Reprinted from Sify News, July 29, 2010

A specific part of our brain processes information about human and animal faces and is responsible for how we recognize them and interpret facial expressions. Now, Israeli researchers are exploring what makes this highly specialized area of the brain unique.

In her “Face Lab” at Tel Aviv University, Dr. Galit Yovel of TAU’s Department of Psychology is trying to understand the mechanisms at work in the face area of the brain called the “fusiform gyrus” of the brain. She is combining cognitive psychology with techniques like brain imaging and electrophysiology to study how the brain processes information about faces. Her most recent research on the brain’s face-processing mechanisms appears in the Journal of Neuroscience and Human Brain Mapping.

The study of face recognition does more than provide an explanation for embarrassing memory lapses. For instance, it may help business executives better match names with faces, and more important can lead to better facial recognition software to identify terrorists or criminals. Similar to faces, bodies are also processed by distinct brain areas. How we perceive faces is not totally intuitive, she says, and therefore raises the question of how this information is combined in our brain to understand how separate face and body areas generate a whole body-image impression. 

In her research, Dr. Yovel has found that we are better able to recognize faces when we regularly see and interact with them in meaningful settings. It’s as though the face-processing sections of the brain – the fusiform face area being the most distinct – recognizes faces holistically. Additions to your face, such as a beard or glasses, are assimilated into or incorporated into the face recognition gestalt of the brain, unlike other elements that are irrelevant to facial recognition, such as the chair you’re sitting on. This may be why fashions in hairstyle and eyewear have become so important to personal appearance, she theorizes.

The inability to recognize faces is more common than most people think. Dr. Yovel says that two percent of all people are born with “face blindness,” scientifically known as prosopagnosia. She hopes her research will enable these people to train themselves, via software and other methods, to better differentiate one face from another – especially when the face is that of a loved one.

“Faces are important. We meet so many people every day, on the street or at work, and should know whether or not each face is important to us. In principle, faces are very similar to one another. That’s probably why we’ve evolved these complex and specialized face areas in the brain – so that we can more accurately discriminate among the countless faces we encounter throughout our lives,” says Dr. Yovel, who first began to study the neurological basis of face recognition as a post-doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. Yovel hopes her studies will lead to new algorithms that can help computers do a better job of recognizing faces, as well as help people who somehow lack this critical social skill. She is currently collaborating with computer scientists at Tel Aviv University to explore new computational algorithms for facial recognition. (ANI)

A common test to diagnose gestational diabetes — a temporary condition which can harm both mother and child if left untreated — also has predictive power for Type 2 adult-onset diabetes, a new Tel Aviv University study finds.

Dr. Gabriel Chodick of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine has proven that women who “fail” the glucose challenge test, a series of four blood tests conducted over a single four-hour period, have a higher chance of developing adult onset diabetes later in life. In his latest published research, Dr. Chodick found that nearly half the women who fail all four of the four-part tests, demonstrating an elevated blood sugar level, developed Type 2 diabetes within ten years.

Dr. Chodick’s study statistically proves what has been anecdotally believed by healthcare practitioners in the past. “While doctors take this into consideration, there usually isn’t close follow-up in the clinical setting,” says Dr. Chodick. He says that women in the highest risk group (those who fail all four of the tests) should be given special counseling and intervention to prevent the onset of diabetes, which can greatly diminish quality of life and lead to adverse effects including heart disease, blindness and liver cancer.

In the retrospective study, Dr. Chodick, Dr. Varda Shalev and their colleagues collected data on more than 185,000 women in Israel who took the glucose challenge test, then acquired information from the health registry as to what percentage of these women contracted diabetes later in life.

Dr. Chodick and his colleagues ascertained that women who failed all four glucose challenge blood tests had a nearly 50% chance of developing Type 2 diabetes within the ten years following the test. Those who failed three of the four tests had a 20% overall chance of developing the disease within the same period.

“This is the first-ever study to show the long-term health of those who failed the glucose challenge test,” says Dr. Chodick.

