Scientists decode words from brain signals.

In an early step toward letting severely paralyzed people speak with their thoughts, University of Utah researchers translated brain signals into words using two grids of 16 microelectrodes implanted beneath the skull but atop the brain.

"We have been able to decode spoken words using only signals from the brain with a device that has promise for long-term use in paralyzed patients who cannot now speak," says Bradley Greger, an assistant professor of bioengineering.

Because the method needs much more improvement and involves placing electrodes on the brain, he expects it will be a few years before clinical trials on paralyzed people who cannot speak due to so-called "locked-in syndrome."

The Journal of Neural Engineering's September issue is publishing Greger's study showing the feasibility of translating brain signals into computer-spoken words.

It's a big skull. No, wait, it's two people under an arch. Hold on, it's a skull again. Two very different images can be perceived in the trick picture Blossom and Decay (see left). Now we are one step closer to working out how the brain spontaneously flips between such views, with the discovery of what may be the relevant brain region.

The precise neural mechanism that provokes the brain to switch its view of a scene is unknown, but it is thought to play a major role in perception by acting as a sort of reality check, says Ryota Kanai of University College London. "We need a trigger to prompt possible different interpretations so that we don't get stuck with a potentially incorrect interpretation of the world."

To find out which part of the brain might be involved, Kanai and colleagues asked 52 volunteers to watch a video of a revolving sphere and press a button when the rotation of the sphere appeared to change direction. Crucially, the sphere was not changing direction; it could simply be perceived to be rotating in either direction. How long each rotation-direction was perceived for was recorded and an average "switch rate" assigned to each of the volunteers.

The team then used structural magnetic resonance imaging to search for active brain regions during this task. This pointed to the superior parietal lobes (SPL), two areas towards the back of the head known to control attention and process three-dimensional images. People whose cortex was thicker and better connected in this region had faster switch rates.

In humans, the cerebral cortex, the tissue like outermost layer of the brain, is thought to play a critical role in creative and analytical thinking.

But just how this portion of the brain evolved has remained a mystery.

Now researchers report that something resembling a cerebral cortex exists in the marine ragworm, a small creature with ancient roots that has not changed in hundreds of millions of years. The findings appear in the journal Cell.

"You can say that the topography is so similar that the human and worm must come from a common ancestor," said Detlev Arendt, a researcher at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and one of the study's authors.

To conduct their study, Dr. Arendt and his colleagues used a technique called cellular profiling to determine what genes were turned on and off in the cells of the ragworm's brain. This sort of profiling provides a molecular footprint for each cell.

To the untrained eye, all evidence here in the heart of the Amazon signals virgin forest, untouched by man for time immemorial - from the ubiquitous fruit palms to the cry of howler monkeys, from the air thick with mosquitoes to the unruly tangle of jungle vines.

Archaeologists, many of them Americans, say the opposite is true: This patch of forest, and many others across the Amazon, was instead home to an advanced, even spectacular civilization that managed the forest and enriched infertile soil to feed thousands.

The findings are discrediting a once-bedrock theory of archaeology that long held that the Amazon, unlike much of the Americas, was a historical black hole, its environment too hostile and its earth too poor to have ever sustained big, sedentary societies. Only small and primitive hunter-gatherer tribes, the assumption went, could ever have eked out a living in an unforgiving environment.

But scientists now believe that instead of stone-age tribes, like the groups that occasionally emerge from the forest today, the Indians who inhabited the Amazon centuries ago numbered as many as 20 million, far more people than live here today.

Identities of the mysterious women carved into the Cambodian temple could finally be revealed. Andrew Buncombe reports

Amid the splendour of the 12th-century temple at Angkor Wat, they stand and stare like silent sentinels, sensuous rather than erotic, carved with elegance and care. But exactly who are these 1,786 mysterious women and why, more than a century after Cambodia's famed Hindu temple was rediscovered by Western archaeologists, did it take the efforts of an amateur researcher from Florida to push experts into trying to resolve the puzzle?

Though Kent Davis had lived in South-east Asia during the 1990s, he did not have an opportunity to see Angkor Wat until 2005. Like most visitors to the huge complex in the centre of the Cambodia, for many years cut off from the outside world because of the presence of the Khmer Rouge, he was mesmerised by the experience.

