True, here the fMRI is being used by the defence as a means to elude the death penalty, and only in the sentencing portion of the trial – not as a tool of conviction, as a dubious EEG scan was used to convict a woman of murder in India last year. Specifically, the fMRI scan is being submitted as evidence that the defendant Brian Dugan’s brain is abnormal – psychopathic – and so he shouldn’t be subject to the death penalty. The jury disagreed, but took 10 hours to reach the decision that the state should kill Dugan for his crime. Without the scan, Dugan’s defence attorney says it would’ve take them an hour.

It’s kind of hard to grasp, conceptually, looking inside somebody’s brain, literally peering into their mind. It’s something from fiction, something paranormal – mind readers and psychics – as a means of detection, a means of determining right and wrong, truth and lies. Brain scans to determine how much punishment your crime merits logically leads into brain scans that figure out whether or not you committed the crime, into scans that reveal every crime you have committed, a persistent and inescapable confessional. What secrets would your brain spill? [Science Mag via Wired]

The story tells of a woman who lived in the town of Pune, engaged to Man A. One day, she up and runs off to Delhi with Man B. She returns to Pune, meets Man A at a McDonald’s, and later on, he dies. Of arsenic poisoning.

When the woman was brought in accused of murdering Man A, she denied the allegation. When investigators hooked her up to an EEG and read aloud facts of the crime, however, software interpreting the electrical impulses in her brain told a different story. Says the NYT: “The relevant nooks of her brain where memories are thought to be stored buzzed when the crime was recounted.”

Unlike in previous cases, there was little or no corroborative evidence here, but the judge sentenced the woman to life in prison anyway, and went on to write a 9-page lovesong to this particular Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test, even though it has yet to be “validated by any independent study and reported in a respected scientific journal.” (Peer review, who needs it?)

The US is leading this burgeoning field of study, but the only time it’s used in court is when the accused pays to have a study performed as evidence of innocence. The New Yorker ran an amazing expose on this shady business a year ago, and it’s still well worth the read.

What happens in an Indian courtroom doesn’t set precedent in the US, but this technology certainly isn’t going to go away, so it’s important either to rule it out as faux science, or tighten up the applied methodology quickly, so that we can all get on to the business of reading each others’ minds in court. Course then we’d really start killing each other. [New York Times]

That is just the kind of power needed to test the properties of high-temperature superconductors like iron oxyarsenide which may result in better, cheaper MRI machines and high-voltage power lines. It could also be used for certain zero-gravity experiments and magnetic propulsion systems that could eliminate the need for traditional rockets down the line. Researchers have been able to create magnetic fields over 100 T for years, but if successful, this would be the first magnet that could repeatedly hold up to the strain. According to Greg Boebinger, director of the Magnet Lab, the magnet will have to resist Lorentz forces “equivalent to the explosive force of 200 sticks of dynamite packed into a volume of space the size of a marble.” [IEEE Spectrum Online via New Launches via DVICE]

The tech, called diffusion spectrum imaging, takes current data from MRI scans and analyses it for the passage of water molecules along the individual neuron connections in the brain. It then processes it to spit out the 3D maps. It’s possible to do on live subjects (like the human brain image above), but more detail can be achieved by scanning non-living samples for up to 24 hours.

Doctors are using the new images to better understand our brain’s infinitely complicated wiring, and to avoid important neural nets during surgeries. More including 3D model animations (awesome) at: [Technology Review]

Built by a couple of researchers at Harvard, the makeshift MRI was cost less than US$100,000 to make, but it does a better job of imaging the lungs than traditional MRIs do. That’s because while traditional MRIs are great at imaging liquid within the body, the lungs are full of air, which doesn’t come out in the scans. Not this hobbled together contraption; it uses a weak magnetic field to image aspects of the lungs that are invisible to all other imaging techniques.

So really, this is a very specialised MRI machine, albeit one that was essentially built in a garage by a couple of crazy geniuses. So no, you won’t be able to go down the street to your neighbourhood mad scientist’s shed to get an MRI on the cheap anytime soon, but it’s a nice thought, isn’t it? [Technology Review]

At the moment, the researchers are claiming a 90% success rate in determining which of two black and white images a person is looking at. Fortunately for those of use who value privacy, they’re a long way from perfecting the system to a degree where they can actually interrogate a person’s brain to extract visual memories, but the research does suggest that might be possible in the future. [The Guardian]