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Canadian researchers have developed a new infra-red scanning technique to read people’s thoughts.

University of Toronto researchers, who have developed this optical brain imaging technique in collaboration with Canada’s largest children’s rehabilitation hospital here, say it will help decode thoughts of people with speech disability.

By measuring near-infrared light absorbed in brain tissue when a person made a decision, the researchers were able to predict accurately up to 80 percent their preference for one thing over the other, a university release said Monday.

‘This is the first system that decodes preference naturally from spontaneous thoughts,’ the release quoted study leader and biomedical engineering student Sheena Luu as saying.

As part of their study, the researchers chose nine adults who were first asked to rate eight drinks on a scale of one to five.

After this, they were made to wear a headband fitted with fibre-optics emitting light into the pre-frontal cortex of their brain, and then shown two drinks on a computer and asked to make a decision about which they liked more.

As they made the decision, their brain activity was monitored on a computer specially programmed to recognize the unique pattern of this activity associated with preference.

To their surprise, the computer accurately predicted which drink any individual would prefer 80 percent of the time.

Explaining this, Luu said, “When your brain is active, the oxygen in your blood increases and depending on the concentration, it absorbs more or less light.

‘In some people, their brains are more active when they don’t like something, and in some people they’re more active when they do like something.’

The study leader added, ‘Preference is the basis for everyday decisions. When children with disabilities can’t speak or gesture to control their environment, they may develop a learned helplessness that impedes development.’

The study will help them develop a portable, near-infrared sensor that rests on the forehead and relies on wireless technology to know the preferences of disabled people who cannot speak or walk, the university release said.

The study has been published in The Journal of Neural Engineering.

A portable device known as the Mars Organic Analyzer (MOA), which was developed to sniff out extraterrestrial life on other planets, is taking on a new role in detecting air pollutants on Earth.

Researchers in California have modified the MOA, to enable it to detect polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), potentially carcinogenic molecules from cigarette smoke and wood smoke, volcanic ash, and other sources.

According to scientist Richard A. Mathies and colleagues, current earthbound PAH detection focuses on the cleanup of environmental contamination sites.

On other planets, the concentration of organic PAH molecules can provide valuable insight into environmental conditions and the potential for extraterrestrial life.

But, existing PAH detection methods are slow and costly. Scientists are thus seeking an inexpensive, rapid and nondestructive technique for the measurement of PAH contamination.

The researchers tested samples from Lake Erie and a hydrothermal vent from the Gulf of California, as well as a Martian analogue sample from the Mars-like Atacama Desert, one of the driest spots on earth.

They found that the detection sensitivity of the device was on par with current laboratory methods.

“The method of PAH analysis developed here significantly advances the MOA’s capabilities for organic carbon detection and may also prove useful for environmental monitoring,” said Mathies.

Older mothers may do a better job raising their children than younger, less-experienced moms, at least among killer whales, researchers reported on Monday.

They studied 30 years of data to show that calves born to the oldest killer whales were 10 percent more likely to survive the critical first year of life than calves born to younger mothers.

“Older mothers appear to be better mothers, producing calves with higher survival rates,” Eric Ward of the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle and colleagues wrote in the journal Frontiers in Zoology.

Killer whale females become mature at around 15 and stop reproducing at around 40.

“Our work supports previous research showing that menopause and long post-reproductive lifespans are not a human phenomenon,” the researchers said.

For years researchers thought humans were the only creatures that had evolved menopause, and one theory was that having a healthy and unencumbered grandmother around to help take care of the babies benefited babies and mothers alike.

But killer whales, Orcinus orca, also have menopause. The mammals live long lives, with males living up to 50 years and females living to be as old as 90.

Ward’s team used 30 years of data on the charismatic black-and-white carnivores to see which mothers did the best at raising calves.

“Older females may be more successful in raising young because of maternal experience, or they may allocate more effort to their offspring relative to younger females,” the researchers wrote in their study, available on the Internet at www.frontiersinzoology.com/.

Stem cell transplantation seems to stop and, in some cases, undo neurological damage in people with multiple sclerosis, a small study shows.

