from Medieval Latin bifurcatus, from Latin bi- (see bi-) + furca, the root of fork.
Examples:
- PARTING THOUGHTS In summary, it may be possible in the coming decades to use a combination of gene therapy, drugs, and magnetic devices to increase our intelligence. There are several avenues of exploration that are revealing the secrets of intelligence and how it may be modified or enhanced. But what would it do to society, though, if we could enhance our intelligence and get a “brain boost”? Ethicists have seriously contemplated this question, since the basic science is growing so rapidly. The big fear is that society may bifurcate, with only the rich and powerful having access to this technology, which they could use to further solidify their exalted position in society. Meanwhile, the poor won’t have access to additional brain power, making it more difficult to move up in society. (Kaku - Future of the Mind)
- By arranging these dominoes in a network with looping, bifurcating and rejoining stretches, one can make these signals combine and interact in a sufficiently rich repertoire of ways to make the whole construction into a computer: a signal travelling down a stretch can be interpreted as a binary '1', and the lack of a signal as a binary '0', and the interactions between such signals can implement a repertoire of operations - such as and, or and not - out of which arbitrary computations can be composed. (Deutsch - Infinity)