Tuesday, July 31, 2007

ecology Small Electric Car May Usher In Big Changes. An anonymous reader sends us to a profile in CNNMoney.com on a Norwegian car company that is building a compact, plug-in electric car, the Think City, that will go on sale in Europe early next year. It could hit US markets in 2009. The CEO is working with Silicon Valley VCs and with Google, Tesla Motors, PG&E, and Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway. Plans are to sell the car only on the Web. No dealers, cheap manufacturing plants, and a battery pack that you lease, not buy — there's potential here for shaking up the auto industry the way Dell did PCs.Read more of this story at Slashdot. 7:54:17 AM    comment [] brain control Who's Minding the Mind?. New studies reveal a subconscious brain that is far more active, purposeful and independent than previously known. Goals are like neural software programs that can only be run one at a time, and the unconscious is perfectly capable of running the... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] 7:51:25 AM    comment [] search Building a Better Search Engine. Powerset, Inc. is on the verge of offering an innovative natural-language search engine, based on linguistic research at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The engine does more than merely accept queries asked in the form of a question. The co... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] 7:50:35 AM    comment [] genetics MIT Engineers World's First Schizophrenic Mice. Frosty  writes "MIT researchers have created a schizophrenic mouse that pinpoints a gene variation predisposing people to schizophrenia. Research with the mouse may lead to the first genetically targeted drugs for the disease, which affects 1 percent of the population worldwide. This is the first study that uses animals who demonstrate an array of symptoms observed in schizophrenic patients to identify specific genes that predispose people to the disease."Read more of this story at Slashdot. 7:49:19 AM    comment [] social networks New Facebook research from MSU. The new edition of JCMC leads with a paper from the MSU team of Ellison, Lampe and Steinfeld, entitled The Benefits of Facebook "Friends:" Social Capital and College Students' Use of Online Social Network Sites. The abstract: This study examines the relationship between use of Facebook, a popular online social network site, and the formation and maintenance of social capital. In addition to assessing bonding and bridging social capital, we explore a dimension of social capital that assesses one's ability to stay connected with members of a previously inhabited community, which we call maintained social capital. Regression analyses conducted on results from a survey of undergraduate students (N=286) suggest a strong association between use of Facebook and the three types of social capital, with the strongest relationship being to bridging social capital. In addition, Facebook usage was found to interact with measures of psychological well-being, suggesting that it might provide greater benefits for users experiencing low self-esteem and low life satisfaction. You can check out the article here at the JCMC website. [Unit Structures] 7:46:48 AM    comment []

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