Disney develops way to 'feel' touchscreen images.

Disney researchers have found a way for people to "feel" the texture of objects seen on a flat touchscreen.

The technique involves sending tiny vibrations through the display that let people "feel" the shallow bumps, ridges and edges of an object.

The vibrations fooled fingers into believing they were touching a textured surface, said the Disney researchers.

The vibration-generating algorithm should be easy to add to existing touchscreen systems, they added.

Developed by Dr Ali Israr and colleagues at Disney's research lab in Pittsburgh, the vibrational technique re-creates what happens when a finger tip passes over a real bump.

"Our brain perceives the 3D bump on a surface mostly from information that it receives via skin stretching," said Ivan Poupyrev, head of the interaction research group in Pittsburgh.

To fool the brain into thinking it is touching a real feature, the vibrations imparted via the screen artificially stretch the skin on a fingertip so a bump is felt even though the touchscreen surface is smooth.

The researchers have developed an underlying algorithm that can be used to generate textures found on a wide variety of objects.

A video depicting the system in action shows people feeling apples, jellyfish, pineapples, a fossilised trilobite as well as the hills and valleys on a map.

The more pronounced the feature, the greater the vibration is needed to mimic its feel.

The vibration system should be more flexible than existing systems used to give tactile feedback on touchscreens, which typically used a library of canned effects, said Dr Israr.

"With our algorithm we do not have one or two effects, but a set of controls that make it possible to tune tactile effects to a specific visual artefact on the fly," he added.

How Infamous Hydroelectric Dam Changed Earth’s Rotation.

“Powerful” doesn’t really do this amazing (and VERY controversial) structure justice. Since the $30 billion project was announced, Chinese officials have faced heavy scrutiny from both scientists and environmental activists like. Many believe that the dam will ultimately result in catastrophe. Some concerns include the dam trapping pollution, spawning earthquakes and landslides, uprooting citizens (more than 1.3 million people have already been forced to relocate), and destroying historical locations – along with the habitats of endangered animals. (The government finally conceded that the project was ill conceived – after years of dubbing the dam one of the most spectacular pieces of engineering in Chinese history – but the damage is already done.)

The last 32 generators (each capable of generating 50 MW of power) went into action at the end of July last year. The gushing water produced by the dam has enough power to generate about 22.5 million kilowatts (22,500 megawatts) of energy (the estimates vary), which is equivalent to about FIFTEEN nuclear reactors and, of course, it doesn’t cause concerns about radioactive materials being unleashed (which is a very good thing, especially after events like the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters) – so the disastrous effects can be negated by most, mainly due to the fact that it’s a clean, effective way of rendering energy for a booming population.

Wondering how this could possibly have an impact on the Earth’s rotation? Here’s a wonderful source that breaks it down further:

“Three Gorges Dam crosses the Yangtze River in Hubei province, China. It is the world’s largest hydroelectric power station by total capacity, which will be 22,500 MW when completed. When the water level is at maximum….it will flood a total area of 632 km2 of land. The reservoir will contain about 39.3 cubic km (9.43 cubic miles) of water. That water will weigh more than 39 trillion kilograms (42 billion tons).

A shift in a mass of that size will impact the rotation of the Earth due to a phenomena known as “the moment of inertia”, which is the inertia of a rigid rotating body with respect to its rotation. The moment of inertia of an object about a given axis describes how difficult it is to change its angular motion about that axis. The longer the distance of a mass to its axis of rotation, the slower it will spin. You may not know it, but you see examples of this in everyday life. For example, a figure skater attempting to spin faster will draw her arms tight to her body, and thereby reduce her moment of inertia. Similarly, a diver attempting to somersault faster will bring his body into a tucked position.