The trial involved just 21 patients, but a larger, randomized trial is under way in the United States, Canada and Brazil.

“This is the first trial for any phase of MS, whether early or later, of any therapy anywhere that has shown reversal of neurological disability,” said study author Dr. Richard K. Burt, chief of the division of immunotherapy at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

MS is a disease in which the immune system turns on the body and attacks myelin, the protective covering on nerve cells. The disease usually starts with a “relapse-remitting” phase, with alternating periods of flare-ups of symptoms and relatively peaceful spans. After a decade or so, however, most patients move into the more severe, secondary-progressive form of the disease.

“There is a need to find a means by which we can control the progression of MS, particularly in these patients who are not responding to FDA-approved therapies,” said Patricia O’Looney, vice president of biomedical research at the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

Treatments are clustered toward the relapse-remitting stage, with little available for the latter stage. “Generally, when you get to late progressive MS, nothing really works,” Burt said.

The technique used in this study, autologous non-myeloablative hemopoietic stem cell transplantation, “resets” the immune system and is already used for secondary-progressive MS.

“This has primarily been used over the last 10 to 15 years in progressive MS patients, people who are doing terribly, and we have nothing to offer them,” O’Looney explained. “There have been some fatalities associated with this aggressive protocol.”

And success was limited.

But, for the new study, researchers tweaked the technique and moved it to relapse-remitting patients who were younger than in previous studies.

“This is a safer approach, and we do it earlier in the disease because people have less disability so it’s safer again,” Burt said.

The study involved 21 patients with the earlier stage of the disease who were not responding to treatment with interferon.

The procedure basically involves stripping the patient’s body of its immune cells, and then repopulating the body with stem cells from the patient’s bone marrow.

“You’re trying to wipe out the immune system and then, with one’s own cells, reconstitute it with the hope that the new cells will not target myelin. That’s the theory, get rid of bad cells and reconstitute it with new cells from one’s own body so hopefully they haven’t been triggered yet to attach to myelin,” O’Looney said.

Seventeen of the participants improved by at least one point on a scale used to measure disability. Five participants relapsed, then went into remission after more treatment.

After about three years, none of the patients’ disease was progressing and 16 were no longer relapsing. And some experienced improvements, all without major side effects.

The findings were published online Jan. 30 in The Lancet Neurology and will appear in the March print issue of the journal.

Still, specialists are curbing their enthusiasm until further results are seen.

“We need to see a larger number of samples… and [we need to] know if the benefit they’re seeing is due to the immune system being reset or because the immune system has been suppressed and will return as the way it was,” O’Looney said.

Scientists have developed a mathematical model that figures out the best strategy to win a popular board game, which could some day help robot mine sweepers navigate strange surroundings to find hidden explosives.

According to Duke University scientists, who developed the new algorithm, both activities are governed by the same principles at the simplest level.

A player, or robot, must move through an unknown space searching for clues.

In the case of CLUE, the board game, players move a pawn around the board and enter rooms seeking information about the killer and murder weapon before moving on to the next room seeking more information.

“In the same way, sensors, like the pawn in CLUE, must take in information about the surroundings to help the robot maneuver around obstacles as it searches for its target,” said Chenghui Cai, from Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering.

“The key to success, both for the CLUE(c) player and the robots, is to not only take in the new information it discovers, but to use this new information to help guide its next move,” Cai said.

“This learning-adapting process continues until either the player has won the game, or the robot has found the mines,” he added.

Researchers in the field of artificial intelligence research refer to these kinds of situations as “treasure hunt” problems and have developed different mathematical approaches to improve the odds of discovering this buried treasure.

Games are often used to test or to help illustrate such complex problems, the scientists said.

“We found that the new algorithms we developed can be best illustrated through the board game CLUE, which is an excellent example of the treasure hunt problem,” Cai explained.

“We found that players who implemented the strategies based on these algorithms consistently outperformed human players and other computer programs,” he added.

