"The new type of material consists of tens of thousands of picoliter connected water droplets encapsulated within lipid films, which can perform some of the functions of the cells inside our bodies."

I wonder how much energy you can extract from the ocean in a responsible way... Mixing up different thermal layers would probably a quite an influence on ecology.

Nature paper by HP Labs: they use waveguides to produce a 3D wide-angle glasses-free image. Here's there website: http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Innovation-HP-Labs/On-Our-Way-to-Glasses-Free-3D/ba-p/134391#.UcFSSOdgfTo

Nice visualization of the structure of the accretion disk surrounding a black hole

If you liked 'Dog' you will surely like 'Cheeta-Cub' ;-)

Scientists may have discovered a 4-quark particle...

Cheap and scalable invisibility cloaks being developed. The setup is so trivial that I would almost call it a "trick" (as in "Magicians trick"): 6 prisms of n=1.78 glass. Nontheless, it does the job of cloaking an object at visible wavelengths and from several directions.

That just means that you have to double the setup, i.e., put 4 glasses in a row. Of course the obvious drawback is that you can only look at this cloak from one direction.

I think it is very easy to call something trivial when you're not the one who invested considerable time (5 min in my case) to design a cloaking device and fill the coffee mugs with water... Also, I did not really violate that many conditions: true I reduced the number of dimensions in which the device works to 1 (as opposed to the 2 dimensions of many metamaterial cloaks). However the polarization should not be affected in my setup as well as the wave phase and wave vector (so it works in full wave optics) - apart maybe from the imperfect lens distortion, but hey I was improvising.

Neat.

After previously investing in the company, Google has now acquired Makani Power, a green energy startup that is currently building airborne wind turbines. The acquisition was first reported in Brad Stone's Businessweek story about Google X, and judging from Stone's story, the team will join Google X.

"Her goal was to design and synthesise a super capacitor with increased energy density while maintaining power density and long cycle life. She designed, synthesised and characterised a novel core-shell nanorod electrode with hydrogemated TiO2(H-TiO2) core and polyaniline shell. H-TiO2 acts as the double layer electrostatic core. Good conductivity of H-TiO2 combined with the high pseudo capacitance of polyaniline results in significantly higher overall capacitance and energy density while retaining good power density and cycle life. This new electrode was fabricated into a flexible solid-state device to light an LED to test it in a practical application. Khare then evaluated the structural and electrochemical properties of the new electrode. It demonstrated high capacitance of 203.3 mF/cm2 (238.5 F/g) compared to the next best alternative super capacitor in previous research of 80 F/g, due to the design of the core-shell structure. This resulted in excellent energy density of 20.1 Wh/kg, comparable to batteries, while maintaining a high power density of 20540 W/kg. It also demonstrated a much higher cycle life compared to batteries, with a low 32.5% capacitance loss over 10,000 cycles at a high scan rate of 200 mV/s."

ESA Science & Technology: A leap forward in probing magnetic reconnection in space: Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental physical process in the Universe, playing a major role in various phenomena such as star formation or solar explosions, but also preventing plasma confinement in fusion reactors on Earth. However, a lack of precise measurements at the heart of this physical process prevents a full understanding of this phenomenon.

Tea, Earl Grey, hot...

Oh yes, I forgot about the language recognition... The abominations it might produce... :-[]

Nature: Scientist have found a plant that has a very small genome because it manages to remove junk DNA.

Amazing! :-D Makes you forget how hard it is to detect individual atoms at all.

Good luck, Helia! ;-)

An African or European Swallow?

Electron microscope studies reveal that the electron bombardment leads to polymerization of the outer layer of some insect larva's skin and protects them from dehydration. Artificial method to create this effect tested as well. Allows observation of living animals under electron microscope! Question: can the insects still breath after they are back in air? :-S