While doctors commonly advise that women with gestational diabetes exercise and supplement their diet with fiber and fruit (and, in the most extreme circumstances, take insulin injections), women who take the advice usually have the health of their child in mind, not themselves. After giving birth, they resume adverse eating and lifestyle habits.

Dr. Chodick, whose life’s work is focused on preventative medicine, hopes to change attitudes and policies through his new study. Gestational diabetes currently affects 3 to 5% of all pregnant women in the U.S., and rates are continuing to rise, Dr. Chodick says. “It’s an epidemic that can be stopped with information and action.”

Diabetic Medicine, July 2010 American Friends of Tel Aviv University (2010, July 8). Women with gestational diabetes: Common glucose test also accurately predicts adult-onset diabetes.

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH, Jerusalem Post, 18/07/2010

Science fiction turned into science fact.

Star Trek fans will remember “tractor beams” that allowed the starship Enterprise to trap and move objects. Now Tel Aviv University is turning this science fiction into science fact on a nano scale by building special laser “tweezers” for medicine, communications and harvesting energy.

The new tool, called Holographic Optical Tweezers (HOTs), use holographic technology to manipulate simultaneously up to 300 nanoparticles such as beads of glass or polymer that are too small and delicate to be handled with traditional laboratory instruments.

The technology, also known as “optical tweezers,” could form the basis for tomorrow’s ultrafast, light-powered communication devices and quantum computers, says Dr. Yael Roichman of TAU’s school of chemistry. She’s using these tweezers to build nano structures that control beams of light, aiding in the development of anything from optical microscopes to lightfuelled computer technology, HOTs are a new family of optical tools that use a strongly-focused light beam to trap, manipulate and transform small amounts of matter. First proposed as a scientific theory in 1986 and prototyped by a University of Chicago team in 1997, holographic optical tweezers have been praised as indispensable for researching cutting-edge ideas in physics, chemistry and biology.

Roichman and her team of researchers are currently pioneering the use of optical tweezers to create the next generation of photonic devices. Made out of carefully arranged particles of materials such as silicon oxide and titanium oxide, these devices have the ability to insulate light, allowing less energy to be lost in transmission. “Our invention could increase transmission speed and save energy, which is important for long-life batteries in computers, for instance,” says Roichman.

Photons are already used in optical fibers that bring us every day services such as cable TV. But Roichman says this technology can be taken much further. In her lab, she is advancing the previous study of photonic crystals, which control and harness light, by manipulating a variety of particles to create 3D heterogeneous structures. The ability to insulate light in a novel way, preserving its potential energy, is central to this goal. 

No known material can resist the flow of light, as its energy is either absorbed by, reflected off or passed through materials.

But Roichman has devised a new layering technique using special crystals – central to the creation of photonic devices – that are arranged to create a path along which light can travel. If done correctly, she says, the light is trapped along the path. She is hopeful that the ability to build these devices will transform communications, telescopic instruments and even medical technology, making them more efficient and powerful.

One medical project would track the effectiveness of antibiotics. She says improvements to optical microscopy will, for the first time, enable researchers to look at the internal processes within bacteria and see how different types of antibiotics attack them. More than that, her optical tweezers can isolate the bacteria to be studied, handling them without killing them.

ISRAELI NEUROSCIENTIST EXCELS
A researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot has just shared the Excellent Paper in Neuroscience award for young scientists, along with a colleague from Finland.

The award ceremony, in which each received 3,000 euros, took place during the Seventh Forum of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) in Amsterdam. ERA-Net NEURON is an initiative of the European Commission aimed at advancing transnational European research in the field of disease-related neuroscience.

Dr. Asya Rolls received the award on her publication in PLoS Medicine (2008) for elucidating the role of scar tissue formation in spinal cord repair after injury. It has been accepted for quite some time that lack of nerve regeneration in the central nervous system is due to formation of harmful scar tissue. Rolls addressed the question of why should the body invest so much energy in scar formation after traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) only to inhibit spinal cord repair. She showed that initial formation of the scar, and in particular a protein called CSPG, is part of an “SOS” response crucial for recovery. In fact, inhibiting the formation of CSPG at the early stages of spinal cord injury actually harms the recovery process. On the other hand, CSPG inhibition during the later subacute phase, improves functional recovery and can benefit regeneration. This study thus identified an endogenous repair mechanism of the body and may have considerable implications for the treatment of SCI.