Raising 39 trillion kilograms of water 175 meters above sea level will increase the Earth’s moment of inertia, and thus slow its rotation. However, the impact will be extremely small. NASA scientists calculated the shift of such a mass will increase the length of day by only 0.06 microseconds, and make the Earth only very slightly more round in the middle and more flat on the top. It will also shift the pole position by about two centimeters (0.8 inch). Note that a shift in any object’s mass on the Earth relative to its axis of rotation will change its moment of inertia, although most shifts are too small to be measured (but they can be calculated).”

Not to worry, though. Earth’s rotation changes frequently, with many different variables added into the equation. First, we have the moon gradually receding from the Earth changing Earth’s rotation ever-so-slightly.  Earthquakes (like the mega quake in Japan back in 2011) also help along the process (the same quake changed Earth’s rotation by 2.68 microseconds). Furthermore, every 5 years (or so), the length of the day increases and decreases by about a millisecond, or about 550 times larger than the change caused by the Japanese earthquake.

Still, this knowledge begs many interesting questions. Namely, how far is too far? Individually, these things don’t make much of a difference one-way-or-another, but together, who knows. So FQTQ readers, what are your thoughts?

The Greatest Nuclear-Powered Space Missions of All Time.

Most spacecraft power themselves by absorbing the sun's energy with solar panels. Beyond Earth’s comfortable, brightly lit cradle, however, outer space assaults probes with deep cold, deeper darkness and intense bursts of radiation.

To keep a spacecraft safely aloft in the void seems to require magic. Thanks to the Cold War-era space race, U.S. engineers found some: Plutonium-238, a byproduct created during the production of weapons-grade plutonium-239.

Unsuitable for use in weapons but perfect in a spacecraft, plutonium-238′s gradual decay gives off warmth that safeguards fragile electronics. More importantly, wrapping plutonium with heat-to-electricity converting materials, called thermoelectrics, turns the radioactive metal into a nuclear battery.

“Plutonium-238 is perhaps the main reason why other nations haven’t gone as deep into space as we have,” saidJim Adams, NASA’s deputy chief technologist and former deputy director of the space agency’s planetary science division. “They don’t have access to material to make reliable, lightweight [nuclear batteries].”

Powering Cassini around Saturn, for example, would require solar panels the size of two tennis courts and weigh thousands of pounds. Barring a radical and unforeseen breakthrough in power systems, or heavy multiplying of NASA’s budget (launch costs range between $5,000 and $10,000 per pound), no other energy source is as practical as a nuclear battery.

As the world’s supply of plutonium-238 comes disastrously close to running out, WIRED reviews the greatest space missions of all time — some of which still phone home decades after launch and billions of miles away from Earth.

INTO THE WORLD OF ANTS

World's Thinnest Glass Created Accidentally By Researchers In U.S., Germany

Researchers captured a microscopic photo of a sheet of glass only two atoms thick. Here it is blended with an artist's conception to show the structural rendering.

Researchers accidentally discovered the world's thinnest sheet of glass, just two atoms thick.

Their chance finding — now immortalized in the 2014 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, out this week — gives scientists a glimpse into the puzzling properties of glass, which behaves like both a solid and a liquid.

Researchers at Cornell University and Germany's University of Ulm were creatinggraphene, one of the thinnest and strongest materials in the world. Sheets of graphene are just one carbon atom thick, with those atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice. 

Using an electron microscope, the researchers inspected some "muck" on the graphene, finding that it was essentially a 2D sheet of common glass, made up of silicon and oxygen atoms.

The glass layer likely was created when an air leak caused copper foils, which are involved in the graphene-making process, to react with a furnace made up quartz, a mineral that is comprised of silicon and oxygen, the researchers say.

The researchers' observations were first described in January 2012 in the journal Nano Letters. They say their microscopic photos of the ultra-thin pane may help to solve some long-standing uncertainties about glass, which is not exactly a liquid or a solid.

Most solids when they cool arrange their atoms in a rigid lattice. Though glass is hard and has a solid appearance, atoms that make up glass are arranged in a disordered network, more like a liquid.

