The proverbs tell us that there’s a fine line between love and hate, and new scans of the brain’s “hate circuit” have confirmed similarities between the two powerful emotions.
But whereas loved-up partners are likely to be less rational, the new scans show hate to be colder and more calculating.
Semir Zeki of University College London, UK, who has previously mapped the neural circuits involved in romantic and maternal love, and colleague John Romaya selected 17 subjects who expressed a strong hatred for an individual – typically an ex-lover or colleague.
The next big stage in the evolution of the Internet, according to many experts and luminaries, will be the advent of the Semantic Web–that is, technologies that let computers process the meaning of Web pages instead of simply downloading or serving them up blindly. Microsoft’s acquisition of the semantic search enginePowerset earlier this year shows faith in this vision. But thus far, little Semantic Web technology has been available to the general public. That’s why many eyes will be on Twine, a Web organizer based on semantic technology that launches publicly today.
Developed by Radar Networks, based in San Francisco, Twine is part bookmarking tool, part social network, and part recommendation engine, helping users collect, manage, and share online information related to any area of interest. For the novice, it can be tricky figuring out exactly where to start. But for experienced users, Twine can be a powerful way to research a subject collaboratively or find people with common interests, with the usual features of a bookmarking site augmented by Twine’s underlying semantic technology.
What do you and your favorite electronic gadgets have in common? According to new research sponsored by the National Science Foundation, more than you’d think.
If you could look inside the computer chips that power your computer or iPod, you’d find arrays of transistors made up of tiny switches. Each switch can be turned on or off and be in a ‘one’ or a ‘zero’ state. This complex system of switches allows electronic devices to hold data in their memories and complete the jobs we want them to do.
It turns out the cells in our bodies also depend on switches, comprised of different chemical reactions that can be switched on or off, to store information and perform their vital functions. Until recently, however, finding these switches has been difficult, and scientists were only able to identify a handful of them.
That was until Naren Ramakrishnan, a professor of computer science at Virginia Tech, and Upinder S. Bhalla at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in India tried a new approach by looking at cells from the standpoint of an electrical engineer.
“A biochemical switch is a basic memory unit,” Ramakrishnan said. “We wanted to try to understand the cellular basis of memory and to see exactly how cells make their decisions.”
The team at Terrafugia is about to fulfill the fantasy of everydriverpilot: a consumer vehicle that can take to the highways and the skies. All they have to do is finish the first one.
The Transition is not a flying car. The vehicle, set to go on sale next year, will cruise smoothly on the road and through the sky. It will have four wheels, Formula One–style suspension, and a pair of 10-foot-wide wings that fold up when it switches from air to asphalt. And when the engineers at Terrafugia in Woburn, Massachusetts, let me sit inside their just-finished proof-of-concept vehicle and grab the steering wheel, it’s easy to imagine piloting this thing up and out of traffic, into the open skies.
It may sound like something out of a James Bond movie, but the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is putting out the call for researchers to come up with a design for a submersible aircraft.
Yup, you read it right. DARPA, a research branch of the U.S. Department of Defense, is looking for someone to prove that a vehicle can be built that will fly, as well as maneuver underwater.
The call for research went out earlier this month, and initial proposals are due by 4 p.m. EST on Dec. 1.