The other recipient was Dr. Heidi Nousiainen from the Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare. Nousiainen received her award on her publication in Nature Genetics (2008) describing and identifying the gene underlying two fatal nervous system diseases (LCCS1 and LAAHD) that are characterized by marked atrophy of spinal cord motoneurons and fetal immobility, and who are lethal already during fetal development or shortly after birth. She discovered that the disease causing gene, adding a new and important member to the increasing number of RNA processing molecules linked to neurodegenerative diseases.

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Areas of expansion in the human cortex during infancy and childhood, top, closely match areas of change in the human brain when compared to the brains of apes and monkeys. Yellow areas expanded the most, followed by orange, red, blue and light blue areas. (Credit: Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.)

ScienceDaily (July 13, 2010) — A study undertaken to help scientists concerned with abnormal brain development in premature babies has serendipitously revealed evolution’s imprint on the human brain.

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found that the human brain regions that grow the most during infancy and childhood are nearly identical to the brain regions with the most changes when human brains are compared to those of apes and monkeys.

Researchers report the finding in a detailed comparison of the brains of normal-term infants and healthy young adults published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientists conducted the study to help assess the long-term effects of premature birth on brain development. These can include increased risks of learning disabilities, attention deficits, behavioral problems and cognitive impairments.

"Pre-term births have been rising in recent years, and now 12 percent of all babies in the United States are born prematurely," says Terrie Inder, MD, PhD, professor of pediatrics. "Until now, though, we were very limited in our ability to study how premature birth affects brain development because we had so little data on what normal brain development looks like."

Among the questions Inder and her colleagues hope to answer is the extent to which the brain can adapt to developmental limitations or setbacks imposed by early birth. They are also helping to develop clinical strategies to promote such adaptations and normalize development.

The study used a technique for comparative brain anatomy called surface reconstruction pioneered by senior author David Van Essen, PhD, Edison Professor and head of the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology. Surface reconstruction helps scientists more closely align comparable regions and structures in many different brains and has been used to create online atlases of brain structure.

First author Jason Hill, an MD/PhD student, analyzed the brain scans of 12 full-term infants and compared these to scans from 12 healthy young adults. Data from the two groups were combined into a single atlas to help scientists quantify the differences between the infant and young-adult brains.

They found that the cerebral cortex, the wrinkled area on the surface of the brain responsible for higher mental functions, grows in an uneven fashion. Every region expands as the brain matures, but one-quarter to one-third of the cortex expands approximately twice as much as other cortical areas during normal development.

"Through comparisons between humans and macaque monkeys, my lab previously showed that many of these high-growth regions are expanded in humans as a result of recent evolutionary changes that made the human brain much larger than that of any other primate," says Van Essen. "The correlation isn’t perfect, but it’s much too good to put down to chance."

The high-growth regions are areas linked to advanced mental functions such as language, reasoning, and what Van Essen calls "the abilities that make us uniquely human." He speculates that the full physical growth of these regions may be delayed somewhat to allow them to be shaped by early life experiences.

Inder notes another potential explanation for the different development rates: the limitations on brain size imposed by the need to pass through the mother’s pelvis at birth may force the brain to prioritize.

"Vision, for example, is a brain area that is important at birth so an infant can nurse and learn to recognize his or her parents," Inder says. "Other areas of the brain, less important very early in life, may be the regions that see greater growth as the child matures."

Researchers are currently conducting similar scans of premature babies at birth and years later.

"This study and the data that we’re gathering now could provide us with very powerful tools for understanding what goes wrong structurally in a wide range of childhood disorders, from the aftereffects of premature birth to conditions like autism, attention-deficit disorder or reading disabilities," Inder says.

Funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Doris Duke Foundation and the Green Fund supported this research.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Washington University School of Medicine. The original article was written by Michael C. Purdy.