The structure of the 2D glass that the Cornell researchers saw is similar to theoretical models of the irregular structure of glass dating back to the 1930s.

"This is the work that, when I look back at my career, I will be most proud of," David Muller, professor of applied and engineering physics at Cornell, said in a statement. "It's the first time that anyone has been able to see the arrangement of atoms in a glass."

Though it was an accidental discovery, the researchers say such deliberately created 2D glass could find its way into nanotechnology and could even one day be used in transistors.

Tiny Diamonds Levitate in Wild Physics Experiment.

Researchers have used lasers to levitate extremely small particles in the past, such as individual

atoms, but this is the first time that anyone has ever levitated a nanodiamond.

In quite an eerie feat, physicists have floated microscopic diamonds in midair using laser beams.

Researchers have already used lasers to levitate extremely small particles, such as individual atoms, but this is the first time that the technique has worked on a nanodiamond, which, in this case, measures just 100 nanometers (3.9 x 10^-8 inches) across, or more than 1,000 times thinner than a fingernail.
In the new study, the physicists from the University of Rochester relied on the fact that a laser beam, which is made up of photons, creates a tiny force that usually can't be felt.
"If we turn on a light or open a door and feel the sun, we don't feel this push or pull," study researcher Nick Vamivakas said in a video released by the university. "But it turns out that if you focus a laser down with a lens to a very small region of space, it can actually pull on microscopic, nanoscopic particles."
To force the tiny diamonds to float, Vamivakas and his colleagues focused a pair of lasers toward a clear vacuum chamber and then sprayed the diamonds into the chamber using an aerosol dispenser. The diamonds gravitated toward the light, and some eventually levitated in a stable position.Sometimes, the levitation occurred within just a couple of minutes, while other times, the process took a bit longer.
"Other times, I can be here for half an hour before any diamond gets caught," Levi Neukirch, a graduate student at the University of Rochester who was involved in the study, said in a statement. "Once a diamond wanders into the trap, we can hold it for hours."
The team hopes the findings will have applications in quantum computing and, more theoretically, help explain how friction operates on extremely small scales.
"The position of the crystal in the trap is a very sensitive probe of forces in its environment," Vamivakas said in the university video. "The reason this is important is, as technology continues to shrink down to these length scales, we need to understand how the environment will interact with the devices that we are making."
The team plans to continue its experiments in order to better understand the physical behavior of the crystals, which could help address other basic unanswered questions in physics.

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Graphene may boost internet speed 100 times.

Using 'miracle material' graphene in telecommunications could dramatically make the internet a hundred times faster, a new study has found.

Researchers from the Universities of Bath and Exeter have demonstrated for the first time incredibly short optical response rates using graphene, which could pave the way for a revolution in telecommunications.

Every day large amounts of information is transmitted and processed through optoelectronic devices such as optical fibres, photodetectors and lasers. Signals are sent by photons at infrared wavelengths and processed using optical switches, which convert signals into a series of light pulses.

Ordinarily optical switches respond at rate of a few picoseconds - around a trillionth of a second. Through this study physicists have observed the response rate of an optical switch using 'few layer graphene' to be around one hundred femtoseconds - nearly a hundred times quicker than current materials.

Graphene is just one atom thick, but remarkably strong. Scientists have suggested that it would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil to break through a single sheet.

Already dubbed a miracle material due to its strength, lightness, flexibility, conductivity and low cost, it could now enter the market to dramatically improve telecommunications, researchers said.

"We've seen an ultrafast optical response rate, using 'few-layer graphene', which has exciting applications for the development of high speed optoelectronic components based on graphene," lead researcher Dr Enrico Da Como said.

"This fast response is in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, where many applications in telecommunications, security and also medicine are currently developing and affecting our society," said Da Como.

"The more we find out about graphene the more remarkable its properties seem to be. This research shows that it also has unique optical properties which could find important new applications," Co-Director of the Centre for Graphene Science at Bath, Professor Simon Bending added.

