Study Looks at Brain Activity and Multitasking

Divide and conquer.  New research shows that when people try to do two things at once, each half of the brain devotes itself to a different task.  Researchers used functional MRI brain imaging to monitor the activity in the brains of volunteers who were performing two different tasks and found that when doing one task, both sides of the brain work together.  But, when doing two tasks at once, one half was activated while doing one task while the other half matched that of the other activity.  This may explain why people can generally perform two tasks at once well, but not more.  The report is from the journal Science.  It was done in France.  This research is starting to look at our brain while the brain is functioning.  We're realizing those studies are very important.

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The Male Y Chromosome May Be Disappearing

There's new information, at least theoretically, that the male Y chromosome could be disappearing.  This work was done at Penn State.  It's in the journal PLoS Genetics.  Researchers say there is a dramatic loss of genes from the human Y chromosome and it could eventually lead to its complete disappearance over the next million years or so.  While some genes seem to be essential, like those for sperm development, most have been lost and the researchers say that they found evidence that many are on a track to disappear as well.  If this happens, researchers say a new pair of chromosomes will likely start down the path of becoming X and Y sex chromosomes.  It's pretty fascinating how you can actually see mutations occur, but this is essentially how the world has developed; changes and development.  With those differences came different people.  

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