Researchers manipulate a certain brain wave to slow down voluntary movement in humans

Researchers have found that manipulating a particular brain wave can force human subjects to move more slowly, and provided some of the first evidence of how brain waves can directly affect behavior.

A group of 14 volunteers received brain stimulation as they tried to manipulate the position of a spot on a computer screen with a joystick. That stimulation led to a 10 percent drop in execution of the computer task.

The electrical current used in this study specifically boosted normal beta activity that has links to sustained muscle activities, such as holding a book. Such beta activity typically drops off before people make a move.

A derivative of cholesterol is necessary for the formation of brain cells, according to a study from the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet. The results, which are published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, can help scientists to cultivate dopamine-producing cells outside the body.

The study was led by Professor Ernest Arenas and demonstrates that the formation of dopamine-producing neurons during brain development in mice is dependent on the activation of a specific receptor in the brain by an oxidised form of cholesterol called oxysterol. Dopamine-producing nerve cells play an important part in many brain functions and processes, from motor skills to reward systems and dependency. They are also the type of cell that dies in Parkinson's disease.

The scientists have also shown that embryonic stem cells cultivated in the laboratory, form more dopamine-producing nerve cells if they are treated with oxidised cholesterol. The same treatment also reduced the tendency of the stem cells to show uncontrolled growth.

An Introduction by Tom Engelhardt:

Hardly less startling than finding herself with breast cancer was Barbara Ehrenreich's discovery of the "pink ribbon culture," of, that is, the enforced cheerfulness and positive thinking that accompanied it (and the teddy bears and "cornucopia of pink-ribbon-themed breast cancer products" which went with that). Back in 2001, she wrote a fierce, wonderful piece for Harper's Magazine, "Welcome to Cancerland," about her experience, and what to do with anger when it's equated with "negativity," and so ill health. (A fine accompaniment for Ehrenreich on this subject would be Ordinary Life, Kathlyn Conway's memoir of surviving cancer with plenty of anger and not the slightest belief in that disease's transformative possibilities.)

Ehrenreich's work is invariably bracing, to say the least -- in part because she's a superb writer, in part because, as in her bestselling book Nickeled and Dimed and other works like Fear of Falling, she has a way of nailing the essential insecurity of life in a corporate/work world that has no pity to offer (but oodles of "positive thinking"). She's always had a wicked tendency to enter worlds, turn them upside down, and report back, as she did recently for the New York Times in a four-part series on poverty in post-meltdown America.

The rites of positive-thinking and the extravagant promises of better health and well-being which are inseparable from them, she soon discovered, were hardly confined to the world of cancer patients. In the ensuing years, she stumbled upon a multitude of worlds central to our lives -- from megachurches to mega-corporations -- in which an ideology of positive thinking ruled the roost. Of course, until the fall of 2008, we were also living through a gusher of positive thinking about an economy that -- so it was firmly believed -- could never go south.

As this piece is posted, Ehrenreich's newest book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, is just being published. A full-scale report on the cult of positive thinking in America, its anti-Calvinist roots and present "successes," it represents Ehrenreich at her best. It's hard to read without wondering whether this country isn't, in many ways, just a giant con game run by spielmeisters, touters, and flim-flam artists.

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.