They may seem a little unsettling but the staring eyes of this female avatar were designed to grab your gaze and hold it, and also to obligingly follow where you look. By performing these actions with people placed inside a brain scanner, she has helped to demonstrate that guiding the gazes of others activates different brain areas than following.
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Spanish awards rekindle old rivalries
An ambitious effort to develop Spanish universities into campuses that are among Europe’s best has stoked some long-standing regional rivalries.
On 26 November, the government announced which universities would benefit from the inaugural round of an annual programme called the Campus of International Excellence, administered jointly by the Ministry of Science and Innovation and the Ministry of Education. The €150-million (US$226-million) scheme is designed to steer resources, in the form of government seed money and loans, to the strategic infrastructure projects with the most potential to aid teaching and research.
Read the entire news story on Nature.com [html] or here [pdf]
Single-celled life does a lot with very little
The blueprint of a small organism’s cellular machinery has been unveiled, offering the most comprehensive view yet of the molecular essentials of life. But the research also shows just how far biologists have to go before they understand the complete biochemical basis of even the simplest of creatures.
See the original news story on Nature.com [html] or read a [pdf]
Biological logic
Grabbing one of the three laptops in her office at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, Jasmin Fisher flips open the lid and starts to describe how she and her collaborators used an approach from computer science to make a discovery in molecular biology. Fisher glances across her desk to where her collaborator, Nir Piterman of Imperial College London, is watching restlessly. “I know you could do this faster,” she says to Piterman, who is also her husband. “But you are a computer scientist and I am a biologist and we must be patient.”