On the radar

News from the world of science

Hair growth in mice restored

Scientists at UCLA and the Salk Institute were studying the effects of stress on gastro-intestinal function when they serendipitously showed that a chemical, astressin-B, which blocks the stress hormone CRF, restored hair growth in mice engineered to over-produce CRF.

“Our findings show that a short-duration treatment with this compound causes an astounding long-term hair regrowth in chronically stressed mutant mice,” said researcher Million Mulugeta at UCLA. “This could open new avenues to treat hair loss in humans through the modulation of the stress hormone receptors, particularly hair loss related to chronic stress and aging.”

Details were published in PLoS One.

The thinking person’s car

A team in Germany has taken thoughtful driving to a new level. The proof-of-concept system, developed at the Freie Universität, Berlin, allows a user to operate a specially fitted car by thinking thoughts the computer has been trained to recognise. The driver wears a headset, which picks up changes in the brain and “tells” the vehicle to steer, speed up or brake accordingly.

“The task here was to show free driving by detecting brain patterns,” according to a video that explains the system (see tinyurl.com/BrainDriver). “There’s still a long way to go before we can really take full control of machines with our brains.”

The latest New Zealand earthquake hit an area that wasn’t even known to have a fault prior to last September. It’s one that had not moved in thousands of years

- Robert Yeats, of Oregon State University, highlighting the risks of crustal faults