E MANN

Shell out46,000 for a flying tricycle,beat rush-hour traffic

REVOLUTIONARY SOLUTION
Shell out46,000 for a flying tricycle,beat rush-hour traffic

London: A man in the US has built a tricycle that will let you soar into the sky and cruise over rush-hour traffic jams.The motor-tricycle,called the super sky cycle,has been developed by Larry Neal from Aurora in Texas and consists of a 582cc engine and a three-blade 68-inch propeller.
It can fly at 56kmph,land in 20ft of space and has a top land speed of 104kph.It has a five hour flight time without refueling,and costs 46,000,the Daily Mail reported.
However,the vehicle requires a pilots licence to fly.Neal,of The Butterfly Aircraft LLC,has just been awarded a US Patent to build the vehicle on a large scale and sell it to the general public.He already has several orders for national and international companies.
The project has been in development for several years but hit a stumbling block as Neal could not work out what to do with the propellers once the vehicle landed.
However,he overcame this problem by making them foldable -- allowing the vehicle to be driven on regular roads.The Texas border patrol has already made a large order of these flying machines.PTI

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Galaxy is home to plenty of WARMER Earth twins

More Sun-like systems could be teeming with life than previously thought

By Brid-Aine Parnell • Get more from this author

Posted in Science, 4th December 2012 15:36 GMT

Boffins believe terrestrial planets orbiting Sun-like stars in the galaxy are probably more hospitable to life than Earth, thanks to their balmy subsurface temperatures.

The plate crust under the Atlantic Ocean

Tectonic plates meet under the Atlantic Ocean

From the stars found by the HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher) spectrometer at the European South Observatory in Chile, geoboffins and astroboffins selected two solar twins of our Sun - stars roughly the same size, age and overall composition - and measured the amounts of radioactive elements they contained, a key indicator of their world-building abilities.
Elements such as thorium and uranium are essential because they help heat up a planet's interior and power its plate tectonics. It is believed these are needed to keep water - an ingredient for life - on the surface of the world.
Seven of the eight twins studied so far possess more thorium than our Sun, and if the planets orbiting in the habitable zone around those stars inherited this material, they may have warmer interiors. This means tectonic activity will have occurred for longer, giving life more time to arise.
One star, for example, had 2.5 times more thorium than the Sun, and the boffins now expect its habitable planets to be 25 per cent warmer inside than Earth. The findings have also encouraged the scientists to extend the habitable zones around each star, increasing the number of prospectively life-packed Earth-like worlds.
"At this point, all we can say for sure is that there is some natural variation in the amount of radioactive elements inside stars like ours," Ohio State doctoral student Cayman Unterborn said.
"With only nine samples including the Sun, we can't say much about the full extent of that variation throughout the galaxy. But from what we know about planet formation, we do know that the planets around those stars probably exhibit the same variation, which has implications for the possibility of life."
The relationship between plate tectonics and surface water isn't fully understood, but boffins do think that the same forces of heat convection in the mantle that move the Earth's crust regulate the amount of water in the oceans as well.
Microbial life in particular benefits from subsurface heat, with some microbes on Earth living directly off that source for energy instead of relying directly on the Sun.
To confirm its findings, the team wants to do a detailed statistical analysis of noise in the HARPS data to improve the accuracy of their computer model. The boffins will then ask for telescope time to look for more solar twins. ®

Giant collider creating new kind of matter

Colour-Glass Condensate Produced From Particle Collision At Cern,Say Researchers

Washington: Collisions at the Large Hadron Collider may have created a new type of matter known as colour-glass condensate,scientists believe.Collisions between protons and lead ions at the LHC near Geneva,Switzerland,have resulted in surprising behaviour in some of the particles created by the collisions,Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) news reported.
When beams of particles crash into each other at highspeeds,the collisions yield hundreds of new particles,most of which fly away from the collision point almost at the speed of light.But,the Compact Muon Solenoid team at LHC found that in a sample of 2 million lead-proton collisions,some pairs of particles flew away from each other with their respective directions correlated.
Somehow they fly at the same direction even though its not clear how they can communicate their direction with one another.That has surprised many people,including us, said MIT physics professor Gunther Roland,whose group led the analysis of the collision data along with Wei Li,an assistant professor at Rice University.
The MIT heavy-ion group saw the same distinctive pattern in proton-proton collisions about two years ago.The same flight pattern is also seen when ions of lead or other heavy metals,such as gold and copper,collide with each other.Those heavy-ion collisions produce a wave of quark gluon plasma,the hot soup of particles that existed for the first few millionths of a second after the Big Bang.
In the collider,this wave sweeps some of the resulting particles in the same direction,accounting for the correlation in their flight paths.
It has been theorised that proton-proton collisions may produce a liquid-like wave of gluons,known as colour-glass condensate.
This dense swarm of gluons may also produce the unusual collision pattern seen in proton-lead collisions,said Raju Venugopalan,a senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory,who was not involved in the current research.Venugopalan and colleagues theorised the existence of colour-glass condensate shortly before the particle direction correlation was seen in proton-proton collisions.The correlation is a very tiny effect,but it's pointing to something very fundamental about how quarks and gluons are arranged spatially within a proton,he added.PTI