Why Some Kids Are Smarter - Technology Review

Scientists studied kids over a period of several years, doing MRI scanning of their brains periodically. They found that the prefrontal cortexes of smarter kids started out thinner, but grew more rapidly between ages 5 and 12 than the cortexes of kids with ordinary intelligence. (In this case, "intelligence" is taken to mean how well the children scored on a standard IQ test.) The Impact of Emerging Technologies: Why Some Kids Are Smarter - Technology Review

Diffusion tensor imaging

Technology Review: Diffusion Tensor Imaging - Kevin Lim's research is helping scientists understand schizophrenia

The Lie Behind Lie Detectors

Wired News commentator Jennifer Granick examines the shortcomings of current polygraph tests, which are highly unreliable, and compares them to the emerging field of fMRI lie detection.

Under laboratory conditions, fMRI technology might be 90 percent accurate in determining whether individuals in a test group of Americans are lying about taking a watch or a ring. But it's useless for employee screening, convicting the guilty, identifying terrorists at the airport or separating innocents from enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay -- at least at the moment.

At some point soon, these high-tech lie detectors will be cheap, accurate, portable and unobtrusive enough to replace the polygraph in incident investigations. But we are a long way from reading minds.

Wired News: The Lie Behind Lie Detectors