According to Silvia Ferrari, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, “In the game of CLUE, you can’t visit all the rooms by the end of the game, so you need to come up with a way to minimize the amount of movement but maximize the ability to reach your targets.”

“When searching for mines, you want the robot to spend as little time as possible on the ground and maximize its information reward function,” he added.

Researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Centre have identified a series of gene fusions that might one day serve as a marker for detecting cancer.

Recurrent gene fusions are believed to be the mechanism that leads to cancer development.

The research team claim that they have discovered several gene fusions in prostate cancer cells.

These fusions occur when chromosomes, the packages of DNA that contain genes, switch places with each other.

“We defined a new class of mutations in prostate cancer. The recurrent fusions are thought to be the driving mechanism of cancer,” Nature magazine quoted Arul Chinnaiyan, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Michigan Center for Translational Pathology and S.P. Hicks Endowed Professor of Pathology at the U-M Medical School, as saying.

“But we found other fusions as well, some of which were unique to individual patients. Our next step is to understand if these play a role in driving disease,” he added.

Gene fusions are already known to play a role in blood cell cancers such as leukaemia and lymphoma, and Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone disease.

Traditional risk assessment tools, like the Framingham and National Cholesterol Education Program tools, NCEP, do not accurately predict coronary heart disease, according to a study by researchers at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, CT.

he study was conducted on 1,653 patients who had no history of coronary heart disease, other than 738 patients who were taking statins (cholesterol lowering drugs like Lipitor) because of increased risk of developing coronary heart disease.

All the patients underwent a coronary CT angiogram and doctors compared their risk of coronary heart disease, determined by the Framingham and NCEP risk assessment tools, to the amount of plaque actually found in their arteries as a result of the scan.

According to the results, 21 percent of the patients believed to be in need of statin drugs before the scan (because of the Framingham and NCEP assessment tools) did not require them.

“26percent of the patients who were already taking statins (because of the risk factor assessment tools) had no detectable plaque at all,” said Kevin M. Johnson, MD, lead author of the study.

He added: “Risk assessment tools are used by physicians implicitly. Physicians use them as a way to separate and treat patients accordingly. Ultimately, the Framingham influences what every physician does, but I feel it is not good enough to show what is happening with each individual patient.

“The average person tends to put a lot of weight on family history, but the association between that and coronary heart disease is only modest,” said Dr. Johnson. “We are living in an era where genetic research is in the headlines, but reality is a lot more complicated than that.

“There are still 400,000 people a year who die from heart attacks and have no warning signs at all; doctors want to be able to find those people before that happens and I hope this study gets people interested in finding out better predictors for coronary heart disease.”

This study appears in the January issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology.

A series of powerful earthquakes killed a 10-year-old girl and seriously injured dozens in remote eastern Indonesia, briefly triggering fears of another tsunami in a country still recovering from 2004’s deadly waves.

One of the quakes — of magnitude 7.3 — was felt as far away as Australia and sent small tsunamis into Japan’s southeastern coast.

Residents near the epicenter in Papua province rushed from their homes in search of higher ground shortly after the first 7.6-magnitude quake struck Sunday at 4:43 a.m. local time (1943 GMT), afraid that huge waves might wash over the island.

The epicenter was about 85 miles (135 kilometers) from Papua’s main city of Manokwari and occurred at a depth of 22 miles (35 kilometers), the U.S. Geological Survey said. It was followed by dozens of aftershocks.

Nearly fifty people were admitted to hospitals with broken bones and head wounds, while more than 300 were treated for minor cuts, scrapes and bruises, local health official Henri Sembiring said Monday.

About 135 homes and other buildings were badly damaged or toppled in the province, the National Disaster Coordination Agency said.

Officials initially reported four deaths, but later discovered three people had died from illnesses.

The 10-year-old girl was killed in her home when a wall collapsed, said hospital director Hengky Tewu. “Her head was crushed,” he said.

Power lines fell, cutting off electricity, and the runway of Manokwari’s Rendani airport was cracked, prompting the cancellation of commercial flights.

The government initially issued a tsunami warning but lifted it within an hour after it was confirmed that the epicenter was on land, not water.