In the long term this research could also lead to the development of quantum cascade lasers based on graphene.

Quantum cascade lasers are semiconductor lasers used in pollution monitoring, security and spectroscopy. Few-layer graphene could emerge as a unique platform for this interesting application.

World’s first telescopic contact lens gives you Superman-like vision.

 An international team of researchers have created the first telescopic contact lens; a contact lens that, when it’s equipped, gives you the power to zoom your vision almost three times. Yes, this is the first ever example of a bionic eye that effectively gives you Superman-like eagle-eye vision.

As you can see in the photo above, the telescopic contact lens has two very distinct regions. The center of the lens allows light to pass straight through, providing normal vision. The outside edge, however, acts as a telescope capable of magnifying your sight by 2.8x. This is about the same as looking through a 100mm lens on a DSLR. For comparison, a pair of bird-watching binoculars might have a magnification of 15x. The examples shown in the image below give you a good idea of what a 2.8x optical zoom would look like in real life.

The main breakthrough is that this telescopic contact lens is just 1.17mm thick, allowing it to be comfortably worn. Other attempts at granting telescopic vision have included: a 4.4mm-thick contact lens (too thick for real-world use), telescopic spectacles (cumbersome and ugly), and most recently a telescopic lens implanted into the eye itself. The latter is currently the best option currently available, but it requires surgery and the image quality isn’t excellent.

To create a 1.17mm-thick telescope, the researchers — led by Joseph Ford of UCSD and Eric Tremblay of EPFL — had to be rather creative. The light that will be magnified enters the edge of the contact lens, is bounced around four times inside the lens using patterned aluminium mirrors, and then beamed to the edge of the retina at the back of your eyeball. The mirrors magnify the image 2.8 times, but also correct for chromatic aberration, resulting in a surprisingly high fidelity image. To switch between normal and telescopic vision, the central (normal, unmagnified) region of the contact lens has a polarizing filter in front of it — and then the wearer equips a pair of 3D TV spectacles. By switching the polarizing state of the spectacles (a pair of active, liquid crystal Samsung 3D specs in this case), the user can choose between normal and magnified vision.

In case you were wondering, these solutions all primarily exist for one reason: To help restore sight to people with age-related macular degeneration. AMD damages the high-resolution fovea at the center of the retina, but generally the low-resolution outer region (perifovea) still works. Without the fovea, people with AMD can’t make out fine details, such as type on a page. These telescopic spectacles, lenses, and implants focus light onto this outer region, giving people with AMD the ability to make out these details.

The current telescopic contact lens is made out of PMMA, a gas-impermeable polymer that old, uncomfortable contact lenses used to be made of. To bring their lens to market, the researchers will need to switch over to rigid gas permeable (RGP) polymers, which modern, comfortable contact lenses are made from. While these telescopic lenses are obviously intended for people who suffer from AMD, there’s nothing to prevent a healthy person from wearing them and achieving better-than-human (superhuman?) vision.

MIT researchers build an all-optical transistor.

Optical computing—using light rather than electricity to perform calculations—could pay dividends for both conventional computers and quantum computers, largely hypothetical devices that could perform some types of computations exponentially faster than classical computers.

But optical computing requires light particles—photons—to modify each other's behavior, something they're naturally averse to doing: Two photons that collide in a vacuum simply pass through each other.

In the latest issue of the journal Science, researchers at MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics—together with colleagues at Harvard University and the Vienna University of Technology—describe the experimental realization of an optical switch that's controlled by a single photon, allowing light to govern the transmission of light. As such, it's the optical analog of a transistor, the fundamental component of a computing circuit.

Moreover, since the weird, counterintuitive effects of quantum physics are easier to see in individual particles than in clusters of particles, the ability to use a single photon to flip the switch could make it useful for quantum computing.

The heart of the switch is a pair of highly reflective mirrors. When the switch is on, an optical signal—a beam of light—can pass through both mirrors. When the switch is off, only about 20 percent of the light in the signal can get through.

