What is needed to deploy telemedicine? The right context, involvement of the key people, good planning and sound "running" of the process. The Momentum Blueprint, published today in its final version, offers critical success factors and performance indicators that help decision makers to scale up healthcare services from a distance through information technology.

Studying the brain activity of blind people, scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem are challenging the standard view of how the human brain specializes to perform different kinds of tasks, and shedding new light on how our brains can adapt to the rapid cultural and technological changes of the 21st Century.

Imagine having a personal robot prepare your breakfast every morning. Now, imagine that this robot didn't need any help figuring out how to make the perfect omelet, because it learned all the necessary steps by watching videos on YouTube. It might sound like science fiction, but a team at the University of Maryland has just made a significant breakthrough that will bring this scenario one step closer to reality.

The Antilope network, a group of of international eHealth stakeholder organisations and national competence centres, has released a final set of documents that provide the best available guidance and reference for advancing eHealth interoperability in Europe. They include:

Privacy and security, patient safety, a clear legal framework and better evidence on cost-effectiveness are all required to help mHealth flourish in Europe, according to the responses to a European Commission public consultation. 211 separate responses from public authorities, healthcare providers, patients' organisations and web entrepreneurs, inside and outside the EU, gave feedback on eleven issues related to the uptake of mHealth in the EU.

Every region of the body - from the toes to the jaw and tongue - has a particular processing area in the somatosensory cortex. These areas are flexible and can change. In the case of violinists, for instance, the area representing the fingers that guide the instrument is larger than in other people.

The first results to emerge from a nationwide project to study the genetic causes of rare developmental disorders have revealed 12 causative genes that have never been identified before. The Deciphering Developmental Disorders (DDD) project, the world's largest, nationwide genome-wide diagnostic sequencing programme, sequenced DNA and compared the clinical characteristics of over a thousand children to find the genes responsible for conditions that include intellectual disabilities and congenital heart defects, among others.