Journal Reference:

1. Jason Hill, Terrie Inder, Jeffrey Neil, Donna Dierker, John Harwell, and David Van Essen. Similar patterns of cortical expansion during human development and evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2010; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1001229107

Washington University School of Medicine (2010, July 13). Baby brain growth mirrors changes from apes to humans. ScienceDaily. Retrieved July 14, 2010, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2010/07/100712154422.htm

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

The findings reject allopatric speciation in a case study from a system thought to exemplify it, and suggest the potential importance of speciation due to differences in ecological conditions (ecological speciation).

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Precursor island regions, lineages, transects, and ecotone on Martinique. (Credit: Thorpe RS, Surget-Groba Y, Johansson H. Genetic Tests for Ecological and Allopatric Speciation in Anoles on an Island Archipelago. PLoS Genetics, 2010; 6(4): e1000929 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1000929)

ScienceDaily (May 1, 2010) — A genetic study of island lizards shows that even those that have been geographically isolated for many millions of years have not evolved into separate species as predicted by conventional evolutionary theory.

Professor Roger Thorpe and colleagues Yann Surget-Groba and Helena Johansson, at Bangor University, UK, reveal their findings April 29 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics.

Since Darwin’s study of the Galapagos Islands, archipelagos have played a central role in understanding how new species evolve from existing ones (speciation). Islands epitomize allopatric speciation, where geographic isolation causes individuals of an original species to accumulate sufficient genetic differences to prevent them breeding with each other when they are reunited.

Current day Martinique in the Lesser Antilles is composed of several ancient islands that have only recently coalesced into a single entity. The phylogeny and geology show that these ancient islands have had their own tree lizard (anole) species for about six to eight million years. 

Capitalizing on the islands’ meeting, the authors genetically tested the lizards for reproductive isolation from one another. In using selectively neutral genetic markers, the authors saw that these anoles are freely exchanging genes and therefore not behaving as separate species. Indeed, there is more genetic isolation between conspecifics from different habitats than between those lizards originating from separate ancient islands.

The findings reject allopatric speciation in a case study from a system thought to exemplify it, and suggest the potential importance of speciation due to differences in ecological conditions (ecological speciation). “The next step is to identify the genes controlling the traits influencing the process of speciation,” said Roger Thorpe.

Adapted from materials provided by Public Library of Science, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

1. Thorpe RS, Surget-Groba Y, Johansson H. Genetic Tests for Ecological and Allopatric Speciation in Anoles on an Island Archipelago. PLoS Genetics, 2010; 6(4): e1000929 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1000929

This page lists the most accessible literature on evolution including the critics of evolution. The emphasis is on recent, affordable books for non-specialists written by specialists.

by Gert Korthof (updated 23 Apr 2010)

http://home.planet.nl/~gkorthof/korthof.htm

Extensions & alternative evolutionary theories
Evo-Devo
Non-religious Anti-Darwinism + Anti-Evolution
Religious criticism:
Creationism / Intelligent Design
Fine Tuning
Theistic Evolution
Buddhism & Hinduism
Orthodox neo-Darwinism
textbooks Evolutionary Biology
introductions
Anti-Creationism/ID
Origin of life & Astrobiology
Ecology & Earth System Science
History of Darwinism
Bibliographies, anthologies, encyclopedias
Human evolution (general)
Psychology, Behaviour & Brain
Sex & evolution
Genetics & genomics
Medicine & evolution
Economics & evolution
Politics, ethics & evolution
Theoretical & mathematical biology
Philosophy & evolution
History & evolution
Engineering & evolution
Evolution & Literature

philosophy of science
books suggested by readers
Scientific controversies
Nederlandse literatuur

This page lists the most accessible literature on evolution including the critics of evolution. The emphasis is on recent, affordable books for non-specialists written by specialists. This page shortly characterises noteworthy books and gives links to book reviews in Nature, Science, etc (19). Furthermore, I have written detailed reviews of many books which are on separate pages of the site Was Darwin Wrong? (now called: ‘The Third Evolutionary Synthesis’). Those reviews are listed in a handy table on the index page. I have subdivided the literature in categories and subcategories (see directory structure above). The goal of this site contains also information about myself. If the reader feels I omitted books that belong on this introduction page, please drop me a note. They are included on this page or suggestions by readers.

