A group of Japanese researchers are claiming that their “mind-reading” machine can read people’s dreams. While it sounds like a novel idea, this is certainly not the first claim from scientists that they can depict what a person sees based on their brain activity—nor the last.
Brain imaging has been around for ages. Typically, when fMRI machines are used to read people’s brain activity, the different states are classified into categories and then used to predict a person’s “perceptual state.” So what these ATR Computational Neuroscience researchers are saying they can do is actually reconstruct what a person is seeing. But can they really?
In the study, published in Neuron, the researchers flashed 400 images in front of subjects for 12 seconds each. An fMRI machine was used to collect brain activity data, which was then analyzed on a computer to determine patterns linked to how the brain reacted when it saw the images.
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Female coffee drinkers beware: that Pumpkin Spice Latte might shrink your breasts. Or so you would think, if you scanned the headlines last week. A new study in the British Journal of Cancer [subscription required] has incited mass hysteria over a tenuous link between coffee intake and breast size. The Telegraph warns: “Drinking Too Much Coffee Could Shrink Women’s Breasts,” while UPI throws in a pun: “Study: Cups of Java Cut Cup Size.” But the best comes from the New York Post: “Women Face Drink & Shrink Dilemma, Coffee Poses a Booby Trap.”
But before you pour that cup of coffee down the sink (or “accidentally” spill it on your busty archnemesis) let’s take a closer look at that study:
Researchers from Sweden recruited 269 women (average age was 29) to have their breast size measured and to answer a questionnaire about coffee intake and other lifestyle choices. All the women were from families at high risk for breast cancer and about half carried a gene, CYP1A2*1F, that is associated with breast cancer. Essentially, the researchers were studying the relationship between CYP1A2*1F, breast size, and coffee intake. The gene is known to control the metabolism of the hormone estrogen as well as certain chemicals found in coffee; it’s also been linked to higher breast density and thus higher breast cancer risk.
This is what they found:
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Obese children, get thee to a library! A press release yesterday announced: “Duke Researchers Show Reading Can Help Obese Kids Lose Weight.”
Not so fast. Before you click over to Amazon.com, let’s take a closer look at the study they’re talking about:
Researchers at Duke Children’s Hospital asked 31 obese girls ages 9 to 13 to read an age-appropriate novel entitled Lake Rescue that was “carefully crafted” with weight management tips and positive role models. The novel follows the overweight heroine on an outdoor school trip, during which she gains self-esteem (rather than pounds) and learns about healthy eating and exercise.
Another group of girls was asked to read a novel not related to weight issues—about a girl searching for a missing cat—and a control group did not read either book. All participants were already enrolled in a comprehensive weight loss program.
Six months later, the girls who had read Lake Rescue experienced a 0.71 percentile decrease in BMI. Meanwhile, the group that read the non-weight-loss-oriented book had a 0.33 percentile decrease in BMI and the control group had a 0.05 percent increase in BMI. According to the CDC, children and teens with a BMI over the 95th percentile are considered obese. The difference between the readers and non-readers in this study was less than 1 percent — a suspiciously low number.
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Maybe you like to lay out in the sun. Maybe you like to do it frequently. But can you really not stop going? Earlier studies have suggested that tanning could be a kind of addictive behavior, and now new research says that more than one-fourth of college students surveyed at one university were “tanning dependent.”
The team of researchers say there is “some evidence” that tanning dependence, or “tanorexia,” has a biological basis, like the release of endorphins known as a “runner’s high.” So they had 400 students and volunteers from Virginia Commonwealth University answer a survey about their tanning habits. Forty percent said they’d used tanning booths, and the researchers classified 27 percent as “tanning dependent,” with tanning beneath the real sun actually more related to “dependency.”
This conclusion seems a little suspect. First, the questionnaire the researchers used was adapted from one used to survey people for symptoms of substance abuse and dependence. While that at first seems like a clever way to do a study, we have to wonder: Isn’t it a self-fulfilling prophecy to ask questions that presuppose tanning to be an addiction, and then declare that tanning is a widespread addiction?
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Don’t look now, but apparently the revolution has begun.
