The PRIORI project at University of Michigan says they have created a smartphone app that monitors subtle qualities of a person's voice during everyday phone conversations - and can detect early signs of mood changes in people with bipolar disorder. 

The app still needs a lot of testing before it can be used outside controlled conditions, but the creators say early results from a small group of patients show its potential to monitor moods while protecting privacy.  

The project is
led by computer scientists Zahi Karam, Ph.D. and Emily Mower Provost, Ph.D., and psychiatrist Melvin McInnis, M.D.  They presented first findings on PRIORI
at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing in Italy. 

You've really got to hand it to all those 15-minute oil change places that dot the American landscape: they know how to pull motorists in.

With their brightly colored signs and endless promotions, it’s no wonder they succeed in getting our business. Whether you’re driving a brand new sports car or sedan with 200,000 miles on it, you’re welcome to drive up, get fresh oil and drive away...no problem.

But when it comes to bone marrow transplants, the sobering fact is that the age of the vehicle —in this case, your body — does matter.

Gluten-free fads are all the rage and a preliminary result by reseachers at the University of Copenhagen want to see if there are health benefits for people who don't have celiac disease.

Their experiments on found that mouse mothers on a gluten-free diet led to pups less likely to  develop type 1 diabetes. There's no reason to start paying 242% more for your food just yet.

Researchers have reported a unique discovery; the marine dinoflagellate Dapsilidinium pastielsii in Southeast Asia, notably the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool. 

This unicellular species, with planktonic and benthic stages, was previously thought to have become extinct within the early Pleistocene. It evolved more than 50 million years ago and is the last survivor of a major early Cenozoic lineage.

The discovery of living D. pastielsii in the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool  suggests that this stable environment served as an important refuge for thermophilic dinoflagellates, and its disappearance from the Atlantic following the early Pleistocene implicates cooling.

Homemade, inexpensive stink bug traps crafted from simple household items outshine pricier models designed to kill the invasive, annoying bugs.

Media has always been partisan but when it was only partisan one way, that was the norm. It was considered objective and impartial. In the US, there were social conservative Democrats who believed in national defense and liberal Republicans who supported labor. Who can really remember whether Thomas Dewey or Harry Truman was a Democrat or a Republican? They weren't very different, really. The media were conservative.

A new study looked into the modulatory effects that musical training could have on the use of the different sides of the brain when performing music and language tasks. 

It found that brief musical training can increase the blood flow in the left hemisphere of our brain, which suggests that the areas responsible for music and language share common brain pathways.

Two separate studies which looked at brain activity patterns in musicians and non-musicians.

The first study looked for patterns of brain activity of 14 musicians and 9 non-musicians while they participated in music and word generation tasks. The results showed that patterns in the musician's brains were similar in both tasks but this was not the case for the non-musicians.  

A new study finds that anxiety about a competitive situation makes even the most physically active of us more likely to slip-up.

If you examine all of the high-profile crimes that have happened any time recently, they share one thing; psychiatric medication. It was once common to ask someone who was acting bizarrely if they were 'off their meds' but it became more common to worry they are on them.

A new paper in The Lancet took a retrospective look at population data and think the fears about medication may be misplaced. The psychiatrists, led by Dr. Seena Fazel of Oxford University, used Swedish national health registries to study the psychiatric diagnoses, and any subsequent criminal convictions, in over 80,000 patients (40,937 men and 41,710 women) who were prescribed anti-psychotic or mood stabilizing medication from 2006 to 2009.

I'd like to share some of the amazing range of rhythms you can find, linking music and maths, some discovered only in the last few years. These include: fibonacci gamelan patterns - highly structured yet the pattern of beats never repeats; the rhythm you get if two musicians each with perfectly steady rhythm play as out of time as possible; the rhythm of the famous "Cantor's set"; and the fairly recent discovery that many rhythms of music throughout the world are "Euclidean rhythms" - uneven beat patterns pleasing to the ear made with a surprisingly simple construction.