The paired mirrors constitute what's known as an optical resonator. "If you had just one mirror, all the light would come back," explains Vladan Vuleti?, the Lester Wolfe Professor of Physics at MIT, who led the new work. "When you have two mirrors, something very strange happens."

Light can be thought of as particles—photons—but it can also be thought of as a wave—an electromagnetic field. Even though, on the particle description, photons are stopped by the first mirror, on the wave description, the electromagnetic field laps into the space between the mirrors. If the distance between the mirrors is precisely calibrated to the wavelength of the light, Vuleti? explains, "Basically, a very large field builds up inside the cavity that cancels the field coming back and goes in the forward direction." In other words, the mirrors become transparent to light of the right wavelength.

Clouding over

In the RLE researchers' experiment, the cavity between the mirrors is filled with a gas of supercooled cesium atoms. Ordinarily, these atoms don't interfere with the light passing through the mirrors. But if a single "gate photon" is fired into their midst at a different angle, kicking just one electron of one atom into a higher energy state, it changes the physics of the cavity enough that light can no longer pass through it.

Joining Vuleti? on the paper are lead author Wenlan Chen and Kristin M. Beck, both PhD students in his group; Robert Bücker of the Vienna University of Technology; and Michael Gullans, Mikhail D. Lukin and Haruka Tanji-Suzuki of Harvard.

For conventional computers, the chief advantage of optical computing would be in power management: As computer chips have more and more transistors crammed onto them, they draw more power and run hotter. Computing with light instead of electricity would address both problems.

Of course, clouds of supercooled atoms are not a practical design for the transistors in, say, a Web server. "For the classical implementation, this is more of a proof-of-principle experiment showing how it could be done," Vuleti? says. "One could imagine implementing a similar device in solid state—for example, using impurity atoms inside an optical fiber or piece of solid."

Going quantum

Quantum-computing applications may be more compelling. Bizarrely, tiny particles of matter can be in mutually exclusive states simultaneously, something known as superposition. Where a bit in a classical computer can be either on or off, representing 0 or 1, bits built from particles in superposition can represent 0 and 1 at the same time. As a consequence, they could, in principle, evaluate many possible solutions to a computational problem in parallel, rather than considering them one by one.

Primitive quantum computers have been built using laser-trapped ions and nuclear magnetic resonance, but it's hard to keep their bits—or "qubits," for quantum bits—in superposition. Superposition is much easier to preserve in photons, for exactly the same reason that it's hard to get photons to interact.

The ability to switch an optical gate with a single photon opens the possibility of arrays of optical circuits, all of which are in superposition. "If the gate photon is there, the light gets reflected; if the gate photon is not there, the light gets transmitted," Vuleti? explains. "So if you were to put in a superposition state of the photon being there and not being there, then you would end up with a macroscopic superposition state of the light being transmitted and reflected."

A photon-switched transistor has other implications for quantum computing. For instance, Vuleti? says, one of the first applications of a conventional transistor was to filter noise out of an electrical signal by feeding the transistor's output back into it. "Quantum feedback can cancel—to the extent allowed by quantum mechanics—quantum noise," Vuleti? says. "You can make quantum states that you wouldn't otherwise get."

The switch could also be used as a photon detector: If a photon has struck the atoms, light won't pass through the cavity. "That means you have a device that can detect a photon without destroying it," Vuleti? says. "That doesn't exist today. It would have many applications in quantum information processing."

"Energy consumption in computing devices is a big issue," says Jelena Vuckovic, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. "The beauty of this approach is that it can really do switching at the single-photon level, so your losses are much smaller. You don't have to spend a lot of energy for each bit. Your bit is essentially included in a single photon."