Extensions, revisions & alternative evolutionary theories
top

This is a category of scientific, non-religious critics of Darwinism. Here we find scientists who do accept evolution (common descent), but aren’t happy with parts of the neo-Darwinist explanation of evolution (mainly the mechanism of evolution: natural selection). 

Against natural selection
One of the earliest critics of the sufficiency of natural selection as an explanation of form in biology was D’Arcy Thompson On Growth and Form (1917). He was not a creationist: he granted that natural selection could weed out the unfit, but doubted the power of natural selection to explain why life took one form and not another. He preferred to explain the forms of organisms by mechanical and mathematical principles (13). In his spirit are books by Philip Ball and Brian Goodwin. About the same time geneticist and Nobelprize winner Thomas Hunt Morgan expressed similar doubts in Evolution and Adaptation (1903) (24). The criticism of population geneticist Motoo Kimura was that all-powerful natural selection was not powerful enough to eliminate all mutations at the DNA level. He called these mutations neutral mutations, because they are not affected by selection, positive or negative. He was right. An alternative explanation for the peacock’s tail turned into a new principle: The Handicap Principle. A missing piece of Darwin’s puzzle by A & A Zahavi (1999); initially unanimously rejected, currently largely accepted by mainstream science. Gabriel Dover claims there is a third force in evolution.
An example of a palaeontologist who accepts evolution, but rejects the claim that palaeontology can determine missing links with certainty, is: Henry Gee. Although cladism is now widely accepted, I hesitate to place Gee in the category ‘Orthodox Neo-Darwinism’ because of his criticism of orthodox palaeontology. The eminent but unorthodox astronomer sir Fred Hoyle wrote an attack on the fundamentals of neo-Darwinism using high level mathematics: Mathematics of Evolution. Years ago Hoyle introduced the much quoted analogy that the chance of life originating out of raw materials would be equal to the chance that a Boeing-747 resulted from a hurricane going over a junkyard. Hoyle believes life came from space (panspermia). The immunologist Edward J. Steele wrote what could be called the textbook of ‘neo-Lamarckism’. He explains in molecular terms how acquired characteristics of the immune system can be inherited in: Lamarck’s Signature: How Retrogenes Are Changing Darwin’s Natural Selection Paradigm. The embryologist Brian Goodwin has interesting ideas about scientific alternatives for Darwinism. A critique of selectionism and the proposal of an alternate theory of emergent evolution is: Biological Emergences. Evolution by Natural Experiment by Robert G. B. Reid (2007) (info), emeritus Professor of Biology and author of ‘Evolutionary Theory: The Unfinished Synthesis‘ (1985). Palaeontologist Niles Eldredge argues against the reductionism of the ‘ultra-Darwinist’. Hubert Yockey is an expert in the information content of genomes, DNA and proteins. Yockey believes that there is too much information in the simplest organisms to have originated by chance, but unlike "intelligent design theorists", he does not infer design or a designer (at least in his book). He has no alternative theory.
    Palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould is known by the public from his column in Natural History and the New York Review of Books and as a defender of evolution (that includes rejection of creationism). It is not so well known that he is also a critic of orthodox neo-Darwinism. Two criticisms are: not everything is adaptation, and evolution is not gradual but punctuated. This and much, much more in his voluminous The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002).
In The tinkerer’s accomplice: how design emerges from life itself J. Scott Turner (2007) argues that "organisms are designed not so much because natural selection of particular genes has made them that way, but because agents of homeostasis build them that way" (Review).
Evolutionary biologist John Reiss (2009) Not by Design; Retiring Darwin’s Watchmaker argues that we can’t infer the past action of selection from the present adaptedness (apparent design) of organisms (25).
Jerry Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini (2010) wrote a critique of the theory of natural selection: What Darwin Got Wrong (Reviews: Michael Ruse, Philip Kitcher, (continued), Philip Ball, Mary Midgley, interview, Nature).