John Rogers from the University of Illinois and Max Lagally from the University of Wisconsin announced this week that they created a way for cameras to capture images on a curved surface, rather than the flat surface used by regular film and digital cameras. It’s a design based on the mammalian eye, and it’s made possible by stretchable electronics made from silicon, which allow cameras to capture wide-angle images without the pictures being distorted.
Rogers says his finding, especially the idea of putting circuits on elastic surfaces, could someday lead to electronics that can integrate with the human body. But the British Newspaper The Telegraph isn’t willing to wait, publishing the story with the headline, “Bionic Eye Heralds Cyborg Revolution.”
It’s an exciting finding, but sadly, many years of research, development, and testing stand between us and creating The Terminator. So if you poke your eye out tomorrow, don’t expect an electronic replacement to be ready.
Image: iStockphoto
The Telegraph published an article this weekend headlined, “Sugary Snacks Help School Children Concentrate.”
Really?
Here’s what actually happened: In a study of 16 kids, researchers gave them fruit juice containing either artificial sweetener or glucose—the natural sugar that acts as the body’s main energy source. The kids who drank the juice with glucose scored better on memory tests than the ones who ate artificial sugar, and appeared to have longer attention spans as well. Study leader David Benton’s main conclusion, then, was that children might perform better in school if they ate occasional snacks, rather than one big meal, and that a snack with some sugar might not be such a bad thing for them.
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Ancient Greek societies were, like the vast majority of other societies, patriarchal. Even as Athens moved toward an early version of democratic government around 500 B.C., men ran the show. But according to an article published on Sunday in the British newspaper The Observer, everything we knew about Greek gender relations was wrong.
The Observer article, titled “DNA Explodes Greek Myth About Women,” reports on a Manchester University study of DNA that dates back to the Mycenaean civilization from around the 16th or 17th century B.C., more than a millennium before the classical Athens of Socrates, Pericles, and Plato. What the scientists actually found through DNA analysis was that two skeletons located in a royal grave together were brother and sister, not husband and wife as archaeologists had previously thought.
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Mainstream news outlets are buzzing today about a new study from UCLA that found an apparent link between mothers using cell phones during pregnancy and their children developing behavioral problems. The story broke on Sunday, when Britain’s Daily Mail and The Independent both reported its findings.
From the headlines in these two papers (”Warning: Using a mobile phone while pregnant can seriously damage your baby” in The Independent) to the claims (”Women who use mobile phones when pregnant are more likely to give birth to children with behavioural problems, according to authoritative research”) and categorizations (stating that the study was conducted by “top scientists”) to … just about every other sentence, these stories do a pretty spectacular job of diluting the facts. And while The Independent may win the award for “most egregious science coverage,” with the Mail a close second, they certainly weren’t alone.
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“Study: Acupuncture works for back pain”
You need only read the first sentence of the article to get the actual news: “Fake acupuncture works nearly as well as the real thing for low back pain, and either kind performs much better than usual care.” Oops.
There is a widely held belief that women, those chatty creatures, utter far more words per day than men. Last year in her book The Female Brain, psychology professor Louann Brizendine tossed out the figures 20,000 (womanly words) versus 7,000 (motes of manly monologuing), which became a kind of informal consensus. As with much Men-are-from-Mars psychologizing, there was never much data to back up what was essentially an old wives’ tale.
Last week, Science published a paper by some researchers who finally looked into the matter and delivered what one hopes—though suspects will not be—a knockout blow to this rumor. In the study’s fairly large (though admittedly homogenous) sample group, both men and women said about 16,000 words per day.
Just a few days before the media blitz over the debunking paper, The Times of India published an earnest, credulous opinion piece that not only accepted the soon-to-be-disproven rumor but tried to explain exactly why it is that women speak so much more than men: because they do more manual work and they have more cells dedicated to emotion and communication. Judging by what we know now, this logic train must have been derailed by terrorists before it ever left the station.
I do admit that giving The Times this booby prize is a bit of a raw deal; many publications repeated the exact same theory before. But this was one magnificent flourish of bad timing.
(Some publications deserve credit for trying to debunk the rumor last fall.)
