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Star Wars Force Trainer by Uncle Milton

Image: NeuroSky Brain-Computer Interface Technologies

Scientists have identified a protein that appears not only to be central to the process that causes Parkinson’s disease but could also play a role in muting the high from methamphetamine and other addictive drugs.

A team of scientists from Canada, Spain and the United States has identified a key gene that allows plants to defend themselves against environmental stresses like drought, freezing and heat.

An unlikely multidisciplinary scientific collaboration has discovered that an electronic nose developed for air quality monitoring on Space Shuttle Endeavour can also be used to detect odour differences in normal and cancerous brain cells. The results of the pilot study open up new possibilities for neurosurgeons in the fight against brain cancer.

Quantum cryptography, a completely secure means of communication, is much closer to being used practically as researchers from Toshiba and Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory have now developed high speed detectors capable of receiving information with much higher key rates, thereby able to receive more information faster.

In a recent issue of The Journal of Chemical Physics, published by the American Institute of Physics (AIP), a group of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and Los Alamos National Laboratory describe the first comprehensive, molecular-level numerical study of gene therapy. Their work should help scientists design new experimental gene therapies and possibly solve some of the problems associated with this promising technique.

Neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center have found that an area known to be important for reading in the left visual cortex contains neurons that are specialized to process written words as whole word units.

A new class of “smart” memory editing drugs could conceivably eliminate the need to study at all.

Efforts to build a new technology cluster of algae-based industries in the region—and to make San Diego a center of excellence in algal biotechnology—are coming together in an unusual series of events today.

The successful use of the stromal vascular fraction (SVF) cells in these patients shows that further clinical studies should be conducted into the use of SVF cells to treat multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases, the researchers said.