When removing a piece of the brain, location makes a world of difference. If the surgeon cuts one millimeter in the wrong direction, the patient may lose the ability to speak, or a pathway that controls thumb movement, or worse.

For five decades, neurosurgeons seeking to avoid damaging critical brain tissue have used the same technique to map the brain before surgery. Researchers at Albany Medical Center, however, are developing a new technique they hope will be quicker, safer and more accurate.

"It's passive, bed-side, real-time; it takes seconds," said Dr. Anthony L. Ritaccio, a neurologist and director of the epilepsy and human brain mapping program at Albany Med. Most important, he added, is that the technique can create an instant snapshot of brain activity by charting different parts of the brain as its cells fire.

It is possible to pinpoint the area of the brain that is activated when a person suffers from tinnitus, according to US doctors.

Tinnitus is a condition where sounds are heard in one or both ears when there is no external source.

While doctors had thought tinnitus was generated by ear problems, they now believe it is generated in the brain.

The team at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit used a special scanner to map the locations in the brain.

They hope it will allow more targeted therapies to be developed.

In populating the growing brain, neural stem cells must strike a delicate balance between two key processes - proliferation, in which the cells multiply to provide plenty of starting materials - and differentiation, in which those materials evolve into functioning neurons.

If the stem cells proliferate too much, they could grow out of control and produce a tumor. If they proliferate too little, there may not be enough cells to become the billions of neurons of the brain. Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have now found that this critical balance rests in large part on a single gene, called GSK-3.

The finding suggests that GSK-3 controls the signals that determine how many neurons actually end up composing the brain. It also has important implications for patients with neuropsychiatric illness, as links have recently been drawn between GSK-3 and schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disorder.

Detroit doctors successfully pinpoint brain area activated during ailment

New research suggests that tinnitus is linked to the brain and not just ear damage as previously thought.

Researchers at Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital have found that it is possible to define the area of the brain that is activated when a person is suffering from the condition, reports BBC News.

The results has led doctors to hope that they will be able to development new kinds of therapies for the condition, where sufferers hear sounds when there is no external source, often experienced as a hissing or beeping-style sound.

The researchers used Magnetoencephalography (MEG) scans to measure magnetic fields in subjects' brains as they played them simulated tinnitus sounds that matched the noises they usually suffer with.

The human body never ceases to amaze.

Even with all the medical breakthroughs, sometimes it's the body itself that fixes -- or compensates -- for what's wrong without us even knowing.

Take the extraordinary case of Michelle Mack. For years the Virginia woman's parents knew their daughter had special needs, but doctors could never pinpoint a diagnosis. Then at age 27 a MRI scan yielded a dramatic discovery: it showed that she was missing nearly all the left side of her brain. Doctors believe an in utero stroke likely caused the damage.

The finding almost didn't make sense because Mack, now 37, is able to do many of the things the left side of the brain typically controls, including speaking and reading. Her doctors could only come to one logical conclusion: her brain had somehow rewired itself to compensate for what was lost.

The latest study focusing on a possible cell phone-brain tumor connection finds a weak potential link between the two.

A review of existing research on the topic, published online Oct. 13 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, discerned no overall link. But when the spotlight was turned on only the more methodologically rigorous studies, a potentially harmful association was found.

Combined with similarly murky conclusions from earlier research, this leaves the world's four billion cell phone users with no clear indication of what risk, if any, they are taking when they converse on the go.

On Nov. 27, 2008, Indian police interrogators came face to face with the only gunman captured alive in last year's bloody Mumbai terror attacks. They were surprised by what they saw. Ajmal Kasab, who had murdered dozens in the city's main railway station, stood barely 5 feet tall, with bright eyes and apple cheeks. His boyish looks earned him a nickname among Indians - "the baby-faced killer" - and further spooked a rattled public. "Who or what is he? Dangerous fanatic or exploited innocent?" wondered a horrified columnist in the Times of India. No one, it seems, had expected the face of terror to look so sweet.

The notion that a man's mug reveals his character is an age-old bias. Since Aristotle, people have thought it possible to infer personality traits from the face and body, an art known as physiognomy. The practice grew popular in the years after the American Revolution, when a Swiss enthusiast published a series of illustrated pocket guides to help readers interpret faces on the go. Soon, it was plain to everyone that a man's greatness was prefigured in his face. (George Washington's big schnoz, for example, signaled strength and foresight.) Over the next 150 years, a gang of enterprising physiognomists set about using the new "science" to identify society's bad apples, too.

In the late 19th century, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso ran autopsies on convicts and cataloged features that might identify "born criminals," such as jug ears and overdeveloped canines. In the 1930s, Harvard's Earnest Hooton examined 14,000 prisoners and observed that first-degree murderers tended to have straight hair, while the hair of second-degree murderers was unusually golden. A few years later, Columbia psychologist William Sheldon studied delinquent youth and invented a human taxonomy consisting of three types - ectomorphs (thin-faced, skinny, brainy), mesomorphs (broad-faced, muscular, aggressive), and endomorphs (round-faced, fat, sociable). He further divided these groups into 88 subtypes named after animals, such as the Herons (very often Phi Beta Kappas, he wrote) and the Foxes and Coyotes (Jesus Christ's type, per Sheldon). Overall, he concluded that the meaty-faced mesomorphs were most prone to criminality.

Reversible reaction shuts roundworms down

Scientists have stopped a tiny worm like a deer in the headlights, paralyzing it with a stream of light. The mechanism that induces the incapacitation isn't yet clear, but the paralysis occurs after the nematodes, C. elegans, are fed a molecule known to react to light. While toxic to some of the worms, the reaction appears to be reversible in others, researchers report online October 7 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The work may add to the growing toolbox of molecules that biologists employ to study cells. By using light to trigger changes in molecules, scientists can spy on a cell's activity, witnessing what happens when messenger molecules speak with their target cells. "Light-driven reactions can be a powerful tool for studying biological processes," comments neuroscientist Ehud Isacoff of the University of California, Berkeley. Such approaches are already shedding light on the biochemistry underlying addiction, Parkinson's and other diseases in which brain circuitry goes awry.

Typical approaches "cage" a compound of interest, such as calcium, or tether it to a molecule that changes shape when energized by light. The shape change allows the compound to break out of the cage and do work, or to reach a target cell such as a nearby nerve. Though nothing was caged in this work, the molecule might be harnessed in such a way in the future.

People are more likely to feel "anxious" when cut off from the internet or their mobile phone than feel "liberated", according to a survey.

Staying in a place with no mobile phone coverage, or suffering from the internet going down, is a cause of high stress and anxiety for an increasing number of people, the study suggested.

As many as 85 per cent of full-time mothers always have the internet turned on at home, while a third of people said they no longer felt any sense of guilt about always being "connected" either by having their mobile phone or computer turned on.

Vaccination against swine flu has started in the US and will soon begin in Europe, but many of those who should be first in line are having second thoughts.

Healthcare workers are a top priority for vaccination because they can infect vulnerable people and because their services are vital in a pandemic. Yet in a survey of UK nurses last week, 47 per cent said they would not get vaccinated.

Meanwhile, British hospital bosses quizzed by The Guardian newspaper claim that as few as 10 per cent of staff will have the shot. In the US, many hospital employees are protesting against rules saying they must be vaccinated or lose their jobs.