher said he plans on filing a police report and now believes the rock was a tool for a break in that was thwarted by the fire alarm that was set off by the incident.

"It's a very heavy rock, I'm going to guess it is at least 15 pounds. With enough velocity it's possible," he said of the projectile's trajectory through two fiberglass panels.

Nothing was stolen from Diagnostic Imaging.

Church officials said there had been no space in the schedule for a spontaneous stop.

Another consideration is that the ultra-nationalist Polish Government might have considered it a slight if the Pope had singled out slaughtered Jews rather than Polish partisans for special tribute on the first day of his visit.

Benedict, 79, has undertaken his four-day tour to honour his friend and mentor, the late John Paul, and build a rapport with Poland, a deeply Catholic country that both he and his Polish predecessor have said could help revive Christian beliefs and values in an increasingly secular Europe.

His visit is thought to also beaimed at breaking down lingering distrust in Poland towards him and Germany, which occupied the country during World War II and killed vast numbers of Poles and Jews.

In deference to Polish and Jewish sensitivities, Benedict will avoid speaking German except for when he prays tomorrow at the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were killed in World War II.

The concentration camp trip is fraught with significance for Catholic-Jewish relations, a favourite cause of John Paul, who also visited there in 1979.

In his memoirs, Benedict described being enrolled in the Hitler Youth against his will, then risking execution by deserting the army as a draftee days before the war ended.

At the airport, Benedict said of his Auschwitz visit: "There I hope especially to meet the survivors of Nazi terror who come from different countries, all of whom suffered under that tragic tyranny.

"Together we will pray that thewounds of the past century will heal, thanks to the remedy that God in his mercy has prescribed for us by calling us to forgive each other."

He drew a roar of applause at the airport when he launched into his welcoming speech in Polish, later switching to Italian.

"I have very much wanted to make this visit to the native land and people of my beloved predecessor, the servant of God, John Paul II," he said. "I have come to follow in the footsteps of his life."

Poles like Benedict's emphasis on continuing John Paul's legacy, but on the streets yesterday the view was that he did not quite match up to his predecessor.

"It's not the same as with our pope," said 75-year-old Wanda Nowicka, who was waiting on a city street to watch Benedict pass by as the pontiff headed to his first stop at Warsaw's Cathedral of StJohn the Baptist.

Aniela Kalisz, a 72-year-old who carried a small Vatican flag bearing Benedict's photo, said: "I don't mind if he is German. He is very friendly and he's learning Polish and he was a friend of John Paul."

Thousands of people lined the motorcade route from the airport to central Warsaw - a large crowd by European standards for a visit by the Roman Catholic leader, but small compared with the hundreds of thousands who turned out when John Paul flew into Warsaw in 1979 for the first time since assuming the papacy.

And pilgrims in their thousands poured into Warsaw's Pilsudski Square yesterday for Benedict's first, huge open-air mass, due to be held there last night. It is the same square in which John Paul inspired the Solidarity movement with his landmark appearance in 1979 during communist rule.

"If by the beginning of next year Moscow has not ratified the sixth protocol of the European convention for human rights on the abolition of death penalty, we can expect any extreme measures from Europe, up to divesting Russian delegation in PACE of authority freezing its membership" Kosachyov was quoted by RIA Novosti as saying at a press conference in Moscow.

Russia was supposed to ban death penalty not later than 1999, Kosachyov added.

"We expect to be able to ratify the sixth protocol," Kosachyov said, adding however that most MPs were against the ratification.

When asked whether Russia will apply death penalty after trial by jury has been established in Chechnya, Kosachyov said the Russian courts are now entitled to deliver capital punishment verdicts, but not apply them.

According to the Russian constitution, a capital punishment verdict cannot be applied unless trial by jury is introduced in every subject of federation.

However "if a capital punishment verdict is delivered, Russia will have a serious conflict with Europe" he said.

The foreword of Dan Brown's book, on which the film is based, hits the reader straight between the eyes. It states, "Fact: the Priory of Sion - a European secret society founded in 1099 - is a real organisation." Its members allegedly included Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo and our old friend Leonardo da Vinci. Members of the society held that Jesus was married with a child and appointed themselves guardians of His descendants, despite many of them being gruesomely butchered by Opus Dei.

I have no doubt that this glancing appeal to truth forms the basis of the book's phenomenal appeal: 50m copies sold to date, of which 10m are in Britain. Da Vinci purports to rewrite a central tenet of western civilisation, inculcated in most Britons since birth. Hence the audience's craving to know whether the parts of the book and film asserted as facts indeed merit the term.

