Sorry coffee lovers -- downing a few cups of coffee throughout the day may spark alertness, but it's unlikely to protect the aging brain from mental decline or dementia, according to researchers from Finland.

Some studies have suggested that coffee has a protective effect on brain function in old age, while others have not shown this association.

One of the latest studies on the topic, which appears in the September issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found no association between coffee consumption and declining cognition or dementia scores in either men or women.

Dr. Venla S. Laitala, at the University of Helsinki, and colleagues assessed the coffee drinking habits, as well as other social, demographic, and health data, of a large population of twin pairs who were 50 years old on average.

A new device from NeuroInterventions, Inc., is designed to minimize brain damage by dramatically speeding the delivery of post-stroke countermeasures.

"Stroke is the third most frequent cause of death, and the number-one cause of permanent disability," says NeuroInterventions President and COO Michele Migliuolo [mil-u-OLO]. "When a clot blocks the flow of oxygen-rich blood in the brain, the 'window' for surgical help is only a few hours wide. Every second can mean a drop in brain function."

So, driven by the emergency-room maxim, "Time is brain," NeuroInterventions has developed groundbreaking technology that enables surgeons to reach and remove clots in much less time than conventional approaches. Dr. Migliuolo will describe the development in a presentation today at AdvaMed 2009, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Room 304, at 10:20 a.m.

"Even after a patient reaches a hospital, it can take up to 60 minutes just to introduce a conventional catheter through the femoral artery and steer it to the site, before you can deal with the clot," he says.

Adults who learn new tricks such as juggling can improve the "wiring" of their brains, British scientists said on Sunday.

The scientists said their research showed newly trained jugglers had better connectivity in parts of the brain involved in movements needed to catch the balls -- and the improvement lasted for weeks, even after they stopped practicing juggling.

"We tend to think of the brain as being static, or even beginning to degenerate, once we reach adulthood," said Heidi Johansen-Berg of Oxford University's department of clinical neurology, whose study was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience on Sunday.

60 Minutes Looks At Alarming New Research On The Longterm Effects Of Concussions And Head Trauma

You can't separate violence from football - it's part of the thrill of the game. Players know what they're risking when they hit the field, including injuries such as torn ligaments and broken bones. But what about a blow to the brain? According to the Centers for Disease Control, concussions from sports are an epidemic in this country.

As many as three million sports related concussions happen every year.

And new research shows that their effects can be frighteningly long-lasting, even leading to permanent brain damage and the early onset of dementia. While concussions happen in many sports, most happen in football. They can happen to kids, to the pros, and as we saw recently, to one of today's top college players.

Two weeks ago, everything was going right for Tim Tebow, the best college quarterback in the country. His team, the Florida Gators, was coasting to victory and Tebow seemed invincible, until he took a hit.

Nutrition expert Elizabeth Somer sees a future with more fortified foods - and where our brains remain healthy enough to remember to buy them.

Just knowing how to pronounce docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, should be a pretty good indicator of brain health, right? (Need some help? It's DOH-koh-sah-HEXXA-eh-NOH-ik.) It's enough to say "DHA," and good thing, since we'll probably be hearing more about this tongue twister as research emerges about the link between diet and dementia.

When nutritionist Elizabeth Somer's mother developed Alzheimer's disease years ago, Somer began looking for anything that might give her an edge against a similar fate. Omega-3 fat has been touted as brain food, but she learned it's not just one fat, but three: ALA, EPA and DHA.

ALA may help your heart, and EPA and DHA help your head, with DHA accounting for up to 97 percent of the omega-3 fats in the brain and up to 93 percent of the omega-3 fats in the retina. One study indicates that those with a diet high in DHA may decrease their risk of Alzheimer's disease by as much as 70 percent.

So, in the language of the grocery store aisle, what does this mean?