Vuckovic believes that it should be possible to reproduce the MIT researchers' results in physical systems that are easier to integrate into computer chips. "It's exactly the same story, except that instead of using these ultracold atoms in the cavity, you use a microscopic cavity on a semiconductor chip on a semiconductor and you use a quantum dot grown inside of the semiconductor as an artificial atom," she says. "There would be extra steps that people would have to take in order to implement the right energy-level structure. But in principle, the physics could be translated to a platform that could be cascaded and more easily integrated."

Into the quantum internet at the speed of light.

The atom’s quantum information is written onto the polarization state of the photon.

Not only do optical fibers transmit information every day around the world at the speed of light, but they can also be harnessed for the transport of quantum information. In the current issue of Nature Photonics, a research team of Innsbruck physicists led by Rainer Blatt and Tracy Northup report how they have directly transferred the quantum information stored in an atom onto a particle of light. Such information could then be sent over optical fiber to a distant atom.

Thanks to the strange laws of quantum mechanics, quantum computers would be able to carry out certain computational tasks much faster than conventional computers. Among the most promising technologies for the construction of a quantum computer are systems of single atoms, confined in so-called ion traps and manipulated with lasers. In the laboratory, these systems have already been used to test key building blocks of a future quantum computer. "Currently, we can carry out successful quantum computations with atoms," explain Andreas Stute and Bernardo Casabone, both PhD students at the University of Innsbruck's Institute for Experimental Physics. "But we are still missing viable interfaces with which quantum information can be transferred over optical channels from one computer to another."

What makes the construction of these interfaces especially challenging is that the laws of quantum mechanics don't allow quantum information to be simply copied. Instead, a future quantum internet – that is, a network of quantum computers linked by optical channels – would have to transfer quantum information onto individual particles of light, known as photons. These photons would then be transported over an optical-fiber link to a distant computing site. Now, for the first time, quantum information has been directly transferred from an atom in an ion trap onto a single photon. The work is reported in the current issue of Nature Photonics by a research team led by Tracy Northup and Rainer Blatt.

Quantum networkers

The University of Innsbruck physicists first trap a single calcium ion in an ion trap and position it between two highly reflective mirrors. "We use a laser to write the desired quantum information onto the electronic states of the atom," explains Stute. "The atom is then excited with a second laser, and as a result, it emits a photon. At this moment, we write the atom's quantum information onto the polarization state of the photon, thus mapping it onto the light particle." The photon is stored between the mirrors until it eventually flies out through one mirror, which is less reflective than the other. "The two mirrors steer the photon in a specific direction, effectively guiding it into an optical fiber," says Casabone. The quantum information stored in the photon could thus be conveyed over the optical fiber to a distant quantum computer, where the same technique could be applied in reverse to write it back onto an atom.

World's First 3-D Printed Battery Is The Size Of A Grain Of Sand.

A team of scientists have used a custom-made 3-D printer to create high-power microbatteries.

Scientists at Harvard University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have 3-D printed lithium-ion batteries as small as a grain of sand. The batteries could be used to power micro-electronics, such as medical implants and robots that mimic insects.

To construct the batteries, the team—led by Harvard’s Jennifer A. Lewis—had to develop specialized inks with the correct electrochemical properties that would immediately harden upon release. After a few tries, the team managed to construct anode ink with nanoparticles of a lithium metal oxide compound and cathode ink from nanoparticles of another lithium metal oxide compound.

The researchers also had to custom-build a 3-D printer that could secrete the inks through an extremely narrow nozzle. Layer by layer, the inks solidified into interlaced, ultrathin stacks of electrodes less than the width of a human hair. With the skeleton of the battery formed, scientists then packaged the electrodes with a surrounding case of electrolyte solution.

After measuring the final product, the team discovered the microbatteries were comparable in performance to commercial batteries in terms of charge and discharge rate, cycle life and energy density.

The technology could go a long way toward helping to miniaturize electronics. “Jennifer’s innovative microbattery ink designs dramatically expand the practical uses of 3D printing, and simultaneously open up entirely new possibilities for miniaturization of all types of devices, both medical and non-medical,” Donald Ingber, Wyss founding director and professor of bioengineering at Harvard SEAS said in a statement.

