Scientists say they have been able to monitor people’s thoughts via scans of their brains, according to BBC News website.
Teams at University College London and University College Los Angeles could tell what images people were looking at or what sounds they were listening to.
The US team say their study proves brain scans do relate to brain cell electrical activity.
The UK team say such research might help paralyzed people communicate, using a “thought-reading“ computer.
In their Current Biology study, funded by the Wellcome Trust, people were shown two different images at the same time - a red stripy pattern in front of the right eye and a blue stripy pattern in front of the left.
The volunteers wore special goggles which meant each eye saw only what was put in front of it.
In that situation, the brain then switches awareness between both images, sometimes seeing one image and sometimes the other.
While people’s attention switched between the two images, the researchers used fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) brain scanning to monitor activity in the visual cortex.
It was found that focusing on the red or the blue patterns led to specific, and noticeably different, patterns of brain activity.
The fMRI scans could reliably be used to predict which of the images the volunteer was looking at, the researchers found.

A black widow spider spinning egg case silk.

Researchers have uncovered the genetic sequence for one of the strongest silks that spiders produce, a discovery that could one day be used to make super spider-silk products for humans.
According to LiveScience, not all spider silk are created equal.
In total, spiders produce approximately seven different types of silk, which they make using special silk glands. The silk threads are spooled out of the external parts of the glands, known as spinnerets. Spiders often have numerous pairs of spinnerets, which they use to produce different types of silk.
In addition to catching and storing food, spiders also use silk for movement and for reproduction.
One of the strongest and most durable types of spider silk is produced only by sexually mature females and is used to construct protective cocoons for their eggs.
“The protein of the egg-case fibers has a different function altogether from that of the other silks,“ said Jessica Garb, a postdoctoral researcher and a co-author on the study.
These properties could also make it ideally suited for human purposes.
In addition to body armor, researchers are also working to develop spider-silk rope and spider-silk micro-sutures for use in surgery.
Using molecular biology lab techniques, Hayashi and Garb uncovered the sequence of molecules called amino acids for a major protein component in egg case silk known as Tusp1. Their finding is important because mechanical properties like the strength, elasticity and durability of a silk is determined by its amino acid sequence, and scientists have been successful in discovering only a handful of such sequences.

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted of a collection of galaxies with more variety than a candy store, SPACE.com reported.
Some are big; some are small. Some are old; some are new. Some are nearby; some are far away.
But one thing many of the hundreds of galaxies have in common is that they’ve never been seen until Hubble recently captured their light.
This image, which covers a patch of sky only a fraction of the area of a full moon, provides a typical view of the far-off places in the universe. As some of these galaxies a re billions of light-years away in space, looking down this long corridor of galaxies is like looking billions of years back in time.
The larger, brighter galaxies in the image are large, fully formed galaxies that are relatively close to us. Several of them are spirals with flat disks that are oriented either edge-on, face-on, or somewhere in between to Hubble.
The smaller galaxies are actually just further away and are faint because their light has taken billions of years to reach us. So, in fact, the light from these galaxies is coming from a much younger version than what exists--or doesn’t--today.
At least a dozen stars from our own Milky Way Galaxy dot the foreground of this image, the brightest of which is the large red object in the center. Stars are easily spotted by their diffraction spikes--the long cross hair lines that come from their centers. These are an image artifact caused when starlight travels through a telescope’s optical system.
This image is a composite of multiple single field exposures taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys in Sept. 2003. The image took nearly 40 hours to complete--one of the longest exposures ever taken by Hubble.