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Insects can execute flying feats more impressive than fighter jets, and a team of researchers has now learned the trick behind one of them. They used high speed video cameras and a new 3D reconstruction technique to show how fruit flies execute their acrobatic turns. As they report in the 9 April Physical Review Letters, despite the complex wing motions, a fly can execute quick pirouettes by adjusting just a single parameter that controls the difference between the way its left and right wings oscillate. The results may be relevant for engineers designing flight control strategies for tiny robotic insects for search-and-rescue and surveillance.

For 15 years, J. Craig Venter has chased a dream: to build a genome from scratch and use it to make synthetic life. Now, he and his team at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in Rockville, Maryland, and San Diego, California, say they have realized that dream.

"One thing is sure," Boeke says. "Interesting creatures will be bubbling out of the Venter Institute's labs."

Like an engineer accounting for a skyscraper swaying in the wind, Madagascar's Darwin's bark spider (Caerostris darwini) spins enormous, river-spanning webs that stretch and contract as the trees to which they're anchored bend this way and that. A new study finds that this spider's silk is the toughest biomaterial yet discovered.

The spiders' colossal orb webs can span up to 2.8 square meters and are anchored by threads as long as 25 meters.

An ingenious new tool triggers a cascade of new insights. In this special section, Science's news reporters and editors mark the end of the current decade by stepping back from weekly reporting to take a broader look at 10 insights that have changed science since the dawn of the new millennium.

Reversible logic could cut the energy wasted by computers to zero. But significant challenges lie ahead.

By some estimates the difference between the amount of energy required to carry out a computation and the amount that today's computers actually use, is some eight orders of magnitude. Clearly, there is room for improvement.

There are one or two caveats, of course. The first is that nobody has succeeded in building a properly reversible logic gate so this work is entirely theoretical. But there are a number of computing schemes that have the potential to work like this. Thapliyal and Ranganathan point in particular to the emerging technology of quantum cellular automata and show how their approach might be applied.