Zero Helicopter.

We’ve always dreamed that one day we can move from one place to another without having to deal with traffic jam. How about flying from one place to another? Take a look at Zero helicopter concept by Hector del Amo. This single person vehicle is no ordinary chopper, well it’s not a private jet, but it does the job in a very cool way. We like the fact that this zero-shaped chopper looks more compact compared to mosquito helicopter but unfortunately not as portable as Libelula helicopter. Regardless, we still wish to see Zero helicopter make it into the real world.

Everyone likes if human heart was created in laboratory.

A Milestone in laboratory Research with Organ Decellurization.
The researchers at University of Minnesota recently performed an amazing work by creating a beating heart in the laboratory.
This research carried on the heart from a dead rat. The researchers used a detergent to remove cells from a dead heart. This made a pure, empty and white in color heart with non-living fibers, which gives structure to heart.
Then, they injected cells from neonatal and newborn rats’ hearts. And pumped oxygen and nutrients through the structure of blood vessels to support cell growth.
These cells started to grow under good condition. Eight days later, the hearts were pumping.

This process is called “Organ decellurizatrion” and it was successfully implemented.
Researchers might soon be able to replicate this success for human transplants.

1st African American Man Dates Back 338,000 Years.

A miniscule bit of DNA from an African American man now living in South Carolina has been traced back 338,000 years, according to a new study.

The man’s Y chromosome — a hereditary factor determining male sex — has a history that’s so old, it even predates the age of the oldest known Homo sapiens fossils, according to the report, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

The fellow’s chromosome turned out to carry a rare mutation, which researchers matched to a similar chromosome in the Mbo, a population living in a tiny area of western Cameroon in sub-Saharan Africa.

“Our analysis indicates this lineage diverged from previously known Y chromosomes about 338,000 ago, a time when anatomically modern humans had not yet evolved,” Michael Hammer, who worked on the study, said in a press release.

“This pushes back the time the last common Y chromosome ancestor lived by almost 70 percent.”

Hammer is an associate professor in the University of Arizona’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology and a research scientist at the UA’s Arizona Research Labs.

The DNA detective work began after the South Carolinian submitted a small tissue sample to theNational Geographic Genographic Project. The researchers were shocked after they noticed none of the genetic markers used to assign lineages to known Y chromosome groupings were found.

They sent the man’s DNA sample to Family Tree DNA for sequencing. Fernando Mendez, a postdoctoral researcher in Hammer’s lab, led the effort to analyze the DNA sequence. It included more than 240,000 base pairs of the Y chromosome.

Searches through a huge database led to the Mbo connection.

The scientists could then estimate the emergence of the chromosome mutation based on rates of change, creating a sort of “family tree” for the chromosome.

The discovery doesn’t necessarily mean that we all descended from an ancestor living in western Cameroon.

“It is a misconception that the genealogy of a single genetic region reflects population divergence,” Hammer explained. “Instead, our results suggest that there are pockets of genetically isolated communities that together preserve a great deal of human diversity.”

Still, Hammer said, “It is likely that other divergent lineages will be found, whether in Africa or among African-Americans in the U.S. and that some of these may further increase the age of the Y chromosome tree. There has been a lot of hype with people trying to trace their Y chromosome to different tribes, but this individual from South Carolina can say he did it.”

The study has even further implications. It strengthens the belief that there is no “mitochondrial Eve” or “Y chromosome Adam.”

All of humankind, as a result, did not descend from exactly one pair of humans that lived at a certain point in human evolution.

Plug-In Hybrid Vehicle Has Wings.(Flying Car Gets FAA Approval).

