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Japanese researchers have created holograms that can be disrupted by human touch.

The touchable holograms, called Fairy Lights, could serve as the beginning to developing technology where humans could interact with the hologram.

This could particularly come in handy in medicine, where hologram technology is used to demonstrate certain procedures.

The holograms were made using femtosecond lasers, a laser that can excite physical matter to emit light in 3D form, the researchers explained in a paper. The lasers can produce high-frequency pulses, from 1,000 to 200,000 pulses per second depending on the type of laser.

The pulses respond to human touch, allowing humans to disrupt them while they’re in the air, Reuters explained.

“People’s daily lives would change if we use a bigger laser in a bigger space where people can interact with it, and to see how it can be used in situations where three dimensional communication is necessary such as a construction site or in the medical field,” Yoichi Ochiai, one of the lead researchers on the project from Tsukuba University, told Reuters.

Previous technology used to create touchable holograms have burned skin.

“If we can project an image in a three dimensional form, and if you can touch it, then you can make something where you’ll think that there actually is something there,” Ochiai told Reuters.

Watch the touchable holograms in action:

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NOW WATCH: Scientists have created holograms you can actually touch

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From JPMorgan’s Mislav Matejka:

The current deterioration in the credit market is particularly worrying at a time when corporates are becoming more and more dependent on external sources of liquidity. The US corporate financing gap – the difference between cash flow generation and spending on capex and dividends – has turned strongly negative. In the past, when the financing gap went strongly negative, the next downturn was just around the corner.

SEE ALSO: Here’s what Wall Street is predicting for the stock market in 2016

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NOW WATCH: Here’s why aliens might actually exist

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GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP) — Forget winning. No. 18 Florida might be lucky to score against second-ranked and heavily favored Alabama in the Southeastern Conference championship game.

The Gators (10-2, 7-1 SEC) have been downright dismal on offense in recent weeks, averaging a little more than 12 points a game in regulation against Vanderbilt, South Carolina, Florida Atlantic and Florida State. And the Crimson Tide (11-1, 7-1) leads the league in just about every defensive category and has allowed a total of 41 points in its last four games.

Mismatch? Maybe.

Florida’s offense failed to score in a 27-2 loss at the Seminoles on Saturday. The Gators had chances, but missed a field goal, had another one blocked and came up short on two fourth-down plays in the red zone. The result was the program’s worst offensive performance at home since a 16-0 shutout to Auburn on homecoming in 1988.

It also has Florida as a 17-point underdog, the biggest in the SEC title game since the Gators were favored by 24 against Arkansas in 1995.

“Is that right? Poor buggers,” Florida coach Jim McElwain said of the Razorbacks.

McElwain has used every opportunity this week to remind people that few, if anyone, expected his team to be in this position. The Gators overachieved for sure. But they underachieved in November, at least offensively.

They needed a late field goal to beat the Vanderbilt 9-7 on homecoming. They needed a late touchdown to hold off South Carolina 24-14 on the road the following week. And they needed a touchdown in overtime and then a fourth-down stop to defeat Florida Atlantic 20-14 two weeks ago.

So nobody should have been surprised by what happened against the Seminoles. Florida managed 262 yards on 79 plays, with just one of those gaining more than 20 yards.

“We’ve just got to get back on our feet,” cornerback Jalen Tabor said. “Coach Mac said we’ve got to get back on the horse. So all we’re worried about right now is getting back on our feet and getting back on the horse and just going and attacking the next day.”

Tabor and his defense teammates have kept Florida in games and essentially won three of four in November.

The other side of the ball has been a head-scratcher, especially since the offense was competent early in the season and even after starting quarterback Will Grier was suspended for a year for testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs.

The offensive line was decent against FSU, and Kelvin Taylor finished with a season-high 136 yards rushing. But quarterback Treon Harris struggled once again.

