Fossil finger points to new human species

Its genetic material told another story. When German researchers extracted and sequenced DNA from the fossil, they found that  it did not match  that of Neanderthals — or of modern humans, which were also living nearby at the time.

The Bose-Einstein Condensate

ATOMIC TRAP cools by means of two different mechanisms

First, six laser beams ( red ) cool atoms, initially at room temperature, while corralling them toward the center of an evacuated glass box.

Next, the laser beams are turned off, and the magnetic coils ( copper ) are energized. Current flowing through the coils generates a magnetic field that further confines most of the atoms while allowing the energetic ones to escape. Thus, the average energy of the remaining atoms decreases, making the sample colder and even more closely confined to the center of the trap.

Ultimately, many of the atoms attain the lowest possible energy state allowed by quantum mechanics and become a single entity known as a Bose-Einstein condensate.

Light Improvement: Could Quantum Dots Boost the Quality of Cell Phone Pix?

Semiconductor crystals known as quantum dots have long held the promise of improving solar cells, lasers and lighting fixtures, but the reality is that integrating these fluorescent nanoparticles into existing technologies has proved difficult. One Silicon Valley start-up now aims to change this by the end of next year using quantum dots to vastly improve the picture-taking quality of cell phone cameras.

Scientists supersize quantum mechanics

A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.

Scanner scans a 200 page book in one minute (w/ Video)

A research team led by Professor Masatoshi Ishikawa of the University of Tokyo has developed a prototype scanner that allows users to scan a book simply by rapidly flipping its pages. A high-speed camera operating at 500 fps and producing pictures with a resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels, takes pictures of the page and its contents of text and images under ordinary light. A laser then projects lines on the page, and the camera captures this image as well. The lines allow the system to adjust for the curvature and distortion of pages as they are being flipped, and the software reconstructs the image into a digitized picture of a flat, regular page.

Perelman wins Millenium Prize for proving Poincaré conjecture

The American Clay Mathematics Institute has awarded the Russian maths genius Grigori Perelman a million dollars for proving what is known as the Poincare Conjecture, a milestone theorem which opens up a whole new field in geometry. The Institute says such breakthroughs happen once in a millennium and cannot be allowed to pass unrewarded. Forty-six-year-old Mr. Perelman meantime is a known recluse who has already rejected a gold medal and cash from the latest World Mathematical Congress for his remarkable discovery. He has spent the period since 2006 in a remote suburban location without contact with colleagues. His former superior at the Steklov Mathematical Institute Professor Sergei Kislyakov warns the Clay Institute that Dr. Perelman is likely to ignore his latest international honour.

A Theory Set in Stone: An Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs, After All

Although any T. Rex–enthralled kid will tell you that a gigantic asteroid wiped the dinosaurs off the planet, scientists have always regarded this impact theory as a hypothesis subject to revision based on further evidence gathered from around the globe. Other possible causes, such as volcanism and smaller, multiple asteroid strikes, never actually went away,

and over the years researchers raised important points that did not fully jibe with a history-changing celestial impact near the Yucatan peninsula one awful day some 65.5 million years ago.

A New Spin on Conductivity: Electric Signals Can Propagate through an Insulator: Scientific American

But that is precisely what a group of Japanese researchers has found, as detailed in a study in the March 11 issue of Nature. The electric current induces a collective excitation in the magnetic insulator that can travel relatively long distances before unloading its momentum to generate a voltage when it reaches an electric conductor.