Scientists have for the first time used brain scans to identify emotions such as happiness, anger, sadness or even envy that a person may be experiencing.

The study combines functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and machine learning to measure brain signals to accurately read emotions in individuals.
The findings by Carnegie Mellon University illustrate how the brain categorises feelings, giving researchers the first reliable process to analyse emotions.

"This research introduces a new method with potential to identify emotions without relying on people`s ability to self-report," said Karim Kassam, assistant professor of social and decision sciences and lead author of the study.

"It could be used to assess an individual`s emotional response to almost any kind of stimulus, for example, a flag, a brand name or a political candidate," said Kassam.

For the study, 10 drama actors were scanned while viewing the words of nine emotions: anger, disgust, envy, fear, happiness, lust, pride, sadness and shame.

While inside the fMRI scanner, the actors were instructed to enter each of these emotional states multiple times, in random order.

The computer model, constructed from using statistical information to analyse the fMRI activation patterns gathered for 18 emotional words, had learned the emotion patterns from self-induced emotions.

It was able to correctly identify the emotional content of photos being viewed using the brain activity of the viewers.

To identify emotions within the brain, the researchers first used the participants` neural activation patterns in early scans to identify the emotions experienced by the same participants in later scans.

The team took the machine learning analysis of the self-induced emotions to guess which emotion the subjects were experiencing when they were exposed to the disgusting photographs.

The computer model achieved a rank accuracy of 0.91. With nine emotions to choose from, the model listed disgust as the most likely emotion 60 per cent of the time and as one of its top two guesses 80 per cent of the time.

Finally, they applied machine learning analysis of neural activation patterns from all but one of the participants to predict the emotions experienced by the hold-out participant.

"Despite manifest differences between people`s psychology, different people tend to neurally encode emotions in remarkably similar ways," noted Amanda Markey, a graduate student in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences.

A surprising finding from the research was that almost equivalent accuracy levels could be achieved even when the computer model made use of activation patterns in only one of a number of different subsections of the human brain.

Men who cannot produce sperm are more prone to developing cancer than the general population, a new study has revealed.

The study also found that a diagnosis of azoospermia - infertile because of an absence of sperm in their ejaculate - before age 30 carries an eight-fold cancer risk.
Lead author Michael Eisenberg, MD, PhD, assistant professor of urology at the medical school and director of male reproductive medicine and surgery at Stanford Hospital and Clinics, said that a man suffering from azoospermia has a risk for developing cancer similar to that for a typical man 10 years older.

He said that there is evidence that infertility may be a barometer for men`s overall health, asserting that a few studies have found an association of male infertility with testicular cancer.

Eisenberg said that the new study not only assigns the bulk of infertile men`s increased cancer risk to those with azoospermia, but also suggests that this risk extends beyond testicular cancer.

The study population consisted of 2,238 infertile men who were seen at a Baylor andrology clinic from 1989 to 2009. Their median age was 35.7 when they were first evaluated for the cause of their infertility. Of those men, 451 had azoospermia, and 1,787 did not. There were otherwise no apparent initial differences between the two groups.

After undergoing a semen analysis, the men were followed for an average of 6.7 years to see which of them turned up in the Texas Cancer Registry.

Their rates of diagnosed cancer incidence were then compared with age-adjusted cancer-diagnosis statistics of Texas men in general.

In all, a total of 29 of the 2,238 infertile men developed cancer over a 5.8-year average period from their semen analysis to their cancer diagnosis. This contrasted with an expected 16.7 cases, on an age-adjusted basis, for the male Texas population in general.

This meant that infertile men were 1.7 times as likely to develop cancer as men in the general population. This is considered a moderately increased risk.

But comparing the cancer risk of azoospermic and nonazoospermic infertile men revealed a major disparity: The azoospermic men were at a substantially elevated risk - nearly three times as likely to receive a diagnosis of cancer as men in the overall population.

Infertile men who weren`t azoospermic, in contrast, exhibited a statistically insignificant increased cancer risk of only 1.4 times that of men in the overall population.

By excluding men whose cancer diagnosis came within two or three years of their infertility evaluation, the researchers were able to rule out the possibility that azoospermia caused by an undiagnosed cancer had affected the statistics.

