http://www.sciencemag.org/cont... This came out earlier this month. See http://www.sci-news.com/physic... for a summary.

I'd love to read the original article. I am not sure how they detected structure, but fMRI most certainly was not it. If fMRI was used, then it can only be a functional difference, there is no way to observe a structural change with fMRI unless it is something gross (like a 5x5x5mm cube of brain tissue suddenly went missing). If T2-weighting was used, then one is still limited to fairly gross changes (lets say a cube that is 1 mm^3 in volume). Finally, we arrive at the various diffusion MRI techniques, which have no established ground truth, but whose models can provide sub-voxel resolution. Not enough information to really evaluate in the OP.

It seems to have worked pretty well, in that the only debates within physics on this topic tend to come from older scientists with political agendas. One can, for instance, look up the APS position on climate change.

The people writing the checks need to better understand that these scientists are the main reason that the US economy does as well as it does. We have had and to date maintain a significant advantage over other nation states in terms of our technological innovation. However, it is undeniable that other countries are fast catching up. Our technological advantage is not a given thing, we have to properly fund R&D for it to be maintained. Technological prowess leads to economic health.

Think of photons as the central point from which oscillating magnetic and electric fields originate. And that this point moves through space at ~3x10^8 m/s. It is kind of like throwing two stones into water and watching the resulting interference patterns, excepts that the centers of those patterns are moving instead of stationary. Hence, collision isn't really an apt description.

Disclaimer: I am a physicist who works in MRI. MRI can be used to measure concentrations of certain biochemicals. MRI is sensitive enough to different proton-containing species that the frequency difference between fat and water causes image artifacts that can pose great difficulty. Not all biomolecules are sufficiently concentrated in the brain, or have a spectrum that is unique enough to be measured in vivo. A good example of a brain chemical that can be measured is N-acetyl aspartate (NAA), which has a proton peak at around 2 ppm that doesn't overlap with much else. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy is very difficult, and is most easily accomplished on research scanners operating at 3 tesla or higher. The reason for this is that rather than letting all hydrogen nuclei contribute to one signal that is then spatially located, one must parse what kinds of nuclei (i.e. what their chemical shift is) within each voxel. This not only imposes technical difficulties, but reduces the signal to noise ratio, potentially requiring more signal averaging in order to see sufficient signal above the noise floor.

"The last supernova in our galaxy occurred several hundred years ago." If that were true, we'd would not have detected it yet. If we had, we'd all be dead. Think about it.

Ohio STATE University. Not Ohio University. There is a huge world of difference. And PR is important, relying on the general media to disseminate information from original scientific journal articles doesn't work. Scientists should be the ones presenting their work, not journalists who are at best mildly fluent in the research areas they cover.