Source: http://home.planet.nl/~gkorthof/korthof.htm

NASA lab accused of crackdown on intelligent design

Complaint alleges harassment, secret investigation, gag order

“When it comes to intelligent design, private and government-run agencies are suppressing free speech.”

By Bob Unruh, April 15, 2010
© 2010 WorldNetDaily

A complaint has been filed against NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, which sent Galileo to Jupiter and dispatched a ship named Dawn to orbit asteroids Vesta and Ceres, claiming managers there discriminated against and demoted a key project worker because he shared intelligent design videos with co-workers.

The case has been filed by David Coppedge, an information technology specialist and systems administrator on the lab’s Cassini mission to Saturn, which has been described as the most ambitious interplanetary exploration ever launched.

“For the offense of offering videos to colleagues, Coppedge faced harassment, an investigation cloaked in secrecy, and a virtual gag order on his discussion of intelligent design,” said attorney Casey Luskin of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.

Luskin serves as a consultant to the Coppedge lawsuit, which is being handled by Los Angeles First Amendment attorney William J. Becker, Jr., of The Becker Law Firm, and includes allegations of free speech violations and wrongful demotion.

“Coppedge was punished even though supervisors admitted never receiving a single complaint regarding his conversations about intelligent design prior to their investigation, and even though other employees were allowed to express diverse ideological opinions, including attacking intelligent design,” Luskin said. 

The complaint was filed in California Superior Court. But officials at the JPL today told WND they had not yet seen the court filing and could not comment.

The action explains that a division of the California Institute of Technology, JPL operates under a contract with NASA.

David Coppedge

Coppedge was a “Team Lead” Systems Administrator on the Cassini mission until JPL demoted him for allegedly “pushing religion” by loaning interested co-workers DVDs supportive of intelligent design.

Coppedge is suing JPL and Caltech for religion discrimination and harassment, retaliation, violation of his religious rights and wrongful demotion.

“Intelligent design is not religion, and nothing in the DVDs that Coppedge shared deals with religion,” said Luskin. “Even so, it’s unlawful for an employer to discriminate against an employee based on what they deem is religion.”

Among the coming JPL projects is Aquarius, which is to offer the first-ever global maps of salt concentrations in the ocean surface needed to understand heat transport and storage in the ocean.

Its Deep Space 1 left Earth in 1998 and tested an ion engine that could power future solar system explorers.

But the case alleges Coppedge’s supervisors demoted and humiliated him for advancing ideas that superiors labeled “unwelcome” and “disruptive.”

The situation reach a boiling point in 2009 when a supervisor angrily harassed Coppedge, claiming “intelligent design is religion” and that Coppedge was “pushing religion.”

Coppedge’s complaint about that harassment resulted in a retaliatory investigation and “severe limitations” on Coppedge’s free speech rights, the case explains.

The actions against him continued, even though supervisors eventually admitted they had no complaints about him, and other employees were allowed to discuss whatever topics they chose, the case explains.

The complaint said, “Intelligent design offers scientific evidence that life’s development is best explained as reflecting the design of an intelligent cause, citing mainstream research in biology, cosmology, and paleontology.”

The DVDs included: “Unlocking the Mystery of Life,” and “The Privileged Planet.”

The Discovery Institute notes this is just the latest in a series of disputes involving the concept of intelligent design and how it conflicts with belief in evolution.

Previously, the California Science Center in Los Angeles, a state agency, was sued following its “discriminatory cancellation” of a contract to screen an intelligent design film.

At at Iowa State in 2006, supervisors denied tenure to and forced out a distinguished astrophysicist for co-authoring a book on intelligent-design in cosmology.

Earlier, in 2005, supervisors at the Smithsonian investigated, harassed and demoted an evolutionary biologist for editing a pro-intelligent design article in a peer-reviewed technical journal.

And in University of Idaho in 2005, the university’s president banned faculty on campus from teaching against evolutionary orthodoxy.

“Anyone who thinks that today’s culture of science allows an open discussion of evolution is sorely mistaken,” said John G. West, associate director of the Center for Science and Culture. “When it comes to intelligent design, private and government-run agencies are suppressing free speech.”