McElwain suggested that defenses have figured out Harris, a 5-foot-11 sophomore who looked mostly lost last month. His indecision and inaccuracy have become as common as his roll outs and runs.

McElwain also shouldered some of the blame, saying he might be asking Harris to do too much.

“You need to look a little bit at me and what I’m asking him to do as well, and trying to push the envelope a little bit,” McElwain said. “That’s how we’re going to be offensively as we continue to grow. He’s probably handled and done as good a job with his skill set as far as helping some of those things moving forward. Yet, he’s learning. He’s there, he’s engaged. He’s our quarterback and I’m glad he’s our quarterback.”

McElwain closed the open portion of practice Tuesday and Wednesday, a sign he might be making tweaks on that side of the ball. He’s gushed about Alabama’s defense and coach Nick Saban’s ability to take away what every opponent does best.

Saban glossed over Florida’s numerous offensive weaknesses and even said Harris reminds him of former Alabama quarterback Blake Sims.

“This is an outstanding team that we’re playing,” Saban said. “They wouldn’t be in the SEC championship game if they weren’t. I think anybody out there that thinks this is not going to be a real challenge and a real test for our team. I don’t know what you’re thinking. I don’t know what you’re thinking. I really don’t get it.”

Alabama has won four in a row in the series, outscoring Florida 143-47 in those. Given Florida’s recent struggles, this one might not even be that close.

“A lot of people doubting us,” Taylor said. “We just really can’t focus on that. We just have to focus on ourselves and our team and we’ll be fine. As long as we believe in each other, that’s all that matters.”

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eBay is a great way to buy and sell things online. But until now, packing and shipping items has always been a hassle, requiring an extra trip to your local post office or shipping store just for a box and a label.

That’s where Shyp, the popular on-demand pickup and packaging startup, comes in.

On Tuesday, Shyp announced a partnership with eBay, which relieves eBay sellers of most of the hard work.

All you have to do is open your Shyp app and connect your eBay account. From there, you can see all the items you’ve sold recently. Just choose the items you want to ship, request a pickup from Shyp, and that’s it. A courier from Shyp will arrive at your location to pick up your items, “professionally package your items with custom materials and ship them via the best-priced carrier,” according to Shyp.

(You can see how Shyp works in our tour of the service here.)

From now until Jan. 31, 2016, Shyp will pick up and package your eBay shipments for free. The company will reintroduce its usual $5 service fee after that period ends, but Shyp promises “our eBay integration is here to stay.”

This eBay-Shyp integration is clever and useful, but it’s unfortunately limited for now. Shyp is only available in a handful of major cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Miami, and Chicago. And if you purchase a shipping label with eBay, you’ll be ineligible to use Shyp’s services.

That said, eBay users in these major cities where Shyp is available should love this integration. It offers the best aspect of on-demand services — someone doing a difficult/annoying task so you don’t have to — and it comes right to your door. And thanks to the free pickup and packaging during this promotional period, this holiday season is the perfect time to sell your stuff on eBay.

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The United Arab Emirates has trained hundreds of mercenaries recruited from Latin America and sent them to fight in Yemen, according to The New York Times. 

The Emirates have steadily built up the mercenary force over the past five years. The deployment to Yemen is the first time the Emirates has sent mercenaries into an active war zone. 

The development of the mercenary force, which is largely comprised of fighters from Colombia, allows the wealthy Gulf nation to engage in combat operations abroad with little risk to their own citizens. 

“Mercenaries are an attractive option for rich countries who wish to wage war yet whose citizens may not want to fight,” Atlantic Council senior fellow Sean McFate told the Times. 

The UAE also faces a potential manpower shortage: As of 2011, only 11.5% of the UAE’s estimated 8.5 million inhabitants were actually Emirati citizens, according to the State Department. The UAE is in the midst of an arms buildup aimed at making the country’s military one of the most powerful in the Middle East. It’s an ambition that might require more personnel than the population can provide.

