Head lice — yuck — have developed a creeping resistance to common insecticides. Maybe it’s time for a new tack.
By Regina Nuzzo
Special to The Times
Los Angeles Times — Health Section
November 13, 2006
IN the war against head lice, we face an enemy that is fast and plentiful, with nimble armies that can evolve and outwit standard weaponry. Will we ever take the lead in this scalp-biting, nit-picking arms race?
Last month, experts from around the world gathered in Buenos Aires to swap battle tactics at the Third International Congress on Phthiraptera, the group of 3,000 species of wingless parasitic insects that includes Pediculus capitis, bane of parents and school nurses across the land.
Researchers reported needed progress in the fight. Some are turning to new classes of insecticides for which head lice have yet to develop resistance. Others are eschewing the poison and getting creative: tricking lice into thinking they’re drowning; moisturizing the blighters until they leak water; or blasting hot air until the insects are desiccated hulls.
Peek inside the skull of a couch potato watching reruns on TV and you’ll see non-stop patterns of blood flow throughout the brain. If you learn to pick out which activity patterns match up with, say, a good belly laugh, then you might be on your way to reading the viewer’s internal experiences. Recently, experts from a variety of fields competed to glean subjective perceptions like humor from functional MRIs of TV viewers. They were surprisingly successful. 
A team headed by Peter Fromherz, PhD, a director at Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich, has developed a computer chip that can measure the activity of thousands of neurons at a time. “We can get a movie of a complete electroactivity map in space and time, with a resolution of eight micrometers,” Fromherz says. The work was published in the September 2006 issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology. 