Judith Horstman ,  – FOXNews.com , – April 13, 2010

The six-million dollar man was pure fantasy in the 70s — but largely realistic technology today. And the future of this tech is even wilder: Implantable brain electrodes may be just around the corner.

Adapted  from the book The Scientific American Brave New Brain.

The six-million dollar man was pure fantasy in the 70s — but largely realistic technology today. And the future of this tech is even wilder: Implantable brain electrodes may be just around the corner.

Futurists and science-fiction writers have long speculated about merging human and machine, especially human brains and computers. These dreams are slowly becoming reality: The deaf are hearing with bionic "ears," the blind see with the aid of electrodes, an amputee is moving a prosthetic arm by thought, a man paralyzed with locked-in syndrome is "speaking" through a brain electrode connected to a computerized synthesizer.

One such bionic advance — thought-driven neural implants — could  change the lives of millions of people, including the many thousands conscious but now entombed within their own bodies in what’s called locked-in syndrome, and the thousands of wounded warriors returning from battle with missing limbs and devastating brain injuries. And it could open tremendous opportunities for people in the future who would like to take their minds where no man’s body has gone before — into deepest space or the deepest of ocean depths, for example, through the "senses" of a thought-driven robot.

Neural implants listen to the brain’s instructions for movement, even when actual movement is no longer possible, and decode the signals for use in operating a computer or moving a robot or an artificial limb. The technology for the basic requirements — powerful microprocessors, improved filters, and longer-lasting and smaller batteries — has advanced rapidly, boosted by funds from many sources, including the U.S. Department of Defense, which sponsors research in prosthetics for wounded war veterans. Years of animal research have revealed neuron activity and the brain’s amazing plasticity: the ability to revise itself.

But the research application has been slow. Scientists first had to determine what parts of the brain were controlling movement so they could figure out where to apply the brain wave sensors or electrodes. It’s quite complex. Several approaches have been taken, involving tapping into various places in the brain involved with the interface between muscle movement and thought.

One of the ongoing experiments with implanted electrodes could possibly lead to the level of targeting needed. Philip R. Kennedy of Neural Signals, Inc., and his colleagues designed a device that records the output of neurons. The hookup lets a stroke victim send a signal, through thought alone, to a computer that interprets it as, say, a vowel, which can then be vocalized by a speech synthesizer, a step toward forming whole words.

"Thought is gazillions of neurons firing in ensembles," says Kennedy. "We’re trying to pick the right ones, and there’s an enormous amount of trial and error." He compares thought to a wind blowing over a vast field of wheat and his work as looking for the specific stalks of wheat that move. He has had to find a way to separate speech signals from neural noise without animal research to guide him, because no other animal except humans has speech.

Brown University neuroscientist John Donoghue, the second scientist after Kennedy to develop a neural prosthesis for human implantation, is teaming up with biomedical engineer Hunter Peckham of Case Western Reserve University, who has developed an electrical device that stimulates nerves or muscles to enable some movement after a partial or lower-level spinal cord injury. Peckham has a system that allows simple, preprogrammed motions, such as boosting a person from a wheelchair to a walker. By linking a neural prosthesis to the device, Donoghue and Peckham hope to create an enormously more effective system.

Tapping into individual neurons is next: using nanoscale fibers, measuring 100 nanometers or less in diameter  (a nano is one billionth of a meter) that could easily tap into single neurons because of their dimensions and their electrical and mechanical properties. Jun Li of Kansas State University and his colleagues have crafted a brush-like structure in which nanofiber bristles serve as electrodes for stimulating or receiving neural signals. Li foresees it as a way to stimulate neurons to allay Parkinson’s disease or depression or to flex astronauts’ muscles during long space flights to prevent the inevitable muscle wasting that occurs in zero gravity.

We’re not there yet. But consider the potential, from the prosaic to the grand. A neurochip and computer backpack might allow a person to move limbs that have been stilled by spinal injury. The rest of us would just like to be able to download traveler’s Japanese for that trip to Tokyo.

Adapted with permission of the publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., from The Scientific American Brave New Brain by Judith Horstman.  Copyright © 2010 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and Scientific American.

