Researchers report in Nature that they have improved brain function in a minimally conscious patient by implanting electrodes into his brain.

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Synaesthesia is a condition in which there is increased connectivity between the areas of the brain that process information received from each sense organ. This leads to a mingling of the senses: for example, sounds may elicit perceptions of colour in a synaesthete who has increased connectivity between the brain’s visual and auditory pathways.

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Cultured neurons seem like ants away from their colony: removed from their parent organ, dissociated from their fellow workers and placed into an unnatural environment. But neurons plated onto a culture dish connect to each other, forming simple neural networks that give rise to spontaneous electrical activity.

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In an advance online publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Harvard Medical School’s Department of Neurobiology show that the perception of single spots of light can be elicited in monkeys by electrical stimulation of a part of the brain called the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN).

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We rarely remember things as they actually happened. Rather, as memories are encoded, they are altered in order to be made compatible with our existing knowledge; upon retrieval, memories are reconstructed rather than reproduced. Because the extent to which this reconstruction occurs can vary, some memories are very accurate while others are a mixture of fact and fantasy. Yet others - claims of highly implausible events such as alien abduction and reincarnation, for example - are completely fabricated.

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Last week, I wrote about the work of Ed Boyden and his colleagues at MIT’s Media Lab. Boyden’s research group has developed a method by which light is used to control neuronal activity. The method involves the use of a light-activated protein called channelrhodopsin (ChR2), which was recently isolated from the extremophile archaebacterium Natronomonas pharaonis.

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An advance online publication in Nature shows that damage to a specific region of the frontal lobe alters people’s ability to make moral judgments.

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Last year, ex-marine Claudia Mitchell, who lost her left arm in a motorcycle accident when she was 24 years old, became the world’s second recipient of a “bionic arm” after she had a pioneering surgical procedure performed on her by surgeons at the   Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.

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The U. S. government has long understood that its military, hyperpowerful as it is, is woefully inadequate for present and future conflicts. Hence, in recent years, the U. S. Department of Defense has sought a radical transformation of its armed forces, with the overall aim of having an agile and technology-driven army that is better prepared for multiple, simultaneous wars than is the cumbersome leviathan of today.

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