Quakes centered onshore pose little tsunami threat to Indonesia itself, but those close to the coast can churn up large waves that sometimes reach the coastlines of other countries such as Japan.

Japan reported tsunamis between 4 inches (10 centimeters) and 16 inches (40 centimeters) high hitting its shores following the temblors.

A huge quake off western Indonesia caused the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed about 230,000 people. Four years on, the multibillion dollar rebuilding process is almost complete.

Residents in Papua’s Manokwari — a jumble of low-lying brick and cement structures home to 167,000 people — remained wary of aftershocks.

“We don’t feel safe,” said Simon, 32, who like many Indonesians goes by one name. He was staying outside with his wife and three kids. “It’s just in case there are strong aftershocks.”

Local officials drove through the streets warning people not to return to structures that might be vulnerable if an aftershock hit.

The Indonesian Health Ministry was sending an aid team to Manokwari as well as four tons of medical supplies and baby food, spokeswoman Lily Sulistyowati said.

Relief agency World Vision Indonesia was flying in 2,000 emergency provision kits, including canned food, blankets and basic medical supplies, said spokeswoman Katarina Hardono. She said its team will try to reach Manokwari by plane, but if needed will make a 36-hour trip by boat.

Papua — located about 1,830 miles (2,955 kilometers) east of the capital Jakarta — is among the nation’s least developed areas, and a low-level insurgency has simmered in the resource-rich region for years. It is off limits to foreign reporters.

The quake was felt 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) southwest of Papua in Australia’s northern city of Darwin but no damage was reported there.

Ecologists have suggested that as a result of global warming, species will shrink in size, as bigger creatures will have more problems losing heat.

Though the effects of the climate change are likely not to be seen for many more years, it is important to consider how to preserve larger species right now.

“Our collective actions are negatively affecting body sizes of many living species,” Kaustuv Roy, a biologist at the University of California in San Diego, told New Scientist.

It is well-known that humans tend to hunt or fish larger animals, creating a selective pressure that favours the smaller ones that can reproduce while they are still small.

Several species of cod are smaller as a result of pressures of the fishing industry.

The degradation of natural environments around the world is having the same effect by limiting the amount of food available to animals, meaning smaller animals that need less food have a head start.

But, according to Roy, there is another factor that threatens the world’s most impressive animals.

“Global warming may reinforce this trend towards smaller sizes through the temperature-size rule,” he said.

The temperature-size rule, also known as Bergmann’s rule, says that species size increases with latitude: they tend to be smaller in the tropics, and larger closer to the poles.

Bergmann’s rule is debated, but one explanation for it is that larger animals have a lower surface-area-to-volume ratio, allowing them to retain more heat and fare better in cooler climes.

Conversely, smaller species radiate their heat more easily and so are better adapted to living in warm temperatures.

There is also some experimental evidence that rearing animals in higher temperatures generally results in smaller individuals.

“In effect, our actions have set up a grand selection experiment where bigger is no longer better,” said Roy, who has also shown that species evolve faster in cooler temperatures.

“It makes sense to be bigger when it’s colder,” said Wendy Foden, a biologist at the World Conservation Union who is studying the effects of climate change on species. “As the world gets warmer, the converse will happen, species will shrink,” she added.

According to Foden, the most likely place to spot an animal that has shrunk in size because of global warming would be in an environment that has already experienced significant warming, and among species with short generation times.

When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, global warming was a slow-moving environmental problem that was easy to ignore. Now it is a ticking time bomb that President-elect Barack Obama can’t avoid.

Since Clinton’s inauguration, summer Arctic sea ice has lost the equivalent of Alaska, California and Texas. The 10 hottest years on record have occurred since Clinton’s second inauguration. Global warming is accelerating. Time is close to running out, and Obama knows it.

“The time for delay is over; the time for denial is over,” he said on Tuesday after meeting with former Vice President Al Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming. “We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years now that this is a matter of urgency and national security and it has to be dealt with in a serious way.”

