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By reactivating a dormant gene called Lin28a, which is active in embryonic stem cells, researchers were able to regrow hair and repair cartilage, bone, skin and other soft tissues in a mouse model.

regrow hair???!!!??? :-)

"Media Lab's technique opens new frontier in 3-D printing."

In work that has major implications for improving the performance of building insulation, scientists at the University of Namur in Belgium and the University of Hassan I in Morocco have calculated that hairs that reflect infrared light may contribute significant insulating power to the exceptionally warm winter coats of polar bears and other animals.

That's quite interesting. Maybe the future of buildings and spacecraft is furry?

Cilia are hairs driven by molecular motors. They are found in monocellular organisms, etc. If we can build such things artificially, we have micro-pumps etc. Any space usability?

carlo's distributed actuator study originally considered cilia as well as peristaltic motion if i remember right. i suppose you might still think about debris transport for digging applications. Originally there was an idea for thermal transport aswell which, it turns out, was bollocks.

Bacterial wires explain enigmatic electric currents in the seabed: Each one of these 'cable bacteria' contains a bundle of insulated wires that conduct an electric current from one end to the other. Cable bacteria explain electric currents in the seabed Electricity and seawater are usually a bad mix.

WOW!!!! don't want to even imagine what we do to these with the trailing fishing boats that sweep through sea beds with large masses .... "Our experiments showed that the electric connections in the seabed must be solid structures built by bacteria," says PhD student Christian Pfeffer, Aarhus University. He could interrupt the electric currents by pulling a thin wire horizontally through the seafloor. Just as when an excavator cuts our electric cables. In microscopes, scientists found a hitherto unknown type of long, multi-cellular bacteria that was always present when scientists measured the electric currents. "The incredible idea that these bacteria should be electric cables really fell into place when, inside the bacteria, we saw wire-like strings enclosed by a membrane," says Nils Risgaard-Petersen, Aarhus University. Kilometers of living cables The bacterium is one hundred times thinner than a hair and the whole bacterium functions as an electric cable with a number of insulated wires within it. Quite similar to the electric cables we know from our daily lives. "Such unique insulated biological wires seem simple but with incredible complexity at nanoscale," says PhD student Jie Song, Aarhus University, who used nanotools to map the electrical properties of the cable bacteria. In an undisturbed seabed more than tens of thousands kilometers cable bacteria live under a single square meter seabed. The ability to conduct an electric current gives cable bacteria such large benefits that it conquers much of the energy from decomposition processes in the seabed. Unlike all other known forms of life, cable bacteria maintain an efficient combustion down in the oxygen-free part of the seabed. It only requires that one end of the individual reaches the oxygen which the seawater provides to the top millimeters of the seabed. The combustion is a transfer of the electrons of the food to oxygen which the bacterial inner wires manage over centimeter-long distances. However, s

Once more, science at the service of humankind...

I have no access to the pdf, but abstract sounds interesting.

A British company has produced a "strange, alien" material so black that it absorbs all but 0.035 per cent of visual light, setting a new world record. To stare at the "super black" coating made of carbon nanotubes - each 10,000 times thinner than a human hair - is an odd experience.

Finally! Nowadays blacks were always too bright for my taste...

"No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." I will keep waiting for my darkness-emitting diodes...

A nanolaser, a thousand times thinner than a human hair.

one of these again. french illustrations from 1910 of life in the year 2000. some pleasingly close. a lot of flying and robots. some inexplicable (bunch of people staring at a horse). some bmi.

No idea... another one I don't get is the one with the waiter presenting some small black-white thing to the white hair guy on a chair.

love the clockwork orange one