The brain may notice more than we realize, and reading the mind might be making a little progress away from science fiction and toward reality, WebMD reported.
Scientists can’t literally delve into other people’s thoughts. But a high-tech approach is helping reveal how the mind processes vision.
Researchers predicted what people saw, even when images were displayed too briefly for focused attention.
The images were very basic, but the findings may hint at what the mind sees and how predictable it is.
In the first study, four adults with normal vision were shown eight sets of parallel lines tilted in different directions. Meanwhile, their brains were monitored with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures changes in an active part of the brain.
A computer program showed subtle differences in brain activity for each set of lines. The program could predict which set of lines the viewer had seen.
Next, slanted lines were displayed together in a plaid pattern. Participants tended to focus more on one set of lines more than the other.
The computer program could predict which lines got more attention from each person, says the study. Experts working on the experiment included Yukiyasu Kamitani, a resident researcher with ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan.
Line patterns were also center stage in the second study. But this time, some images were virtually “invisible.“ Flashed in front of participants for a fraction of an instant, those images were masked from conscious attention.
But on some level, the mind apparently still noticed, the study indicates.
Using fMRI scans, the researchers were able to infer which images were being viewed by the participants even when the images were completely invisible to the participants, they write.

Structural diagram of M17-SO1. Credit: Shigeyuki Sako and colleagues.

A young star that had been the poster child of massive star formation may have been lying about its weight, SPACE.com said.
The star is in its infant stages and is known as a protostar, with the designation M17-SO1. Its heft carries weight in an ongoing debate over how the most massive stars form.
A year ago, a group of astronomers published evidence showing that the mass of M17-SO1 was more than 15 times that of our Sun. The radiation from a star this big is thought to prevent matter from collapsing onto it. But if matter cannot fall-- or accrete--onto a massive star, how does it grow to be so large?
“It’s the big question in star formation at this moment,“ said Markus Nielbock of the Ruhr-Universitat Bochum in Germany, who along with Rolf Chini measured the mass of M17-SO1.
One theory states that stellar behemoths are built out of the collision of two medium-sized stars. But Chini and Nielbock found signs that M17-SO1 was chomping away on an accretion disk, which implies the same kind of slow feeding process that goes on in smaller stars.
“Chini’s group proposed that high mass stars evolve in a similar manner to low/mid mass stars by going through a phase with a flared disk,“ said Shigeyuki Sako from the University of Tokyo. “This was a shock to the community studying the formation of high mass stars, especially to the theorists.“
From their own data for M17-SO1, Sako and his colleagues claim the star has less than 8 solar masses, meaning radiation pressure is no longer a concern. Whether this is good news or bad news depends on how one thinks massive stars come into being.

Variety of activities like exercise, household chores and even dancing, can help people avoid Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, US researchers said.
According to MSNBC News website, they found that variety was more important for preventing dementia than total calories burned in exercise and other physical activities.
“We don’t yet know why this association exists or what causes it,“ said Dr. Constantine Lyketsos, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University.
“It could well be that maintaining a variety of activities keeps more parts of the brain active, or that this variety reflects better engagement in both physical and social activities,“ he added in a statement.
The study included 3,375 men and women over the age of 64 who did not have dementia when the program began.
Writing in the American Journal of Epidemiology, Lyketsos and colleagues said each volunteer answered questions about the frequency and duration of physical activities such as walking, household chores, gardening, dancing, bowling or swimming.
Researchers then created an activity index, and considered other factors such as age, gender, education level, ethnicity, smoking and alcohol use.
Over the next 5 years, 480 people developed dementia. Of those, only 84 who listed four or more activities developed dementia, as opposed to 130 who listed one activity or none.
The association held true for all types of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia.
The study also took into consideration what type of APOE gene people had. APOE, or apolipoprotein-E, is related to cholesterol metabolism and people with one particular variant of this gene called APOE-4 have a higher risk of Alzheimer’s.
And in the study, exercise and other activities did not protect people with APOE-4.

Hot spots on neutron stars have been tracked for the first time, by astronomers using an X-ray space telescope, said the New Scientist website.
The breakthrough result will help improve the understanding of neutron stars’ internal structure and the dominant role of their strong magnetic fields. It also provides the first measurement of very small-sized features on objects hundreds to thousands of light years away, astronomers say.
Neutron stars are the remnants of some supernovae explosions, formed when the stellar core collapses and compresses protons and electrons into neutrons. The stars are very dense, only about 20 kilometers across and they also spin rapidly, which creates intense magnetic fields.
Italian astronomers used the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton spacecraft to measure the X-rays from three neutron stars. They divided each star into 10 segments and measured their temperature. As the stars spun, at about five times per second, astronomers were able to track their hot spots, which were three or four times hotter than the surface surrounding them.
The hot spots may be where each star’s magnetic field accelerates particles and funnels them back to the surface - focusing electromagnetic energy on a specific region. On Earth, charged particles from the Sun are channeled through concentrated magnetic field lines at the poles, giving rise to aurora.
“[A hot spot] could be the pole of the magnetic field of the neutron star,“ says Patrizia Caraveo, at the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Milan, Italy.