So far, the Emirates have hired and trained hundreds of Colombians since starting its mercenary program in 2010, according to the Times. The Times notes that the UAE had a preference for Colombians over other soldiers because of the Colombian military’s decades of experience battling against FARC rebels in jungles throughout the country. Colombian soldiers are also happy to work in the Emirates, where they can earn upwards of seven times their salary in the Colombian military.  

Until the deployment to Yemen, the mercenary force was intended to function as a guarantor of domestic stability. The force’s missions involved operations against Somali pirates and potential al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) elements.

“The troops were told that they might one day be called for foreign combat missions, but until the deployment to Yemen the only external missions they were given were to provide security on commercial cargo vessels,” the Times reports. 

The Times notes that the exact nature of the mercenaries’ involvement in Yemen still isn’t clear. Whatever the the mercenaries are up to, they’re now a part of a fluid and multi-sided war that’s raged for the better part of a year. 

The ongoing war in Yemen pits Iranian-supported Houthi rebels, who overthrew the internationally recognized and US and Saudi-supported government of president Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi in January of 2015, against former government elements backed by a Saudi-led multinational Arab force.

The Emirates have intervened in Yemen as part of the international coalition that seeks to restore the earlier government and to curb Iranian influence in the region. In September, 45 Emirati soldiers were killed when a Houthi-fired missile hit their encampment in Yemen’s Marib Province.

The coalition has managed to dislodge the Houthis from parts of the country. But the rebels still control Sanaa, the capital, while the anti-Houthi bombing campaign has been widely criticized for its civilian death toll.

Amid the chaos, AQAP has managed to assert control of a large but sparsely inhabited portion of the country, which was the poorest in the Arab League even before the outbreak of the war. Militants that have associated themselves with ISIS have also carried out operations in Yemen, but so far do not control any territory in the country. 

SEE ALSO: ISIS now has a ‘colony’ in an oil-rich Libyan city just 400 miles from Italy

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Now that the relentless buying sprees of Black Friday and Cyber Monday are over, why not complete the trifecta by celebrating Giving Tuesday?

Started by the New York cultural center 92nd Street Y in 2012, Giving Tuesday (the day after Cyber Monday) helps remind people the holiday season is about charity, not consumption.

92Y estimates online charitable donations have risen by 470% since the campaign started.

Finding the right charity can be tough, though, since there’s so much debate over what will actually put your money to good use.

Givewell is here to help.

The non-profit charity evaluator and advocate for effective altruism finds through its complex analyses that the top charity in the world is the Against Malaria Foundation.

For $3,340, you could save a life right now.

In the developed world, mosquitoes are pesky insects. But in sub-Saharan Africa, mosquitoes carry a raft of diseases. Easily the most deadly of those is malaria, which is responsible for approximately 600,000 deaths annually.

Rather than invest millions in finding a vaccine, AMF tries to avoid infection through insecticide-treated bed nets, simple pieces of mesh that drape over children’s beds and kill mosquitoes on contact.

Loads of research says that bed nets are incredibly effective.

Mosquito nets only cost between $5 and $7, GiveWell’s research shows. Based on the organization’s model, for roughly $1.50 one bed net can extend one person’s life for a year. Multiplied over a person’s entire life and adding in the overhead costs and cost of wasted or ineffective nets, GiveWell arrives at $3,337.06 per death averted.

GiveWell has three major requirements when selecting its top charities, and AMF fulfills all of them. The solution is proven to work, it successfully passes a vetting process (in this case, figuring out if AMF makes good on delivering the bed nets to people in need), and it’s underfunded, which means there is a real need for outside donation.

While other charity evaluators tend only to look at where money is going, GiveWell’s research seeks to understand how much gets there, who needs it most, and, perhaps most important, what that money can do.

AMF rises above the rest.

AMF is one of only a handful of charities that meet the organization’s strict criteria, says Catherine Hollander, an outreach associate at GiveWell. Once a charity stands up to those measures, GiveWell’s research arm can root out how far a dollar actually goes.

