Word: optical
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They first recruited a group of nine healthy adults and presented each with a list of eight beverages, which they were asked to rate in appeal on a scale of 1 to 5. The investigators then outfitted each participant with a headband equipped with fiber-optic strands that projected infrared light through the scalp and skull and into the prefrontal cortex, a brain area critical for processing preference. Infrared imaging is typically used to detect heat, which is just what the researchers were looking for. The volunteers were shown pictures of different pairs of drinks from their original list...
...Frankenstein: we have gained too much power over life and made the body into a mere machine. Plots turn on how bodies can be used as recording devices: corpses are psychically "interrogated"; people's memories are stolen by a villain jamming wires up their noses; a murder victim's optic nerve is hooked up to a TV screen to show the last thing she saw before she died. The humans involved have no more volition than a hard drive being reformatted in the shop...
Topping Roberts' list of challenges: calling Verizon's and AT&T's billion-dollar bets on delivering TV service through fiber-optic lines. Verizon has signed up 1.4 million video subscribers, a good many of them in the Northeast, where Comcast rules. By 2010, Verizon expects its video, phone and Internet effort, dubbed fios, to reach 18 million households. AT&T is following along the same track, while EchoStar and DirecTV continue to add satellite-video subscribers...
...Africa by the end of 2010. It's not the only ambitious scheme to bring the continent online. In recent months, work has begun on initiatives to connect countries in eastern and southern Africa - the only major populated regions not hooked up to the global broadband network of fiber-optic cables - to each other and the rest of the world through high-speed lines...
...only part of a flurry of telecom activity on the continent. Amid a push by Africa's leaders and telcos to modernize its networks over the next few years, a string of firms have partnered to build the East African Submarine Cable System, some 10,000 km of fiber-optic lines linking 21 countries from South Africa to Sudan. With work on the line started last year, the project is due for completion in 2009. The World Bank's $424 million Africa Regional Communications Infrastructure Program - a complementary scheme approved at roughly the same time - aims to have all major...