Planet 9 May Have Been 'Stolen' By Our Sun

                The mysterious Planet 9 may have been stolen from its original star by our sun some 4.5 billion years ago, possibly making it the first exoplanet to be discovered inside the solar system, astronomers have claimed. An extra solar planet, or exoplanet, is by definition a planet located outside our solar system. Now it appears that this definition is no longer viable. According to astronomers, there is a lot to indicate that Planet 9 was captured by the young sun and has been a part of our solar system completely undetected ever since.

                Stars are born in clusters and often pass by one another. It is during these close encounters that a star can “steal” one or more planets in orbit around another star. This is probably what happened when our own Sun captured Planet 9, the researchers behind the study said, when it came in close contact while orbiting another star.

A Prosthetic Foot that lets disabled wear heels

                Researchers have developed the first non-custom prosthetic foot to help women who have lost a leg to disease or injury, adapt heels up to four inches high. Women adjusting to life with a prosthetic limb face the same challenges as men, with perhaps one added complication: how to wear high-heels.

                A team of researchers has developed ‘Prominence’, the first prosthetic foot on the market that is nor custom made that adapts to popular fashion for heels up to four inches high. High heels have become an integral part of the female lifestyle in modern society, permeating through all aspects of life – professional and social. Scores of prosthetic feet are available on the market, but most are built to fit men’s shoes and none can adjust to a heel more than two inches high. That is less than the average women’s heel height in the US.

                With some 2,100 American women who lost a leg or foot in military service, and more women entering combat assignments, the demand for a prosthesis that accommodates women’s fashion footwear is sure to grow, researchers said.

                The challenge was creating a foot that adjusts without a separate tool to a range of heel heights, holds position without slipping, supports up to 113 kg, weighs less than over 1kg  and is slender enough to accommodate a woman’s shoe. The researchers’ work unfolded as a mix of mathematical calculations on paper and trial and error involving tests by machines and people.

New Form of Light Discovered

                Scientists have discovered a new form of light, which will impact our understanding of the fundamental nature of light. One of the measurable characteristics of a beam of light is known as angular momentum. Until now, it was thought that in all forms of light the angular momentum would be a multiple of Planck’s constant – the physical constant that sets the scale of quantum effects.

                Now, researchers have demonstrated a new form of light where the angular momentum of each photon (a particle of visible light) takes only half of this value. This difference though small is profound, researchers said. “We’re interested in finding out how we can change the way light behaves, and how that could be useful. What we think is so exciting about this result is that even this fundamental property of light, that physicists have always thought was fixed, can be changed,” researchers said.

                This discovery will have real impact for the study of light waves in areas such as secure optical communications. In the 1830’s, the mathematician William Rowan Hamilton and physicist Humphrey Lloyd found that, upon passing through certain crystals, a ray of light became a hollow cylinder. The team used this phenomenon to generate beams of light with a screw-like structure.

                Analyzing these beams within the theory of quantum mechanics they predicted that the angular momentum of the photon would be half-integer, and devised and experiment to test their prediction. Using a specially constructed device they were able to measure the flow of angular momentum in a beam of light. They were also able, for the first time, to measure the variations in this flow caused by quantum effects. The experiments showed a tiny shift, one half of Planck’s constant, in the angular momentum of each photon.

Tom Cruise's Minority Report Tech Arrives a Few Years Early

                The gesture tracking technology used by Tom Cruise’s precrime-fighting police officer in Minority Report, the sci-fi movie set in 2054, has arrived a few years early. Tiny radar chips by Infineon Technologies AG paired with algorithms by Alphabet Inc.’s Google help devices detect the finest gestures from several meters away, the German chipmaker says. The first gadgets to use the so-called Soli technology, presented at Google I/O event on Friday, are prototypes of an LG Electronics Inc. smartwatch and a Harman Kardon loudspeaker.

                While coarser gesture detection has been around for a bit, for example in gaming consoles such as Wii, the new chips are more precise. They can detect fine hand movements, like twisting your thumb and index finger when winding a watch from several feet away. This tech will revolutionize human-machine interaction far beyond the touchscreen of smartphones and even voice recognition. Since mankind started using tools 2.4 million years ago, this is the first time tools adapt to the user instead of the other way around.

Infineon, which teaming with Google to sell its chips paired with the US company’s software from mid 2017, expects the tech to provide new user experiences and inspire new devices, like the iPhone did with the touchscreen technology. Paired with the right software the radar chips are able to recognize people when they enter a room, detect finger and hand movements up to 15 feet away, and help workers steer machines and tools as industries digitize their factories.