The $3,340 total is a rough guideline, GiveWell stipulates. It’s meant to be a helpful placeholder that can guide people’s donation. With myriad overhead costs, including manufacturing and delivery costs, there are always unknowns.

That’s why GiveWell argues it’s a tad disingenuous when charities purport to save lives on the cheap.

A bed net may cost $5 to manufacture, but a $5 donation won’t necessarily save a life.

As the effective altruist Peter Singer noted in “The Life You Can Save,” not every child who uses a bed net would necessarily have died from malaria — only a fraction would meet that fate. Likewise, not every donated net will save a life, as some will inevitably be misused.

Charities that make such claims typically refer to the “cost per child treated” as the relevant metric in deciding whether to donate. But as GiveWell’s research shows, that approaches a solution from the wrong direction: Donors need to account for all the other costs that make the charity work. For AMF, GiveWell uses the “cost per life saved.”

So while the total of $3,340 may seem high, it’s only because other numbers have been artificially low. GiveWell’s research into AMF takes into account all the surrounding costs and statistical likelihoods that could prevent a lesser donation from reaching its ultimate goal: the prevention of fatal malaria.

But according to Sean Conley, a research analyst at GiveWell, you don’t need to give thousands of dollars to make a difference.

“On an intuitive level, giving people additional money who are among the poorest in the world — even small amounts of money — will make a big difference in their lives,” Conley says.

And if you give to a charity like AMF, you know the money is going to the right places.

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Last April, CEO and founder of Gravity Payments Dan Price stunned his 120 employees when he announced a new policy that would raise the minimum wage at his credit card processing firm to $70,000 a year.

The change would double some employees’ annual wages and slash his own compensation from $1.1 million to $70,000. 

He received an overwhelming amount of attention: tremendous internal and external praise for his altruism, a bit of skepticism, and questions about whether or not it was simply a PR stunt.

Well, it may have been too good to be true.

A new report from Bloomberg Business’ Karen Weise suggests his motives — which he described to us as altruistic — may actually have been to avoid a costly lawsuit served to him by his older brother, who owns about 30% of Gravity, which claimed that Price paid himself excessively for a number of years.

Previously Price had suggested that his brother may have sued in reaction to the wage increase, Weise reports. “I know the decision to pay everyone a living wage is controversial,” Price told the Seattle Times, which first reported the lawsuit. “I deeply regret the rift this has caused in my relationship with my brother.”

However, Weise uncovered that the lawsuit was actually served before the wage increase:

The lawsuit predates the wage hike and therefore couldn’t have been in reaction to it. If anything, it may have been the other way around. According to court records (see here), Price was served with the suit at his house on March 16 — about two weeks before he said he first came up with the idea for the wage increase and almost a month before announcing it. Lucas’s attorney states Dan didn’t inform his brother of the pay hike until he sent Lucas an email April 9, five days before Dan announced the increase to staff. Lowering his own pay could give Dan Price negotiating leverage in the case.

Business Insider reached out to Price for comment but hasn’t yet heard back. When Bloomberg confronted him about the discrepancy, Price said he was “only aware of the suit being initiated after the raise.”

The lawsuit contended that Price paid himself excessively, and indeed Weise found that Price’s pay was very high for a company its size:

At private companies with sales like Gravity’s total revenue, salary and bonus for the top quartile of CEOs is $710,000, according to Chief Executive magazine’s annual compensation survey. At companies with sales like Gravity’s net revenue, the top quartile pay falls to about $373,000. At companies with a similar number of employees as Gravity, the top quartile of CEOs makes $470,000 in salary and bonus. The CEO of JetPay, a publicly traded competitor that processes a similar volume as Gravity, received $355,000 in 2014.

Price told Bloomberg that he never gave himself a raise without full board approval.

