Eleanor Maguire can’t read your mind. But she’s getting closer.

Two years ago the neuroscientist’s team used functional MRI scans of the brain to predict where in a virtual reality environment a person was “standing” just by looking at their brain activity. And now, in a study for Current Biology, she’s used fMRI scans, interpreted by a computer algorithm, to pick out the patterns of brain activity that indicate whether a person is remembering one movie versus another.

An fMRI scan measures the brain’s blood flow—associated with neuron activity—on the scale of voxels, three-dimensional “pixels” that each include roughly 10,000 neurons. The algorithm then interprets the changes voxel by voxel to learn the brain’s patterns of activity over time [ScienceNOW]. In this experiment, Maguire’s team showed their 10 participants three different movies. Each was short, only about seven seconds, but featured a different actress doing a different simple activity, like mailing a letter or drinking coffee. The scientists then asked the subjects remember the films while the team scanned their brains.

Maguire says they found a few striking things. In the first stage, the scientists asked the participants to remember the films one at a time so they could try to find a brain pattern for each of the three. Maguire says it was a success: “We’ve been able to look at brain activity for a specific episodic memory — to look at actual memory traces” [AFP]. In addition, she says, the traces of activity the researchers saw in the hippocampus for each memory remained consistent over the course of the study, and showed similarities from person to person.

While that’s impressive, it’s not foolproof “mind-reading”—yet. The computer program was not good enough to predict which film a person was thinking about every time. With three films to choose from, a blind guess would be right 33% of the time on average. The computer predicted the right film 40-45% of the time [The Guardian]. Also, Maguire says, they can’t be sure what they’re looking at in these brain patterns from their small sample—whether the people are remembering the setting of the movie, the action, or something else.

Even though the results are preliminary, experts say the rapidly advancing technology may soon raise ethical questions. Neuroscientist Marcel Just notes that the ability of machines to detect what someone is thinking is progressing with remarkable speed. “At the extreme, maybe we could decode somebody’s dream while they’re dreaming,” Just says. “Is that possible? Not this year. Not next year. But I think that’s doable.” Just says once the technology reaches that point it’s likely to touch off a societal discussion about who is allowed to see what’s in our brains [NPR].

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Image: NASA

Well, isn’t this flattering? The Times Online science blog, called Eureka Zone, picked Bad Astronomy as one of its top 30 best science blogs. It’s always nice to get some recognition, even if it doesn’t come with a wheelbarrow full of money and a free trip to Tahiti.

You listening, Times Online? Just a suggestion.

Anyway, I don’t agree with every single blog on that list — I leave it as an exercise to you to figure out which ones — but almost everything else on there is worth your time checking out. If your feed reader is looking a little pale and thin, this should help beef it up. There’s always room for science!

The show with Andy Revkin just went up! Here’s a sample from the write-up:

In this conversation with host Chris Mooney, Revkin discusses the uncertain future of his field, the perils of the science blogosphere, his battles with climate blogger Joe Romm, and what it’s like (no joke) to have Rush Limbaugh suggest that you kill yourself. Moving on to the topics he’s covered for over a decade, Revkin also addresses the problem of population growth, the long-range risks that our minds just aren’t trained to think about, and the likely worsening of earthquake and other catastrophes as more people pack into in vulnerable places.

I will have much more to say about the show soon enough–I’m proud of this one–but for now, listen and download here.

Gather around all ye LOLcat lovers, YouTube watchers, rabid facebookers and diligent tweeters, for there is good news for you. Our beloved Internet is in the running for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

The Nobel committee’s decision last year to award the Peace Prize to the freshly elected President Obama was considered by many to be an unusual choice, but the committee could top itself this year. The list of potential winners contains 237 nominees, including human rights activists like Russian Svetlana Gannushkina and Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo, but also our very own Internet.

The effort to get the net nominated was spearheaded by the Italian edition of Wired magazine. The editors propose that apart from being a place for people to nurture their vanity and satisfy their need to look at kittens in costumes, the Internet is also a forum for peaceful dialogue and communication. Thus, they say, it plays a valuable role in building peace.

Riccardo Luna, editor-in-chief of the Italian edition of Wired magazine said:

“The internet can be considered the first weapon of mass construction, which we can deploy to destroy hate and conflict and to propagate peace and democracy….What happened in Iran after the latest election, and the role the web played in spreading information that would otherwise have been censored, are only the newest examples of how the internet can become a weapon of global hope.”

So far, the Internet has found a bunch of early backers, including the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and designer Giorgio Armani. You can support the net’s nomination by signing an online petition at Internet for Peace. The results will be announced on October 8th and the winner will walk away with 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.4 million). Which brings us to our next question–who picks up the award if the net wins? And who gets to pocket the cash? And most importantly, who gets to blab the acceptance speech?

While we work those out, here’s the video for the Internet for Peace campaign.

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Image: LOLcats

After six years of legal wrangling, a New York judge is set to approve a $657 million settlement package for thousands of rescue workers and volunteers who became sick after working on the cleanup of the World Trade Center site. The workers, who had sued the City of New York and other officials for their subsequent illness, can now settle their injury claims. Marc Bern, one of the lawyers representing the workers, said many of his clients were “first responders” at the site when the twin towers collapsed on September 11, 2001. After the work, some found their health deteriorated, with many suffering from asthma, other respiratory issues and blood cancer [CNN].

The money for the claims will come from a $1 billion federal grant to the WTC Captive Insurance Co., created to indemnify the city and its contractors against the flood of lawsuits [Daily News]. The workers have 90 days to look through the proposed settlement and decide if they like it. If 95 percent of the plaintiffs approve of the package, then the settlement will stand at $575 million. If 100% approve, the settlement goes up to $657 million [Daily News].

The individual payments will be made based on a point system that depends on the severity of the worker’s illness, his past health history, and the role the smoke at Ground Zero played in his current illness. Rescue workers can claim anything from a few thousand dollars to more than one million. The settlement would also fund a special insurance policy, which provides additional compensation to any plaintiff contracting certain types of cancer in the future [CNN]. New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg said the settlement was a “fair and reasonable resolution to a complex set of circumstances.”

DISCOVER has reported in the past that when the twin towers collapsed on September 11, two million tons of dust containing cement, asbestos, glass, lead, and carcinogens rained down on lower Manhattan. Phillip Landrigan, who heads the Department of Preventive and Community Medicine at Mount Sinai, said the concentrations of dust in the air were so high that they overwhelmed all the normal defenses of the human respiratory tract, and people inhaled ounces of dust into their trachea or their bronchi. The apparent results were the persistent “World Trade Center cough,” inflamed sinuses, and in the case of some workers who worked amidst the debris and smoke, thyroid and lung cancer.

For many long-suffering workers, news of the settlement drew mixed reactions. Carpenter James Nolan, who said he helped recover bodies and build ramps for firehoses at the WTC site, said the settlement would help pay the medical bills for his for lung and leg problems–which he claimed were a result of working at Ground Zero. “We’ve had to fight for what we deserve,” said Nolan, 45. “I’m glad it’s coming to an end” [Associated Press]. Others like Gary Klein, a retired cop with lung scarring and stomach problems, wasn’t so sure. “A million dollars is not a lot of money if you have cancer and need chemotherapy,” Klein said. “What’s going to be left for your family after you die?” [Daily News]

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Image: Wikimedia