Last Sunday, investigative reporter for the New York Times Michael Moss took a hard look at a hamburger contaminated with e. coli, following the elaborate path it took from multiple cows and slaughterhouses and through various processes to one of the victim's plates, a 22-year old dance instructor, now paralyzed, named Stephanie Smith. The piece was a shocker because it showed just how unaccountable these companies have become in the face of an often powerless and conflicted USDA. The piece is still on the most-emailed list of the NYT website as of this writing, it pushed Tyson into a deal with Costco over testing, and it is even being discussed in Washington, according to a follow-up piece featured today by Moss.

If you pinned a map of the United States to a dartboard, Kansas would be the bull's-eye. Smack dab in the center of the country, the Sunflower State is one of America's most productive agricultural hotbeds - the fifth-biggest producer of crops and livestock in the country. More than 90 percent of the state consists of farmland endowed thousands of years ago with rich glacial loam. This fertile topsoil is no longer as robust as it once was, having offered up its nutrients season after season, decade after decade, century after century, to produce great bounties of wheat, corn, soybeans, sorghum, hay, and sunflowers. I could almost sense the exhaustion of the land as I drove through the back roads of northeastern Kansas one chilly November morning - past sagging wooden farmhouses silvered by age and weather, barbed-wire fences with listing wooden posts, general stores and swinging-door saloons, a Native American heritage museum commemorating the Kansa tribes that once roamed and tilled these prairies, and mile after desolate mile of denuded farmland.

Our reporter went looking for the farms that produce the raw materials for junk food and found that they take up almost half of the cropland in Ontario

Follow the flow of food. That's what any farmer will tell you. Because apples don't grow in supermarkets.

So to get to the root of the exploding obesity epidemic, I went in search of a junk food farm.

Such farms are not so easy to spot. No fields of Dorito bags waving in the breeze, no orchards blooming with soda pop, no soil bursting with 99-cent burgers.

What you do see are vast operations growing the raw materials for junk food: soybeans and corn.

The two crops go into the production of many things: pharmaceuticals, industrial products, animal feed - and inexpensive calories.

'Immediacy bias' means large-scale problems take back burner

A University of Colorado professor who studies emotions found that it's human nature to be more concerned about headline-grabbing dangers, such as an impending terrorist attack, than large-scale, prolonged problems like global warming.

CU psychology professor Leaf Van Boven calls it an "immediacy bias." His newly released study shows people tend to view their immediate emotions as more intense and important than their previous emotions.

Van Boven said the research could be of interest to policymakers and the media, given today's 24-hour news cycle that focuses on the threat of the day and can exacerbate the human trait of focusing on immediate emotions.

If a child is accidentally hit in the head with a baseball or kicked in the forehead during roughhousing, it can be scary for the youngster and the parents, too. After all, traumatic brain injuries are sometimes serious. They result in about 7,400 deaths a year to American kids 18 years old and younger. So it makes sense to have children checked out for a concussion or other signs of brain injury if they've experienced head trauma, especially if they were knocked unconscious. But far too many kids with knocks to their "noggins" are being routinely treated as if they had serious brain injuries -- even if they don't have significant symptoms of a neurological problem -- and given unnecessary, radiation-loaded computerized tomography (CT) scans.

That's the conclusion of a study just published online and slated for an upcoming edition of the print version of the medical journal the Lancet. Nathan Kuppermann, of the University of California at Davis Departments of Emergency Medicine and Pediatrics, and colleagues found there are validated ways doctors can identify children at very low risk of clinically important traumatic brain injuries (ciTBIs). That's important because these simple, non-invasive findings on an exam should keep the vast majority of youngsters with head trauma from having CT scans which expose them to potentially cancer-causing radiation.

The study investigated the records of more than 42,000 children, including CT scans that had been performed on 35 percent of them. About 25 percent of the youngsters were under the age of two, and the others were three to 18 years old. Out of this group, ciTBIs had occurred in only 376 (one percent) and just 60 (0.1 percent) underwent neurosurgery for their injuries.