Just getting on a commercial airplane is tough enough these days, so it’s no surprise that Terrafugia has taken so long to navigate regulatory hurdles. Earlier this year, it cleared a major one when the FAA classified the Transition as a Light-Sport Aircraft, which means drivers don’t need a pilot’s license, just FAA certification in this category. While the company has been working on getting the Transition in the air, Terrafugia hasn’t stopped designing.

That’s where the TF-X plan comes in. Unlike the two-seater Transition, this new street-legal aircraft will seat four and run on electricity. That means the engine will recharge the batteries in the air or it could be plugged into a charging station on the ground. According to Terrafugia, the vehicle will also have electric ground drive and electric power assist for takeoff and landing.

Other cool features include retractable wings and the propellers that open from two motor pods. Initially the propellers point up for takeoff, then the motor pods tilt forward until the vehicle cruises and after that the propellers can fold in. The TF-X will have a non-stop flight range of at least 500 miles, and is expected to be able to automatically avoid other air traffic, bad weather, and restricted and tower-controlled airspace, according to the website, as well as implement an emergency auto-land at the nearest airport, if the operator became unresponsive. See more details in the Youtube video.

The vehicle will also have extensive safety features such as a parachute system to prevent it from crashing horribly should something go seriously wrong. Terrafugia indicated that learning how to safely operate the TF-X will take the average person five hours; a light-sport aircraft certification takes an additional 20 hours.

Dutch ‘Flying Car’ Takes to the Skies

Before you get your hopes up, the TF-X will likely be in development for eight to 12 years and cost way, way more than a new car. According to the company, Transition owners will have the first shot at purchasing these vehicles when they do get produced. Nevertheless, I look forward to the day when we hear drivers turn to their passengers and say, “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”

10,000 to 15,000 years ago woolly female mammoth found in Arctic Ocean with flowing blood and well preserved muscle tissue.

A researcher in Yakutsk on May 13 next to a carcass of a female mammoth found on an island in the Arctic Ocean. Russian scientists claimed Wednesday they have discovered blood in the carcass of a woolly mammoth, adding that the rare find could boost their chances of cloning the prehistoric animal.

An expedition led by Russian scientists earlier this month uncovered the well-preserved carcass of a female mammoth on a remote island in the Arctic Ocean.

Semyon Grigoryev, the head of the expedition, said the animal died at the age of around 60 some 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, and that it was the first time that an old female had been found.

But what was more surprising was that the carcass was so well preserved that it still had blood and muscle tissue.

"When we broke the ice beneath her stomach, the blood flowed out from there, it was very dark," Grigoryev, who is a scientist at the Yakutsk-based Northeastern Federal University, told AFP.

"This is the most astonishing case in my entire life. How was it possible for it to remain in liquid form? And the muscle tissue is also red, the colour of fresh meat," he added.

Grigoryev said that the lower part of the carcass was very well preserved as it ended up in a pool of water that later froze over. The upper part of the body including the back and the head are believed to have been eaten by predators, he added.

"The forelegs and the stomach are well preserved, while the hind part has become a skeleton."

The discovery, Grigoryev said, gives new hope to researchers in their quest to bring the woolly mammoth back to life.

"This find gives us a really good chance of finding live cells which can help us implement this project to clone a mammoth," he said.

"Previous mammoths have not had such well-preserved tissue."

Last year, Grigoryev's Northeastern Federal University signed a deal with cloning pioneer Hwang Woo-Suk of South Korea's Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, who in 2005 created the world's first cloned dog.

                                   

In the coming months, mammoth specialists from South Korea,Russia and the United States are expected to study the remains which the Russian scientists are now keeping at an undisclosed northern location.

"I won't say where it is being kept or it may get stolen," he said.

Last year, a teenager from a nomadic family in Russia's north stumbled upon a massive well-preserved woolly mammoth, in what scientists described as the best such discovery since 1901.

The young male mammoth was dubbed Zhenya after the nickname of the boy who discovered it.

Global warming has thawed ground in northern Russia that is usually almost permanently frozen, leading to the discoveries of a number of mammoth remains.