A Computer program to detect pain?
Can a computer tell when it hurts? It can if you train it, US researchers said on Tuesday. A team at Stanford University in California used computer learning software to sort through data generated by brain scans and detect when people were in pain.
“The question we were trying to answer was can we use neuroimaging to objectively detect whether a person is in a state of pain or not. The answer was yes,” Dr Sean Mackey of the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, whose study appears in the journal PLoS One. Currently, doctors rely on patients to tell them whether or not they are in pain. And that is still the gold standard for assessing pain, Mackey said. But some patients — the very young, the very old, dementia patients or those who are not conscious — cannot say if they are hurting, and that has led to a long search for some way to objectively measure pain.
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STAR bombards PLANET WITH RADIATION
A nearby star is bombarding its companion planet with a barrage of X-rays, hundred thousand times more intense than the earth receives from the sun, a Nasa discovery says.
This radiation from star CoRoT-2a is stripping about five million tonnes of matter from the planet CoRoT-2b every second, suggests data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. CoRoT-2b has a mass about thrice that of Jupiter and 1,000 times that of earth.
It orbits its parent star at a distance roughly 10 times more than that between the earth and the moon, the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics reports.
“This planet is being absolutely fried by its star,” says study co-author Sebastian Schroeter.
— ians
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