The findings suggest that genetic defects that result in azoospermia may also broadly increase a man`s vulnerability to cancer, Eisenberg said, supporting the notion that azoospermia and cancer vulnerability may share common genetic causes.

The study has been published online in Fertility and Sterility.

The new respiratory virus, MERS coronavirus, that originated in the Middle East is mostly spread in hospitals and appears more deadly than SARS, according to a new study.

The virus which infected more than 60 people and killed 38 of them has some striking similarities to SARS but hasn't spread as quickly as SARS did in 2003.

"To me, this felt a lot like SARS did," said Dr. Trish Perl, a senior hospital epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Medicine, who was part of an international team.

Perl said they couldn`t nail down how it was spread in every case - through droplets from sneezing or coughing, or a more indirect route. Some of the hospital patients weren`t close to the infected person, but somehow picked up the virus.

"In the right circumstances, the spread could be explosive," said Perl, while emphasizing that the team only had a snapshot of one MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) cluster in Saudi Arabia.

Cases have continued to trickle in, and there appears to be an ongoing outbreak in Saudi Arabia. MERS cases have also been reported in Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Tunisia. Most have had a direct connection to the Middle East region.

In the Saudi cluster that was investigated, certain patients infected many more people than would be expected, Perl said. One patient who was receiving dialysis treatment spread MERS to seven others, including fellow dialysis patients at the same hospital. During SARS, such patients were known as "superspreaders" and effectively seeded outbreaks in numerous countries.

Perl and colleagues also concluded that symptoms of both diseases are similar, with an initial fever and cough that may last for a few days before pneumonia develops.

But MERS appears far more lethal. Compared to SARS` 8 percent death rate, the fatality rate for MERS in the Saudi outbreak was about 65 percent, though the experts could be missing mild cases that might skew the figures.

While SARS was traced to bats before jumping to humans via civet cats, the source of the MERS virus remains a mystery. It is most closely related to a bat virus though some experts suspect people may be getting sick from animals like camels or goats. Another hypothesis is that infected bats may be contaminating foods like dates, commonly harvested and eaten in Saudi Arabia.

Other experts said there are enough worrying signs about MERS that it can`t yet be written off, despite the relatively small number of cases it has caused.

WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan has previously called MERS the single biggest public health threat and acknowledged officials were "empty-handed" regarding prevention measures.

"We understand too little about this virus when viewed against the magnitude of its potential threat," she said last month in Geneva.

Aspirin lowers the rate of the accumulation of DNA mutations in abnormal cells in at least one pre-cancerous condition, a new study has claimed.

Carlo Maley, PhD, a member of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, said that aspirin and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, which are commonly available and cost-effective medications, may exert cancer-preventing effects by lowering mutation rates.

Maley, working with gastroenterologist and geneticist Brian Reid, MD, PhD, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, analyzed biopsy samples from 13 patients with a pre-cancerous condition called Barrett`s esophagus who were tracked for six to 19 years.

In an "observational crossover" study design, some patients started out taking daily aspirin for several years, and then stopped, while others started taking aspirin for the first time during observation. The goal was to track the rate of mutations in tissues sampled at different times.

The researchers found that biopsies taken while patients were on an aspirin had on average accumulated new mutations about 10 times more slowly than biopsies obtained during years when patients were not taking aspirin.

Gender and ethnic distribution of study patients reflected the known demographics of esophageal cancer, which predominantly affects, white, middle-aged and elderly men, he said. Barrett`s esophagus only occasionally progresses to esophageal cancer.

Maley said that less inflammation may result in less production within pre-cancerous tissue of oxidants known to damage DNA, and may dampen growth-stimulating signaling.

For the duration of the study, the rate of accumulation of mutations measured in the biopsied tissue between time points was slow, even when patients were not taking aspirin, with the exception of one patient.

While mutations accumulated at a steady rate, the vast majority of mutations arose before the abnormal tissue was first detected in the clinic, the researchers concluded.

In the one patient who later went on to develop cancer, a population of cellular "clones" with a great number of mutations emerged shortly before he started taking aspirin.

The study has been published online in journal PLOS Genetics.

