Two new studies show that migraine headaches are very common among US military personnel, yet the condition is frequently underdiagnosed. The studies, appearing in Headache, the peer-reviewed journal of the American Headache Society, examine the incidence among soldiers within 10 days of returning from a 1-year combat tour in Iraq , as well as US Army officer trainees.

Although the idea that instrumental learning can occur subconsciously has been around for nearly a century, it had not been unequivocally demonstrated. Now, new research uses sophisticated perceptual masking, computational modeling, and neuroimaging to show that instrumental learning can occur in the human brain without conscious processing of contextual cues.

Elevated cholesterol levels return to normal or near normal levels over time in four out of 10 children with uncontrollable epilepsy treated with the high-fat ketogenic diet, according to results reported in the Journal of Child Neurology.

Car crashes are the No. 1 killer of US teens. While states are passing laws to help teen drivers, little thought is being given to their habits as passengers. A new study uncovers a public health crisis and offers a solution to the problem.

Scientists have found novel patterns of ultrasonic vocalizations in a genetic mouse model of autism, adding a unique element to the available mouse behaviors that capture components of the human disease, and representing a new step towards identifying causes and better treatments.

A breakthrough into regulating a single enzyme may lead to new drug therapies that will help prevent heart attacks and strokes. The research focuses on the effects of Viagra -- the popular erectile dysfunction drug, which is also used to treat pulmonary hypertension.

Researchers from Boston University's Slone Epidemiology Center have found that in a given week, over 10 million Americans are taking opioids, and more than 4 million are taking them regularly (at least five days per week, for at least four weeks). These findings appear in the Aug. 31 issue of the journal Pain.

New insights into how the brain compensates for loss of sight suggests the brain is more adaptable than previously recognized.

Today's Nature has a teeth-grittingly bitchy review of psychologist Daniel Levitin's new music and psychology book The World In Six Songs that would be entertaining were it not so surprisingly vitriolic.

I've not read the book, but when someone is criticising the author's musical taste as immature, not once, but twice, in the world's leading science publication, you know the review has gone beyond the point of healthy knock-about into the zone of below-the-belt punches.

What is it about Nature book reviews? We covered one in 2007 where the reviewer got stuck in despite not...

PLoS Biology has a cozy essay entitled "Is Sleep Essential?" that addresses the mystery of the purpose of sleep.

The article looks at sleep across the whole of the animal kingdom to examine how different species sleep and whether there are any animals that don't sleep at all.

There are no convincing cases of sleepless animals it seems, and the authors, neuroscientists Chiara Cirelli and Giulio Tononi, argue that sleep is therefore likely to be an essential function of living creatures.

The three corollaries of the null hypothesis ['sleep is not required'] do not seem...

Art-science blog Bioemphemera has an excellent piece on how Renaissance artists depicted madness as involving a stone in the head. Numerous paintings from the 16th and 17th century show operations to remove the stone and presumably cure the insane of their 'folly'.

Despite the widespread depiction of this procedure, many examples of which are wonderfully illustrated in the Bioemphemera post, it's not clear whether these paintings were documenting widespread practices of medical fakery, or whether they were entirely metaphorical.

Perhaps owing to this element of mystery, and to the striking artworks, the topic is often featured...

Somatosphere is an excellent new blog on medical anthropology, the study of how culture influences our understanding of health, illness and medicine.

While we tend to think of illnesses as specific encapsualted 'things' that happen to the body, it turns out that our culture and psychology has a huge influence on not just what we think of illness, but how we actually become ill.

Culture also shapes what we think of as 'healthy' and 'unhealthy', 'normal' and 'abnormal' and this is one of the main driving forces behind how we express physical or psychological...

I cannot recommend strongly enough Goodale & Milner's book on vision 'Sight Unseen'. The title refers to the idea they pursue throughout the book that our everyday conception of vision is thoroughly misleading. Rather than vision just being 'what we experience', it is, in fact, a collection of specific eye-behaviour links ('visuomotor functions') of which our conscious perception of the world is only an evolutionary-recent addition. Goodale & Milner have spent their careers investigating this area and base their narrative around a selection of seminal experiments and case-studies of patients with selective brain injuries....

If this National Review report is true, the GOP platform calls for making illegal all forms of embryonic stem cell research, even privately financed research. Definitely a story to watch.