Hadassah Hospital researchers develop new cell growth method which may help heal Parkinson’s disease, diabetes

Sarit Rosenblum, YNET News, April 9, 2010

A breakthrough made by Israeli researchers may pave the way for healing chronic illnesses: Researchers from Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital have developed a new method for producing large amounts of human fetal stem cells.

Fetal stem cells can transform into any type of cell in the human body. The cells attract considerable scientific interest due to the estimate that in the future they could be used as an endless source of cells, which will be transplanted and improve the performance of organs in a wide variety of degenerative diseases.

The medical world hopes to be able to use fetal stem cells to heal Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, reticular degeneration and other illnesses. In addition, the cells may be used in the future to grow human organs which would replace damaged organs like kidneys and liver.

Up to now, stem cells would be multiplied in colonies of one cell layer attached to a flat substrate. In their study, the Israeli researchers showed that human fetal stem cells can be produced and multiplied while floating in liquid substrate.    
“The study’s findings are an important step ahead of an automatic and controlled creation of the large amounts of cells needed for transplant and other industrial and research purposes,” says Prof. Benjamin Rubinoff, director of the Hadassah Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research Center, who headed the team of researchers.

The study’s findings offer the first practical option of growing large quantities of fetal stem cells in large containers with calculated and accurate control of the breeding conditions.

The research was conducted as part of Dr. Deborah Steiner’s post-doctoral study with the help of other researchers from the Hadassah Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research Center. The study was published recently in the prestigious Nature Biotechnology journal.

MIT Press, April 2010

Edited by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller

In the six decades since the publication of Julian Huxley’s Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, spectacular empirical advances in the biological sciences have been accompanied by equally significant developments within the core theoretical framework of the discipline. As a result, evolutionary theory today includes concepts and even entire new fields that were not part of the foundational structure of the Modern Synthesis. In this volume, sixteen leading evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science survey the conceptual changes that have emerged since Huxley’s landmark publication, not only in such traditional domains of evolutionary biology as quantitative genetics and paleontology but also in such new fields of research as genomics and EvoDevo.

Most of the contributors to Evolution—The Extended Synthesis accept many of the tenets of the classical framework but want to relax some of its assumptions and introduce significant conceptual augmentations of the basic Modern Synthesis structure—just as the architects of the Modern Synthesis themselves expanded and modulated previous versions of Darwinism. This continuing revision of a theoretical edifice the foundations of which were laid in the middle of the nineteenth century—the reexamination of old ideas, proposals of new ones, and the synthesis of the most suitable—shows us how science works, and how scientists have painstakingly built a solid set of explanations for what Darwin called the "grandeur" of life.

Contributors: John Beatty, Werner Callebaut, Jeremy Draghi, Chrisantha Fernando, Sergey Gavrilets, John C. Gerhart, Eva Jablonka, David Jablonski, Marc W. Kirschner, Marion J. Lamb, Alan C. Love, Gerd B. Müller, Stuart A. Newman, John Odling-Smee, Massimo Pigliucci, Michael Purugganan, Eörs Szathmáry, Günter P. Wagner, David Sloan Wilson, Gregory A. Wray
About the Editors
Massimo Pigliucci is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York.
Gerd B. Müller is Professor of Theoretical Biology at the University of Vienna and Chairman of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research. He is a coeditor of Origination of Organismal Form (MIT Press, 2003) and Modeling Biology (MIT Press, 2007).

Endorsements

"The essays in this volume provide ample food for thought, and from all the major food groups! The Modern Synthesis in evolutionary theory, and what lies beyond, are assessed here from multiple angles. This book will greatly interest evolutionary biologists and philosophers of evolutionary biology alike."
—Elliott Sober, Hans Reichenbach Professor and William F. Vilas Research Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"The twenty-first century will likely be the century of biology, just as the twentieth century was the century of physics. The central, organizing theory of biology is—and will remain—the theory of evolution. If you want to know how the theory of evolution will likely expand and be configured in the twenty-first century, reading Evolution – the Extended Synthesis is a good way to start.”
—Francisco J. Ayala, Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences, University of California, Irvine and author of Human Evolution: Trails from the Past