Despite his past salary, he seems all in on the new wage plan. A few weeks ago, Price told Inc. that he sold all of his stocks, drew everything from his retirement accounts, and mortgaged his two properties in order to make the new minimum wage work at Gravity. 

But he may have a lot to gain in the move as well, Weise suggests — a $500,000 book deal and paid speaking gigs, for instance. 

While it’s still unclear what his motives were, the new company-wide $70,000 salary did positively affect many of his employees’ lives. 

Read the full report on Bloomberg Business.

SEE ALSO: CEO describes the moment when he decided to raise his company’s minimum wage to $70,000 a year

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Focusing is no small feat. It seems that every minute there’s a new Tweet to read or co-worker to chat with. But all those distractions can make us incredibly unproductive.

But you don’t have to go to extremes to get focused. Here are some science-backed ways to help you stay focused throughout your day:

RELATED: 15 ways to stay focused all day, according to scientists

SEE ALSO: 15 healthy eating habits that work according to scientists

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NOW WATCH: Yes, this is actually the crazy situation going on between Pluto and its moons

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Paris (AFP) – Paris Saint-Germain’s nine-match winning run in Ligue 1 was brought to a halt on Tuesday as they were held to a 0-0 draw away to promoted Angers.

The reigning champions dropped points for just the third time this season after being unable to break down the division’s tightest defence behind that of their own at the Stade Jean Bouin.

The result left PSG on 42 points from 16 matches but still 14 points clear of nearest challengers Caen, who visit Monaco on Wednesday, with Angers one point further back in third.

With six games in a 19-day stretch leading up to the winter break, PSG coach Laurent Blanc has made no secret of his desire to rotate his squad.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who drew level with Mustapha Dahleb’s club-record 85 top-flight goals over the weekend, dropped to the bench while Serge Aurier made his first league start since October in defence.

Blaise Matuidi also returned to the side after being used as a substitute in Saturday’s 4-1 win over Troyes, while Adrien Rabiot again kept his place in midfield after impressing in recent weeks.

PSG were bidding to stretch their unbeaten league run to 25 games and nearly grabbed a fifth-minute lead when Edinson Cavani connected with a corner, only for the Uruguayan’s glancing header to bounce back off the near post.

Aurier then forced Angers goalkeeper Ludovic Butelle, who had kept nine clean sheets in 15 appearances prior to Tuesday, into a sharp save with a fierce angled drive.

But the home side were again rescued by the woodwork on 33 minutes when Angel Di Maria weaved his way in from the right side of the penalty area before seeing his curling left-footed strike smack against the far post. 

Angers also struck the frame of the goal when a looping header from Romain Saiss dropped onto the top of the crossbar and bounced over, although PSG keeper Kevin Trapp appeared to have it covered.

The hosts went even closer three minutes into the second half when skipper Cheikh Ndoye rose to meet a corner, but Trapp made a fine stop from point-blank range to thwart the Senegalese midfielder.

Saiss again caused trouble from a set-piece, this time at his own end, as he flicked a cross towards his own goal with Butelle doing well to turn it over.

Ibrahimovic replaced Lucas Moura on 71 minutes but PSG were still unable to find a way past Butelle who clawed away Rabiot’s low strike late on that was destined for the bottom corner to preserve a hard-earned point for Angers. 

Nice missed the chance to leapfrog Angers into third when they were held to a 0-0 draw at mid-table Lorient.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department says it is seeking information about the fate of a dual Iranian-American citizen who was reportedly sentenced to death in Iran and executed last month.

Spokesman Mark Toner said Tuesday the department learned of the arrest and sentencing of Hamid Samiee in late October and had asked Iranian authorities through the Swiss embassy in Tehran to stay the execution. Toner said the department was still looking for information about the case and could not confirm that the execution had been carried out as reported by Iran Human Rights, an Oslo, Norway-based organization.

The group said Samiee had been arrested in Iran in 2008 and was executed by hanging on November 4 for allegedly killing an Iranian man in California. Details of that incident were not immediately clear.

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