New approach to beef trade could positively transform livelihoods for farmers, reduce threat to wildlife movements

A new study by the Wildlife Conservation Society's Animal & Human Health for the Environment And Development (AHEAD) Program, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and regional partners finds that a new approach to beef production in southern Africa could positively transform livelihoods for farmers and pastoralists, while helping to secure a future for wildlife and wildlife-based tourism opportunities.

Market access for livestock and livestock products from Africa is constrained by the presence of foot and mouth disease (FMD). Fear of the FMD virus largely precludes large-scale beef exports from Africa to potentially lucrative overseas markets and hinders trade within Africa itself. Wild buffalo, an ecologically and economically critical species in the region, can transmit the FMD virus to livestock but are not themselves affected.

The study looked at new commodity-based (value chain) approaches to beef trade (commodity-based trade or CBT) that focus on the safety of the process by which products are produced rather than on whether a given cow was raised in a location where wildlife like buffalo also roam. This food safety-type approach offers the potential for export of meat products that are scientifically demonstrable as safe from animal diseases for importing countries, while also diminishing the need for at least some of the veterinary fencing currently aimed at separating livestock and wildlife and constraining the Southern African Development Community's vision for regional transboundary wildlife conservation, which has in some places begun to surpass livestock agriculture in terms of its contribution to regional GDP through tourism and related industries.

Working in close coordination with Namibian authorities, economist Dr. Jonathan Barnes led a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis evaluating policy options related to animal disease management and land-use decisions in Caprivi, Namibia. Caprivi is a core part of the Kavango Zambezi ("KAZA") transfrontier conservation area (TFCA) that is home to extraordinary wildlife including the largest population of elephants in the world (approximately 250,000). KAZA includes contiguous portions of Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe, and may become the largest terrestrial area available to migratory wildlife on the planet if FMD-related land-use conflicts can be resolved.

Caprivi was selected for study in part because it is currently classified as an FMD-infected zone as its livestock and wildlife populations have co-existed for many years. The study found that economic costs associated with development of CBT in Caprivi would be outweighed by economic gains in terms of enhanced wildlife-based income generation, abattoir viability, and livestock-based incomes. Further, income growth is more diversified when CBT is applied, therefore less risky. CBT, because of its emphasis on science-based approaches to ensure that the meat produced is free of dangerous pathogens, helps assure product safety regardless of whether wildlife like buffalo also live in the area of livestock origin and therefore makes more conventional approaches that rely on fences to physically separate livestock and wildlife less necessary.

In contrast, the analysis showed that a scenario using spatially segregated, fenced FMD-free livestock compartments is technically impractical and would be economically undesirable. Here, significant loss of growth in wildlife-based incomes, and significant costs for fencing and maintenance, would outweigh any new economic gains in abattoir viability and / or livestock farming incomes.


"By carefully looking at the economics of different land-use planning options, it appears the way to optimize economic development in this case is through a value-chain approach to beef production," said Dr. Jon Barnes. "This would open up new markets for southern African farmers and reduce the threat to key wildlife movements brought about by fencing-based approaches to disease management."

The authors believe that the findings have important implications for development policy in and around the KAZA TFCA, and possibly other TFCAs in southern Africa. They strongly suggest that initiatives aimed at introduction of CBT to underpin sanitary risk management offer significant economic potential. At the same time, this approach can assist in meeting other TFCA objectives, such as the restoration of diverse ecosystems by re-opening corridors that allow for wildlife movements across large, historically connected landscapes. This will provide greater resilience in the face of natural catastrophes, disease outbreaks and /or climatic challenges.

"By working proactively to improve the health and productivity of animals and people, recognizing up front that livestock and wildlife depend on a much more unified approach to land-use management, we believe we're onto what had been an elusive but highly prized 'win-win' solution to the age-old problem of getting beef out of areas where wildlife is also allowed to thrive- a win for wildlife as well as for communities who have long relied on domestic animals both economically and culturally," said Dr. Steve Osofsky, Director of the WCS AHEAD program.

The Wildlife Conservation Society would like to thank the Rockefeller Foundation, the US Agency for International Development, and the World Wildlife Fund for the financial support that made this study possible.

Source: Wildlife Conservation Society