LONDON : Stimulating the brain with a very low electric current can enhance a person’s maths ability for up to six months, British neuroscientists said on Thursday. Researchers at Britain’s Oxford University studied 15 volunteers and demonstrated for the first time that electrical stimulation of the brain improved their performance in a series of maths assessments, and continued to do so half a year later.
 

LONDON : Scientists have developed an eye implant that allowed three blind patients to see shapes and objects within days of treatment in a trial and say the device could become routine for some kinds of blindness in five years. Experts described the study results as phenomenal and said the device, developed by German researchers, could eventually change the lives of up to 200,000 people worldwide who suffer from blindness due to a degenerative eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa.
 

CAPE TOWN : A group of prehistoric people mastered a difficult and delicate process to sharpen stones into spears and knives at least 75,000 years ago, more than 50,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to a report. This technique, known as pressure flaking, allowed for the more precise shaping of stones to turn them into better weapons for hunting, a paper published on Thursday in the US periodical Science said.
 

LONDON : Scientists are struggling to get a full picture of the variety of wildlife species around the globe as climate change, human exploitation and pollution threaten “mass extinctions,” a series of studies published on Wednesday showed. The 16 studies in a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London said science had an incomplete record of species from animals to plants and microbes at a time when they may be dying out faster than ever before.
 

CHICAGO : Early data from the 1,000 Genomes Project, an international effort to build a detailed map of human genetic variation, is already offering new clues about human disease, including why some people are more severely affected by disease than others. Dr. Evan Eichler of the University of Washington in Seattle and colleagues used findings from the pilot phase of the project to identify subtle differences among people in areas of the genome where DNA sequences are often repeated many times.
 

NAGOYA, Japan : About a fifth of the world’s vertebrates are threatened with extinction, a major review has found, highlighting the plight of nature that is the focus of global environment talks underway in Japan. The study by more than 170 scientists across the globe used data for 25,000 species from the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of threatened species and examined the status of the world’s mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fishes.