The Simply Physics site collects images of things that flew at and into MRI machines, attracted magnetically: DANGER! Flying Objects! Once you’ve been in the MRI field for any length of time, you start hearing all of the various horror stories about thing that have flown into a scanner. Often, newcomers don’t take the real […]
Tag: MRI
Advanced brain research using Neo-Nazis and a cup
Research about the brain tries to measure — and interpret — ever-more-complex kinds of phenomena. Dr. Aziz-Zadeh tells, in a recorded talk for Academic Minute, about an advanced investigation: …looking at the brain activity of Jewish individuals while they watched videos of Anti-Semetic Neo-Nazis performing simple actions, like reaching for a cup. BONUS: the 2012 Ig Nobel […]
An inside, moving look at beatboxing body parts
MRI, a tool used to make images of all sorts of body parts (and sometimes, video of the motions thereof) has been used to look at beatboxing: “Para-Linguistic Mechanisms of Production in Human ‘Beatboxing’: a Real-time Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study“, Michael I. Proctor, Shrikanth Narayanan [pictured here], and Krishna Nayak, In Interdisciplinary Workshop on Singing […]
RARE (MRI) experiments scan cereals with milk.
Only a handful (or less) of scientific investigators have ever utilised MRI techniques to track hydration in milky breakfast cereals.But a team of experimenters from Madrid (in collaboration with Nestlé, Switzerland) have done just that. They were working on the basis that : “When they are soaked in milk, they may present lost [sic] of […]
Where babies come from, start to finish: The MRI videos
You can now watch both the thrilling start and the thrilling conclusion of the process that makes babies—each in a separate, quick MRI video. The top video shows a couple’s sexual organs while those organs were in use. The video is a spin-off from project that earned the Ig Nobel prize in medicine, in the year […]
Kids’ brain response to ice cream and a milkshake
How does part of the brain respond when you stuff kids with ice cream over a long period of time and then offer them an ice-cream-filled milkshake? This is the first study to involve a scientist named Burger who investigates that question in the particular way that this study goes about it (Thanks to investigator Gus […]
Working Memory Across Nostrils
This week’s memorable cross-nostrils study of the week is: “Working Memory Across Nostrils,” Yaara Yeshurun, Yadin Dudai, and Noam Sobel, Behavioral Neuroscience, vol.122, 2008, pp.1031-1037. BONUS: Sobel did the blindfolded-humans-follow-a-chocolate-small-trail experiment pictured here]. He is also the inventor of the nose-controlled electric wheelchair. BONUS: Yudai performed the snakes-in-an-MRI experiment.
A slip of the pen (followed by 25 years of writer’s blockage)
A pen in the wrong hands can be dangerous. This medical case report shows one specific danger (and also demonstrates the fine quality of pen manufacturing 25 years ago): “An incidental finding of a gastric foreign body 25 years after ingestion,” Oliver Richard Waters, Tawfique Daneshmend, Tarek Shirazi, BMJ Case Reports 2011. The authors, at […]
Snakes in an MRI machine
Snakes and MRI machines figure together in several scientific studies. Here are two of them: “Contour extraction from cardiac MRI studies using snakes,” S. Ranganath, IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 1995;14(2):328-38. and “Fear Thou Not: Activity of Frontal and Temporal Circuits in Moments of Real-Life Courage,” Uri Nili, Hagar Goldberg, Abraham Weizman and Yadin Dudai, Neuron, […]
Bat on a plane, Snake in an MRI tube
Reminiscent, in a general way, of the film Snakes on a Plane, here are two recent (or fairly recent) instances of scary (if you find them scary) animals interacting with humans inside a machine. Bat on a plane Bat stows away on Delta flight, CDC fears rabies risk to passengers The CDC [Centers for Disease […]