But there are powerful political and economic realities that must be quickly overcome for Obama to succeed. Despite the urgency he expresses, it’s not at all clear that he and Congress will agree on an approach during a worldwide financial crisis in time to meet some of the more crucial deadlines.

Obama is pushing changes in the way Americans use energy, and produce greenhouse gases, as part of what will be a massive economic stimulus. He called it an opportunity “to re-power America.”

After years of inaction on global warming, 2009 might be different. Obama replaces a president who opposed mandatory cuts of greenhouse gas pollution and it appears he will have a willing Congress. Also, next year, diplomats will try to agree on a major new international treaty to curb the gases that promote global warming.

“We need to start in January making significant changes,” Gore said in a recent telephone interview with The Associated Press. “This year coming up is the most important opportunity the world has ever had to make progress in really solving the climate crisis.”

Scientists are increasingly anxious, talking more often and more urgently about exceeding “tipping points.”

“We’re out of time,” Stanford University biologist Terry Root said. “Things are going extinct.”

U.S. emissions have increased by 20 percent since 1992. China has more than doubled its carbon dioxide pollution in that time. World carbon dioxide emissions have grown faster than scientists’ worst-case scenarios. Methane, the next most potent greenhouse gas, suddenly is on the rise again and scientists fear that vast amounts of the trapped gas will escape from thawing Arctic permafrost.

The amount of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere has already pushed past what some scientists say is the safe level.

In the early 1990s, many scientists figured that the world was about a century away from a truly dangerous amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, said Mike MacCracken, who was a top climate scientist in the Clinton administration. But as they studied the greenhouse effect further, scientists realized that harmful changes kick in at far lower levels of carbon dioxide than they thought. Now some scientists, but not all, say the safe carbon dioxide level for Earth is about 10 percent below what it is now.

Gore called the situation “the equivalent of a five-alarm fire that has to be addressed immediately.”

Scientists fear that what’s happening with Arctic ice melt will be amplified so that ominous sea level rise will occur sooner than they expected. They predict Arctic waters could be ice-free in summers, perhaps by 2013, decades earlier than they thought only a few years ago.

In December 2009, diplomats are charged with forging a new treaty replacing the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which set limits on greenhouse gases, and which the United States didn’t ratify. This time European officials have high expectations for the U.S. to take the lead. But many experts don’t see Congress passing a climate bill in time because of pressing economic and war issues.

“The reality is, it may take more than the first year to get it all done,” Senate Energy Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., said recently.

Complicating everything is the worldwide financial meltdown. Frank Maisano, a Washington energy specialist and spokesman who represents coal-fired utilities and refineries, sees the poor economy as “a huge factor” that could stop everything. That’s because global warming efforts are aimed at restricting coal power, which is cheap. That would likely mean higher utility bills and more damage to ailing economies that depend on coal production, he said.

Obama is stacking his Cabinet and inner circle with advocates who have pushed for deep mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas pollution and even with government officials who have achieved results at the local level.

The President-elect has said that one of the first things he will do when he gets to Washington is grant California and other states permission to control car tailpipe emissions, something the Bush administration denied.

And though congressional action may take time, the incoming Congress will be more inclined to act on global warming. In the House, liberal California Democrat Henry Waxman’s unseating of Michigan Rep. John Dingell — a staunch defender of Detroit automakers — as head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee was a sign that global warming will be on the fast track.

Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., vowed to push two global warming bills starting in January: one to promote energy efficiency as an economic stimulus and the other to create a cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from utilities. “The time is now,” she wrote in a Dec. 8 letter to Obama.

Mother Nature, of course, is oblivious to the federal government’s machinations. Ironically, 2008 is on pace to be a slightly cooler year in a steadily rising temperature trend line. Experts say it’s thanks to a La Nina weather variation. While skeptics are already using it as evidence of some kind of cooling trend, it actually illustrates how fast the world is warming.

The average global temperature in 2008 is likely to wind up slightly under 57.9 degrees Fahrenheit, about a tenth of a degree cooler than last year. When Clinton was inaugurated, 57.9 easily would have been the warmest year on record. Now, that temperature would qualify as the ninth warmest year.