But he was also left with a flurry of questions. "I went to Angkor as a tourist and I was startled when I got there to notice these women," said Mr Davis, 54, a publisher and writer who now lives near Tampa, Florida. "I was not prepared for it. The human element of them struck me and I wanted to know who they were. I asked one of the guides and he said they were there to serve the king after he went to heaven."

Mr Davis's interest was tweaked, so he wanted to know more. He vowed he would return to the US and investigate. Yet when he got home he found there was essentially nothing written about these women, who appear throughout the temple complex in full body carvings.

Indeed, the only study of the female carvings he could find had been made in the early 20th century by the daughter of Frenchman Henri Marchal, then the curator of the temple site. Frustrated but intrigued, he decided he would find out for himself. Five years and several trips to Angkor later, Mr Davis has slowly begun to get some answers.

Hubble Space Telescope observations of the aftermath of a giant star explosion are offering a new glimpse into the events that follow the collapse of a massive dying star.

This well-known supernova remnant in a neighboring galaxy has been studied for more than 10 years, but the recent observations could glean new knowledge of how such stellar debris helps shape the evolution of galaxies.

The new study, led by Kevin France, a research associate at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy at the University of Colorado in Boulder, targeted the remnants of star SN1987A, which was first discovered in 1987.

Stars like this that have at least eight times the mass of our sun are considered "massive" stars, France said, and they speed toward death very quickly. Unable to support their weight any longer, these stars end their lives by collapsing in spectacular supernova explosions.

For the first time in the world, Iranian scientists have succeeded in discovering the gene responsible for a common type of blindness, prevalent in North Eastern parts of the country.

Latest figures have revealed that one in every family living in Esfarayen, in North Khorasan province, are blind, indicating that the blindness gene runs in these families. Scientists and officials had long considered climate and environmental factors as the main cause contributing to the condition.

According to Normohammad Ghiasvand, a genetic professor in Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, the high prevalence of a certain gene accounts for the considerably high number of blind people in this area.

Thick, choking smoke hung over Russia on August 1, 2010, adding to the misery of a stifling summer heat wave. Thousands of people were fleeing nearly 700 fires burning in the drought-dried forests and peat bogs of western Russia, while those not directly threatened were struggling to see through and breathe the smoky air.

It was perhaps not too surprising, then, when the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA's Aura satellite recorded high concentrations of aerosols over far northern Russia on August 1. Smoke from forest fires contains tiny particles (aerosols) produced when a fire incompletely burns through trees and other carbon-based fuel. These aerosols usually linger in the lower part of the atmosphere before falling out. On this day, OMI measured aerosols above the top of high clouds.

A decade ago, a scientist trying to trace the source of those aerosols would have looked for an erupting volcano. A volcanic eruption, it was thought, was the only force powerful enough to loft aerosols twelve kilometers or more into the atmosphere.

But in 2010, meteorologist Michael Fromm saw another suspect far closer to northern Russia. Working at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., Fromm had spent the last decade studying how fires inject smoke into the upper atmosphere. His experience told him that at least one of the hundreds of fires burning in western Russia had probably generated a powerful, dangerous firestorm.

NASA's daring plan to visit the sun took a giant leap forward today with the selection of five key science investigations for the Solar Probe+ spacecraft.

Slated to launch no later than 2018, the smart car-sized spacecraft will plunge directly into the atmosphere of the sun, aiming to solve some of the biggest mysteries of solar physics. Today's announcement means that researchers can begin building sensors for unprecedented in situ measurements of the solar system's innermost frontier.

"Solar Probe+ is going where no spacecraft has gone before," says Lika Guhathakurta, Solar Probe+ program scientist at NASA HQ. "For the first time, we'll be able to 'touch, taste and smell' the sun."

Animations for Probe

On Sept. 4th around 1600 UT, a magnetic filament erupted and hurled a massive coronal mass ejection (CME) off the sun's northwestern limb. Click on the image to view a close-up movie of the blast from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory:


Another movie from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) shows the CME billowing into space. The cloud is not heading toward Earth, and no geomagnetic storms are expected from this blast.