Thursday Tech News

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Tracking stations on Russia's Kamchatka peninsula, in the South Pacific and in the Czech Republic recorded signals that seemed to be transmissions from the craft, Planetary Society officials said, leaving the possibility that the vehicle made it part way around the globe or actually was in orbit, waiting to be found.

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Both backers and opponents of the deal say there is little chance investors will reject the all-stock transaction. With no alternative deals in sight for the companies, analysts say, shareholders essentially have no choice but to accept the deal marrying Symantec, a Cupertino, Calif., maker of consumer antivirus software, and Veritas, a Mountain View, Calif., storage software vendor.

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The Bell phone companies and local cable companies have spent millions of dollars lobbying local and state officials to pass laws that would prohibit cities and towns from building their own broadband networks. In the last year, 14 bills were introduced in state legislatures to prohibit the build-out of municipal networks. But state legislatures typically only meet for the first six months of the year.

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Long-lived planets may be especially important for the evolution of life, given the devastating effects of periodic asteroid and meteor impacts. For example, many scientists believe that the massive asteroid that hit Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago was responsible for the wholesale extinction of dinosaurs. That catastrophe opened the way for the proliferation of mammals on Earth, eventually resulting in humankind. But on other worlds, such chance events might have obliterated an even greater variety of complex life, perhaps effectively stopping the evolution of intelligence—at least on planets with only modest lifetimes.

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He found that as violence became imminent, the cognitive parts of the brain became more active. And during a fight, emotional parts of the brain, such as the amygdala and parts of the anterior cingulate cortex, were shut down. This pattern is the same as that seen in subjects who have had brain scans during other simulated violent situations such as imagining an aggressive encounter. It is impossible to scan people's brains during acts of real aggression so Mathiak argues that this is as close as you can get to the real thing. It suggests that video games are a "training for the brain to react with this pattern," he says.