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The Infectious Disease Promotion Movement (let by such intellectual luminaries as Jenny McCarthy) may be worried about "toxins" in vaccines, but the real problem may hiding in plain sight.

Today's issue of JAMA has an interesting study of Ayurvedic (traditional Indian) medicines. It turns out that many of them contain a significant amount of toxic heavy metals.

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I know I'm probably beginning to sound a like a broken record (does anyone remember what that sounds like?), but I'd like to draw your attention once again to the plight of the planet's coral reefs. Today we have the Honolulu Declaration, in which a dozen leading reef researchers make a plea for stabilization of greenhouse-gas emissions. Will it do any good?

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President Bush observing the disaster in New Orleans from Air Force One.

For a campaign that appears to be making all the right moves, Mother Nature might be the one variable that the McCain team can't control. As New Orleans prepares to evacuate three years to the day that Hurricane Katrina hit, Republicans should not be happy.

Indeed, it was Hurricane Katrina that sent the Bush administration's approval ratings plummeting. As I detailed in this blog post back in 2006, Hurricane Katrina suddenly made long standing claims that the Bush administration was of touch with...

Yesterday, I wrote about selfless capuchin monkeys, who find personal reward in the act of giving other monkeys. The results seemed to demonstrate that monkeys are sensitive to the welfare of their peers, and will make choices that benefit others without any material gain for themselves. Today, another study looks at the same processes in a very different sort of cheeky monkey - human children.

Humans are notable among other animals for our vast capacity for cooperation and empathy. Our concern about the experiences of...

(UT Southwestern Medical Center) Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have discovered in mice that the brain must create new nerve cells for either exercise or antidepressants to reduce depression-like behavior.

(Elsevier) The news about antidepressant medications over the past several years has been mixed. The bad news from large multicenter studies such as STAR*D is that current antidepressant medications are effective, but not as effective as one might hope.

(Meharry Medical College) Car crashes are the No. 1 killer of US teens. While states are passing laws to help teen drivers, little thought is being given to their habits as passengers. A new study by Meharry Medical College uncovers a public health crisis and offers a solution to the problem.

(Academy of Finland) A typical characteristics of children's linguistic development are early signs of the risk of developing reading and writing disabilities, or dyslexia.

(American Academy of Neurology) A new study shows that older people's mental skills start declining years before death, even if they don't have dementia. The study is published in the Aug. 27, 2008, online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Happiness is rising in most countries around the world because of the spread of democracy and social liberalisation, say researchers (full text available to subscribers)

When the brain thinks it has lost a hand, the hand gets colder – the finding reveals that our sense of who we are is intimately tied to our physical bodies

As election day approaches, self-confessed floating voters have often already made up their minds – they just don't know it yet

When the calm voice of reason is drowned out by screaming emotions, how can we make good decisions? pauses for thought (full text available to subscribers)

Recent successes may help persuade more bereaved families to overcome taboos associated with donating facial tissue (full text available to subscribers)

Daniel Levitin writes a review of "Human - What Makes Us Unique" by Michael S. Gazzaniga which is worth a look. Also, Levitin has new book out which I have just ordered: "The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature." From the Publisher's weekly review:

Charles Darwin meets the Beatles in this attempt to blend neuroscience and evolutionary biology to explain why music is such a powerful force. In this rewarding though often repetitious study by bestselling author Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music), a rock musician turned neuroscientist,...

In an article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Ramachandran and McGeoch offer evidence of an innate gender-specific body image in the brain:

How the brain constructs one’s inner sense of gender identity is poorly understood. On the other hand, the phenomenon of phantom sensations — the feeling of still having a body-part after amputation — has been much studied. Around 60% of men experience a phantom penis post-penectomy. As transsexuals report a mismatch between their inner gender identity and that of their body, we wondered what could be learned from this regarding innate gender-specific body image. We surveyed...

It is very difficult to putter with this blog while lounging on my couch - one of my new Abyssianian kittens always helps out or wishes I would play with him instead.

Oosterhof and Todorov have devised a simple model that uses facial cues that have evolutionary significance to predict important social judgments as a function of two orthogonal dimensions of valence and dominance. Here is a graphic illustrating the essential facial features, followed by their abstract.

People automatically evaluate faces on multiple trait dimensions, and these evaluations predict important social outcomes, ranging from electoral success to sentencing decisions. Based on behavioral studies and computer modeling, we develop a 2D model of face evaluation. First, using a principal components analysis of trait judgments...