FOOTBALL teams of the future — even high school squads on limited budgets — may someday have a new tool to check players for brain injuries. It’s a special form of headgear, packed with sensors that read the brain waves of athletes after they come off the field, thus detecting changes caused by the trauma of hard knocks.

The compact, portable sensors decipher neural activity by measuring changes in the brain’s tiny magnetic field. These small magnetometers — still in the laboratory and in prototype — have yet to be tried on athletes. But their potential is enormous for brain imaging and for inexpensive monitoring of brain diseases, as well as for many other applications like the control of prosthetics, said Dr. José Luis Contreras-Vidal, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Houston.

Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) are combining two of the best-known approaches to automatic speech recognition to build a better and language-independent speech-to-text algorithm that can recognize the language being spoken in under a minute, transcribe languages on the brink of extinction, and make the dream of ever present voice-controlled electronics just a little bit closer.

Achieving accurate, real-time speech recognition is no easy feat. Even assuming that the sound acquired by a device can be completely stripped of background noise (which isn’t always the case), there is hardly a one-to-one correspondence between the waveform detected by a microphone and the phoneme being spoken. Different people speak the same language with different nuances – accents, lisps and other articulation defects. Other factors such as age, gender, health and education also play a big role in altering the sound that reaches the microphone.

The NTNU researchers are now pioneering an approach that, if it can be fully exploited, may lead to a big leap in the performance of speech-to-text applications. They demonstrated that the mechanics of human speech are fundamentally the same across all people and across all languages, and they are now training a computer to analyze the pressure of sound waves captured by the microphone to determine which parts of the speech organs were used to produce a phoneme.

A typical five-month-old infant has hardly figured out how to sit up yet — even crawling may be months away — but there are a few babies who already know how to drive. They’re steering their very own mobile robots. 

The robots are designed to allow babies with disabilities to move around independently, at the same age their peers might learn to crawl.  Whether they use robots or their own limbs, starting to move may be an important part of baby brain development, some childhood specialists think. Researchers don’t want kids with cerebral palsy or other movement disorders to miss out. 

"We think that babies with disabilities are missing an opportunity for learning that typically developing babies have," said Carole Dennis, a professor occupational therapy at Ithaca College in New York.

Baby songbirds learn to sing by imitation, just as human babies do. So researchers at Harvard and Utrecht University, in the Netherlands, have been studying the brains of zebra finches—red-beaked, white-breasted songbirds—for clues to how young birds and human infants learn vocalization on a neuronal level.

While a baby bird mimicking the chirps of his “tutor” may seem far removed from human learning, the researchers at the two universities found that the songs of the birds and human language are both processed in similar areas on the left sides of the two very different brains. The discovery was published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Slinging political dirt may be something both sides engage in during election season, but for some voters that metaphor may reveal something more fundamental about their view of the world.

According to a study in the September 2012 issue of Social Psychology & Personality Science claims to have found “a positive relationship between disgust sensitivity and political conservatism” — that is, if you’re conservative, you’re more likely to be disgusted by things you experience. It’s a correlation that holds in the samples they tested in the United States and from the rest of the world.

Researchers from the University of York are fitting one thousand northern hairy wood ants with tiny radio receivers in a world first experiment at the National Trust’s Longshaw Estate in Derbyshire to find out how they communicate and travel between their complex nests.

Most Neanderthals were right handed, just like modern humans, and this tendency suggests that they may have had the capacity for speech, new research claims.

A new investigation by Professor Frayer and an international team led by Virginie Volpato of the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, has confirmed Regourdou’s right-handedness by looking more closely at the robustness of the arms and shoulders, and comparing it with scratches on his teeth.

'We’ve been studying scratch marks on Neanderthal teeth, but in all cases they were isolated teeth, or teeth in mandibles not directly associated with skeletal material,' said Professor Frayer.

'This is the first time we can check the pattern that’s seen in the teeth with the pattern that’s seen in the arms. We did more sophisticated analysis of the arms — the collarbone, the humerus, the radius and the ulna — because we have them on both sides. And we looked at cortical thickness and other biomechanical measurements. All of them confirmed that everything was more robust on the right side then the left.'