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Nice approach to generate healthy skin and to patch parts or to replace the overall human skin. Next step - clinical studies.

FEM modelling of bone structures in woodpeckers combined with high speed video of pecking motion etc headgear? shock absorbing structures? low mass hammering penetrators? Lizhen Wang1,2, Jason Tak-Man Cheung3, Fang Pu1, Deyu Li1, Ming Zhang2*, Yubo Fan1* 1 Key Laboratory for Biomechanics and Mechanobiology of Ministry of Education, School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, People's Republic of China, 2 Department of Health Technology and Informatics, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, 3 Li Ning Sports Science Research Center, Beijing, People's Republic of China Head injury is a leading cause of morbidity and death in both industrialized and developing countries.

500000 lego bricks, a tank of compressed air, some mechanical engineering and a lot of time later...

A new, sponge-like material developed engineers at MIT can convert water to steam using just 1% of the sunlight required by conventional steam-producing solar generators.

An exhaustive overview of all possible advanced rocket concepts, eg.. "As an example, consider a photon rocket with its launching mass, say, 1000 ton moving with a constant acceleration a =0.1 g=0.98 m/s2. The flux of photons with E γ=0.5 MeV needed to produce this acceleration is ~1027/s, which corresponds to the efflux power of 1014 W and the rate of annihilation events N'a~5×1026 s−1 [47]. This annihilation rate in ambiplasma l -l ann corresponds to the value of current ~108 A and linear density N ~2×1018 m−1 thus any hope for non-relativistic relative velocity of electrons and positrons in ambiplasma is groundless." And also, even if it would work, then one of the major issues is going to be heat dispersal: "For example, if the temperature of radiator is chosen T=1500 K, the emitting area should be not less than 1000 m2 for Pb=1 GW, not less than 1 km2 for Pb=1 TW, and ~100 km2 for Pb=100 TW, assuming ε=0.5 and δ=0.2. Lower temperature would require even larger radiator area to maintain the outer temperature of the engine section stable for a given thermal power of the reactor."

The problem is not achieving a high energy density, that we can already do with nuclear fission, the question however is how to confine or harness this power with relatively high efficiency, low waste heat and at not too crazy specific mass. I see magnetic confinement as a possibility, yet still decades away and also an all-or-nothing method as we cannot easily scale this up from a test experiment to a full-scale system. It might be possible to extract power from such a plasma, but definitely well below breakeven so an additional power supply is needed. The fission fragments circumvent these issues by a more brute force approach, thereby wasting a lot of energy for sure but at the end probably providing more ISP and thrust.

Sure. However, the annihilation based photon rocket concept unifies almost all relevant drawbacks if we speak about solar system scales, making itself obsolete...it is just an academic testcase.

Several new components for biological circuits have been developed by researchers. These components are key building blocks for constructing precisely functioning and programmable bio-computers. "The ability to combine biological components at will in a modular, plug-and-play fashion means that we now approach the stage when the concept of programming as we know it from software engineering can be applied to biological computers.

Stacking laser printed supercapacitors (no clean room required btw) has lead to about 1100F/g and thus about 20-40Wh/L. For supercapacitors thats pretty damn good. For reference, Li-ion recently reached 650Wh/L. The gap is closing, although for supercaps of this type the theoretical maximum is 1400F/g.

Cool scientific and technical feat in engineering a tractor beam. See the explanation video here http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/151027/ncomms9661/extref/ncomms9661-s3.mov and the thing working in real time here http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/151027/ncomms9661/extref/ncomms9661-s2.mov

Imaging of gas giant orbiting its central star (related to Jai's YGT proposal): With GPI, astronomers image the actual planet--a remarkable feat given that an orbiting world typically appears a million times fainter than its parent star. This is possible because GPI's adaptive optics sharpen the image of the target star by cancelling out the distortion caused by the Earth's atmosphere; it then blocks the bright image of the star with a device called a coronagraph, revealing the exoplanet.

such a simple image, such an awesome feat of science and engineering!

We humans take for granted our remarkable ability to predict things that happen around us. Here, a deep learning model trained from real-world videos and a 3D graphics engine was able to infer physical properties of objects against humans.

Sounds like an interesting building material. Unlike concrete, after use it can simply be molten down (at seemingly reasonable temperatures) and used again to build different parts. Crack in the wall? Just iron it out (literally)! A group at Northwestern University wants to solve an engineering challenge now to prepare for the future: it's turning Mars-like soil into concrete. And, in turn, that concrete requires very little (if any) water. It's just the thing we may need to make life on Mars sustainable.

Engineer Roger Shawyer's controversial EM Drive thruster jets back into relevancy this week, as a team of researchers at NASA's Eagleworks Laboratories recently completed yet another round of testing on the seemingly impossible tech.

I like this just because it will end up on Thijs' desk :D

Interesting that the new comes in... Yahoo Finance :). Another more complete article http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/11/nasa-eagleworks-has-tested-upgraded.html

Maybe something to look at for Ricarda? Researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a first-of-its-kind self-healing gel that repairs and connects electronic circuits, creating opportunities to advance the development of flexible electronics, biosensors and batteries as energy storage devices. "There's no need for heat or light to fix the crack or break in a circuit or battery, which is often required by previously developed self-healing materials." Yu and his team created the self-healing gel by combining two gels: a self-assembling metal-ligand gel that provides self-healing properties and a polymer hydrogel that is a conductor.

Ricarda??

Quoted from one of the authors in a separate interview: "We know that the spin states of atomic nuclei associated with semiconductor defects have excellent quantum properties at room temperature," said Awschalom, Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering and a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. "They are coherent, long-lived and controllable with photonics and electronics. Given these quantum 'pieces,' creating entangled quantum states seemed like an attainable goal." Bringing the quantum world to the macroscopic scale could see some interesting applications in sensors, or generally entanglement-enhanced applications.

They were previously working on the same concept in N-V centers in diamond (as a semiconductor). Here the advantage is that SiC could in principle be integrated with Si or Ge. Anyway its all about controlling coherence. In the next 10 years some breakthroughs are expected in the field of semiconductor spintronics, but quantum computing in this way lies still in the horizon

Did we just solve overpopulation and climate change? With 40% more efficient crops we could easily sustain 10+ billion people on Earth. And 40% more efficient plants would absorb much more CO2 than we are emitting (currently: artificial CO2 emission ~29 GT/y, photosynthesis CO2 capture through plants ~450 GT/y) I am usually very worried about the risks of climate change, but this could be a real game changer!

I love the car animation!

Great engineering feat from Capasso's idea - an integrated flat lens electrically controlled enabling dynamic beam steering. Reconfigurabilility is the aim. The lens can be used microscope systems, holographic and projection imaging, LIDAR and laser printing. Besides working now on the mid-IR, visible light is the target.

Some people answering the question 'What's cooler than blasting space debris with lasers...?'.

If it fires in both directions, can we align it such that it deorbits two debris with one shot?

:) the idea of having this method for debris removal is actually an ACT one from Claudio Bombardelli (ACT RF in MAD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion-beam_shepherd). This is just a technological device to implement it so that the system on board is simplified (i.e. instead of two engines, you get away with one and a weird nozzle) Marcus, you cannot align it to get rid of two debris as you need to keep the spacecraft close to the debris as this is a long duration acion. One of the two would drift away (can only follow one!)

Amazing engineering feat: 1 nm transistor. Besides we can argue Moore law is still OK, dennard scaling is gone and with it the performance boost, as alluded subtly. Link article: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6308/99.full