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Running Faster On High-Grade Oil: Mouse Study
Between the 1932 and 2008 Olympic Games, world record times of the men"s 100m sprint improved by 0.6 seconds due to improved training techniques and technological advances. Imagine if this improvement could be achieved by a simple change in diet. Scientists at the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology in Austria have managed to achieve an equivalent feat in mice fed on a diet high in polyunsaturated fatty acids.
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Senate HELP Committee's Health Reform Bill Gives Needed Relief For America's Families
Senator Christopher Dodd, who is presiding over the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee during the absence of Committee Chair Edward Kennedy, today released the remaining portions of the health care reform bill that the Committee will consider when the July 4th recess ends. The following is the statement of Ron Pollack, Executive Director of Families USA, about the bill:
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Supreme Court Should Be 'Reined In' To Return Power To Legislative Branch, NYT Columnist Writes
Although Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor"s confirmation hearings are more than a month away, "it"s easy to predict how they will go," New York Times columnist Ross Douthat writes. Douthat predicts that Senate Judiciary Committee members "will attempt to divine Sotomayor"s position on a variety of controversial topics," such as abortion rights, and in "a series of polite, evasive answers, the nominee will feign a studious neutrality on almost every issue that could come before her during what"s likely to be decades as one of the most powerful women in the world." According to Douthat, the "deeper stakes" that likely will be ignored are that "Sotomayor will be joining a high court that"s gradually become a kind of extra legislative body." He cites research from Harvard Law School professor Jed Shugerman showing that the court over roughly the past 50 years has invalidated both state and federal statutes at an unprecedented rate. Douthat also points to data from Evan Caminker of the University of Michigan showing that in one eight-year period, the court invalidated 16 federal laws in 5-4 votes, something that occurred only 25 times in the previous two centuries. Douthat writes that "settling so many vexing controversies with 5-to-4 votes -- effectively making Anthony Kennedy the nation"s philosopher king -- is an awfully poor way to run a republic."Douthat continues that the "modern court"s most enduringly controversial power grabs -- with Roe v. Wade leading the way -- were usually the work of liberal justices" but that "in practice, the main divide between liberal and conservative judges tends to be over the responsibilities of the federal government, not judicial activism per se." He writes, "There are bipartisan ways that the Court could be reined in, and the legislative branch reinvigorated," including the idea of a supermajority rule that would require a 6-3 vote to overturn federal legislation. This idea "might spur the court toward greater consensus, and perhaps greater modesty as well," according to Douthat. Another possibility would be to implement 12-year term limits, he says. Douthat concludes that these suggestions would not "reduce the Supreme Court"s power directly, but it would help us see the court for what it has become -- a deeply political institution, as fallible as any other, and answerable, when all is said and done, to us" (Douthat, New York Times, 6/2).
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Study By UCLA, Rutgers Neuroscientists Provides New Insights Into 'Mind-Reading'

"If you could read my mind, love, what a tale my thoughts could tell" - Gordon Lightfoot Can neuroscience read people"s minds? Some researchers, and some new businesses, are banking on a brain imaging technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal hidden thoughts, such as lies, truths or deep desires. New research by neuroscientists at UCLA and Rutgers University provides evidence that fMRI can be used in certain circumstances to determine what a person is thinking. At the same time, the research suggests that highly accurate "mind reading" using fMRI is still far from reality. The research is scheduled to be published in the October 2009 issue of the journal Psychological Science. In the study, 130 healthy young adults had their brains scanned in an MRI scanner at UCLA"s Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center while they performed one of eight mental tasks, including reading words aloud, saying whether pairs of words rhyme, counting the number of tones they heard, pressing buttons at certain cues and making monetary decisions. The scientists calculated how accurately they could tell from the fMRI brain scans which mental task each participant was engaged in. "We take 129 of the subjects and apply a statistical tool to learn the differences among people doing these eight tasks, then we take the 130th person and try to tell which of the tasks this person was doing; we do that for every person," said lead study author Russell Poldrack, a professor of psychology who holds UCLA"s Wendell Jeffrey and Bernice Wenzel Term Chair in Behavioral Neuroscience. "It turns out that we can predict quite well which of these eight tasks they are doing," he said. "If we were just guessing, we would get it right about 13 percent of the time. We get it right about 80 percent of the time with our statistical tool. It"s not perfect, but it is quite good - but not nearly good enough to be admissible in court, for example. "Our study suggests that the kinds of things that some people have talked about in terms of mind reading are probably still pretty far off," Poldrack said. "If we are only 80 percent accurate with eight very different thoughts and we want to figure out what you"re thinking out of millions of possible thoughts, we"re still very far away from achieving that." Poldrack"s study is one of the first to show that neuroscientists can make these kinds of predictions on new people, whose brain patterns the researchers have never seen before. In most previous studies, researchers made predictions about a person"s mental state after having already studied that person"s brain to understand its particular patterns. "Our study indicates that different people"s brains work very similarly," Poldrack said. "We often tend to focus on how different each person"s brain is, but our study suggests that most healthy people"s brains work in very similar ways; otherwise, this approach wouldn"t work. "We can tell a lot about what you"re thinking using functional MRI, even though we have never seen your brain before," he said. "However, it is limited in that there are only eight things that we are letting you think about in this study." The tools used in this research come from a scientific field known as machine learning, which is related to statistics and computer science, said Poldrack, who noted that this technology is heavily employed by companies like Amazon to predict what people will buy based on their previous purchases. Nearly 10 years ago, neuroscientists showed that if they take brain images with fMRI while people look at different objects, such as faces, houses and chairs, they can use the tools of machine learning to predict with high accuracy what object the subjects are looking at - if the scientists first know from studying brain activity how each subject"s brain responds to those objects. Co-authors on the research are Yaroslav Halchenko, a graduate student in psychology at Rutgers University, and Stephen Jose Hanson, a faculty member in psychology at Rutgers University. The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the James S. McDonnell Foundation. Stuart Wolpert University of California - Los Angeles


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