New research published in the journal Science suggests it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort. It's the kind of thing seen in Hollywood's "Matrix" franchise.

Experiments conducted at Boston University (BU) and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, recently demonstrated that through a person's visual cortex, researchers could use decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to induce brain activity patterns to match a previously known target state and thereby improve performance on visual tasks.

A 22-year-old woman known as "HC" with amnesia since birth as a result of developing only half the normal volume of the hippocampus in her brain, has demonstrated to scientists that the ability to hold a single face or word in short-term memory is impaired. But there's a catch - only if the information is unfamiliar.

Scientists have designed a novel, noninvasive system that allows users to control a virtual helicopter using only their minds, as reported in the online journal PLoS ONE on Oct. 26. The researchers, led by Dr. Bin He of University of Minnesota, created an EEG-based, noninvasive brain-computer interface that allowed users to accurately and continually navigate a virtual helicopter simply by thinking about where they wanted to craft to go.

The task required users to direct their helicopter through randomly positioned rings in three-dimensional space (videos of the task available); these targets were reached successfully 85% of the time.

Nearly all active people suffer ankle sprains at some point in their lives, and a new University of Georgia study suggests that the different ways people move their hip and knee joints may influence the risk of re-injury.

In the past, sports medicine therapists prescribed strengthening and stretching exercises that targeted only ankle joints after a sprain. The study by UGA kinesiology researchers, published in the early online edition of the journal Clinical Biomechanics, suggests that movements at the knee and hip joints may play a role in ankle sprains as well.

There is some evidence about the potential value of cognitive rehabilitation therapy (CRT) for treating traumatic brain injury (TBI), but overall it is not sufficient to develop definitive guidelines on how to apply these therapies and to determine which type of CRT will work best for a particular patient, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine.

Cardiac rehabilitation, traditionally used after heart attack to prevent future heart problems, seems similarly effective for people who have a transient ischemic attack (TIA) or mild stroke, according to new research published in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association.

TIA, also called mini-stroke, is a warning sign. While causing little or no permanent injury to the brain, patients are at high risk for subsequent, often debilitating strokes. In the study, researchers defined a mild stroke as one that didn't cause significant disability.

Several studies in the current issue of Topics of Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation put a needed spotlight on the health and health care disparities experienced by individuals with spinal cord injury. This research highlights the disparities in access for patients and lack of awareness about SCI by health care providers.

"We health care providers can do a better job of dealing with health and health care disparities related to individuals with spinal cord injury, if we are better informed as to how and where the disparities occur," says Michelle A. Meade, Ph.D., assistant professor in the University of Michigan Medical School's Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and guest editor for the issue, which published this week.

In a paper to be presented at the upcoming HFES 55th Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada, human factors/ergonomics researchers will describe WISE, a Web-based tool for breast cancer survivors designed to reduce work disabilities and improve employment outcomes.

Those who have beaten breast cancer comprise the largest population of cancer survivors in the United States. Many return to the workplace after treatment, but symptoms and long-term side effects can impact their ability to do their work. However, the good news is that very simple strategies can address these issues.