They do not. The use of the word "fact" to open The Da Vinci Code is a lie. The "priory" was a well-attested hoax by a French con man in the 1950s. The hoax was given credence by a misguided BBC Chronicle programme and then by the writers of a 1982 bestseller, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. It was then lifted lock, stock and drivel by Brown and called a fact. This was not some reality uplift of the sort beloved of modern fiction. It is the fact around which the whole story spins its suspense.

At this point we see bearing down on us the amalgamated union of novelists, screenwriters and film publicists, all claiming ancestral licence to make things up. Their job, they say, is to create their own reality. Facts can be boring and will vanish faster from the shelves with a little help from fiction. Besides, art has always made history its slave, not its master. Did not Henry James refer to the "fatal futility of fact"? How could the fair maid, hypothesis, survive if constantly raped by the ogre, fact? At this point the union invariably calls in aid its honorary president, Shakespeare.

In which case, why was my film audience so confused and even worried? The answer is that Brown was not just undermining received religious wisdom - there is no harm and nothing new in that - he was using a specific tool. He was manipulating what should be a different object of veneration, his audience's understanding of truth, its instinctive reverence for facts.

Journalists have one thing in common with historians, a residual obligation to truth. It may seem hard to credit, but if a serious journalist gets a fact wrong it hurts. (Last week I regrettably confused Maundy Gregory with Horatio Bottomley.) Facts should be taskmasters. They must be sought out and checked, not just made up. An entire profession is supposedly devoted to gathering and assessing them. As Tom Stoppard joked, "Comment is free but facts are on expenses."

I resent fiction hijacking this activity and cheapening it. Historical novels have the easiest tunes because their fabrication imposes harmony on the cacophony of facts. This need not destroy the latter's integrity, but novelists should surely accept the same discipline as history and journalism. They should not put the Battle of Hastings in 1067 or Waterloo in 1816. It is inaccurate. At the very least they should try. When Tolstoy described the Battle of Borodino he meticulously sought to get dates and events in order. Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie would despair if their readers could not rely on their facts being more reliable than their villains.

Film-makers fall victim most easily to this failing. One of the silliest remarks made of art was by Jean-Luc Godard, that "cinema is truth 24 times a second". Oliver Stone in JFK, Jim Sheridan in In The Name of the Father and Stephen Spielberg in Schindler's List made similar claims. In these films, usually prefaced with the seal of approval, "based on fact", it is impossible to disentangle truth from fabrication.

What in overt propaganda might be dismissed as false, in a pseudo-documentary has potency. The prewar Hollywood film Birth of a Nation was plausibly blamed for the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Daniel Boorstin, a cultural historian of America, remarked that early movies "claimed the power to be mistaken for reality ... to make us walk more confidently on the precarious ground of the imagination." That must explain why The Da Vinci Code has sent thousands to seek out the "real" sites from the book and has, bizarrely, boosted Opus Dei membership. These people clearly do not think the book is make-believe.

Because I love films I find it depressing when they lapse from grace. I have never believed them to be uninfluential, whether peddling love, politics, sex, violence or corruption. That is not how their makers see them. Ask Costa Gavras, ask Michael Moore. As Woody Allen pleaded, "If I've made one more person feel miserable, I have done my job." But faction can make its point without exploiting public credulity with a lie. Good biopics struggle to present a truth, if not the truth, about their subjects. They are plainly "based on true events" yet do not set out to deceive. Fiction can anyway do its own propaganda. The best film about Bill Clinton was Primary Colors and the best about Watergate was Washington Behind Closed Doors, neither of which pretended to fact.

The phenomenal success of Da Vinci renders it the apotheosis of the lie. The Catholic church understandably asked that the film open with a disclaimer for Opus Dei, similar to that used for "any similarity to living persons ...". This was refused since it might blunt the film's phoney verisimilitude. Hence the irritation that drove the religious historian Bart Ehrman to write his debunking Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code. It should be compulsory reading alongside the original, before Rosslyn Chapel is entirely wrecked by tourists. Yet the high court judge in the recent Holy Grail plagiarism trial was unconcerned as to whether the book was calculated to mislead or defamed persons or institutions. His sole concern was to find honour among these thieves of truth (and at our expense!).

Journalism already has a tough time guarding Fortress Fact from marauders (including its own) until the historians can arrive. To find novelists and film-makers getting in round the back and stealing the treasure is galling. Despite Humpty Dumpty, words do not mean anything we choose. Facts are still facts wherever they are used, and should be honoured in fiction as in history. The dictionary offers no exemption to novelists. They have the entire range of the human imagination at their disposal. They can play with light and shade, fantasy and magic, dancing free of reality to conjure their tales from the air. But facts are sacred. If writers use them to disguise their fabrications, I call them liars.