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Gizmorama - January 14, 2015
Good Morning, According to a new study brain scans could actual predict future behavior. That's amazing! Can it predict future lottery numbers?
Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.
Until Next Time,
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GopherArchives**** Study: Brain scans could predict future behavior *CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (UPI) - Brain scans have been widely employed and remarkably useful in correlative and experimental research, helping scientists better understand the human brain structure and its relationship to biological systems and the diseases that disrupt them. But can brain imaging also be used to predict human behaviors?
A new survey of recent scientific literature on the subject -- conducted by researchers at MIT and published this week in the journal Neuron -- suggests the answer is yes, it can. And has.
According to the new survey, imaging of the brain has already proven capable of predicting a person's future learning abilities and disabilities, propensity for criminality, health-related behaviors, and reception to drug and behavioral treatments.
As part of the new survey, researchers point to previous studies which showed brain imaging could predict infants' future performances on reading and math examinations. Another study found a correlation between brain structure and the likelihood of a criminal becoming a repeat offender.
"Presently, we often wait for failure, in school or in mental health, to prompt attempts to help, but by then a lot of harm has occurred," lead author Dr. John Gabrieli, an MIT neuroscientist, said in a press release. "If we can use neuroimaging to identify individuals at high risk for future failure, we may be able to help those individuals avoid such failure altogether."
"Seventy or so studies have reported positive findings that analyzing brain measures beforehand can considerably improve knowing whether a person will be successful at something," Gabrieli told Fox News.
Gabrieli and his colleagues were sure to point out the ethical dilemmas and risks involved in this sort of scientific research. Their hope in shedding light on these studies is to illuminate new methods of intervention, not to instigate restrictive policies aimed at high-risk patients.
"We will need to make sure that knowledge of future behavior is used to personalize educational and medical practices, and not be used to limit support for individuals at higher risk of failure," explained Gabrieli. "For example, rather than simply identifying individuals to be more or less likely to succeed in a program of education, such information could be used to promote differentiated education for those less likely to succeed with the standard education program."
*-- Researchers develop soil-derived antibiotic --*BOSTON (UPI) - An international team of scientists claim to have created one of the most powerful antibiotic drugs in decades, capable of killing the microorganisms that cause pneumonia, staph, tuberculosis, blood infections and more. And they found it in a pile of dirt.
The new antibiotic, teixobactin, operates differently than previous antibiotics; its power and uniqueness has moved some scientists to suggest germs may never be able to develop resistance to it.
"Our impression is that nature produced a compound that evolved to be free of resistance," explained lead researcher Kim Lewis, a professor at Northeastern University. "This challenges the dogma that we've operated under that bacteria will always develop resistance. Well, maybe not in this case."
While that notion has been dismissed by a number of other researchers who believe that eventually, bacteria will develop a resistance to anything, the new drug still holds great promise in the medical field. Given the growing concerns over resistance to today's common antibiotics, the new discovery has many health researchers, doctors and officials excited.
"It brings back the notion that there are lots of unanticipated surprises still lurking in the soil," Gerald Fink, a microbiologist at the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the MIT Technology Review.
Researchers at MIT, Boston University and Northeastern teamed up with scientists in Germany and England in order to develop the new antibiotic. Most of the world's bacterial resistance strategies are hidden in the dirt, but less than one percent can be recreated in the lab. Researchers have long been looking for a way to utilize the other 99 percent.
Now there is a way to grow uncultured bacteria in their natural environment, thanks to a device called the iChip that was developed by Lewis and his colleague, Northeastern biology professor Slava Epstein. The iChip has allowed scienitsts to grow single cell organisms in their natural environments.
Teixobactin is one of more than two dozen new antibiotics discovered using the technique -- it's also the latest and most promising. Though it is yet to be tested on humans, it has cured a variety of bacterial infections in mice. Lewis told MIT that it may be two years before teixobactin is tested on human volunteers.
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