The loss rate of Mars' original atmosphere apparently has been quantified through isotope ratio measurements. Should be useful for climate engineering studies (Isabelle & Markus ?)
Scientists from the Nano-Science Center at the Niels Bohr Institut, Denmark and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, have shown that a single nanowire can concentrate the sunlight up to 15 times of the normal sun light intensity. The results are surprising and the potential for developing a new type of highly efficient solar cells is great.
Solid state tunnel junction can cool "payload" to sub-Kelvin temperatures. This would be much more convenient than for example helium3-helium4 mixing. Proposed use for cooling sensors on spacecraft - could extend lifetime of satellites like ESA's about to switched off Herschel almost indefinitely.
On Android speech recognition but also with a very nice video: direct translation of English voice input to Chinese audio. Looks like it might be really useful eventually.
Linked to the discussion we had last week on elastically non-linear polymers. The inverted liquid->solid phase transition might be interesting and the material might be self-healing just above the transition.