By tracking the particle's motion using a video camera and then using image-analysis software to identify when the particle had rotated against the field, the researchers were able to raise the metaphorical barrier behind it by inverting the field's phase. In this way they could gradually raise the potential of the particle even though they had not imparted any energy to it directly.

"Nobody thinks of using bits to boil water," he says, "but that would in principle be possible at nanometre scales." And he speculates that molecular processes occurring in nature might already be converting information to energy in some way. "The message is that processes taking place on the nanoscale are completely different from those we are familiar with, and that information is part of that picture."

According to Penrose and Gurzadyan, these circles allow us to "see through" the Big Bang into the aeon that would have existed beforehand. The circles, they say, are the marks left in our aeon by the spherical ripples of gravitational waves that were generated when black holes collided in the previous aeon.

Julian Barbour, a visiting professor of physics at the University of Oxford, says that these circles would be "remarkable if real and sensational if they confirm Penrose's theory". They would, he says, "overthrow the standard inflationary picture", which, he adds, has become widely accepted as scientific fact by many cosmologists. But he believes that the result will be "very controversial" and that other researchers will look at the data very critically. He says there are many disputable aspects to the theory

Researchers in Canada have created a new material that mimics the brilliant iridescent colours seen in beetle shells. As the eye-catching effect can be switched off with the simple addition of water, the researchers believe their new material could lead to applications including "smart windows".

A computer simulation shows the transition from "fermionic" to "liquid" light.

The possibility of sending this type of "self-focused" light pulse long distances could be important for remote sensing applications, such as LIDAR, which uses laser light the way radar uses radio waves.

Lima and Vanzella joined with George Matsas of São Paulo State University in their latest work to examine a model of the highly-curved spacetime that appears during formation of an ultradense neutron star. For some reasonable values of the mass and size of the star, they predict that the vacuum energy will grow within milliseconds for some values of the coupling parameter. At this point the vacuum energy would begin to induce additional gravitational effects, which they haven't yet calculated, so they don't know how the star would be affected. If further research shows such a neutron star to be unstable, the existence of stable neutron stars of particular sizes could rule out the existence fields of the type they modeled.

Researchers thought that flies chose their altitude based on optic flow, a phenomenon familiar to anyone who has ridden an airplane.

The team's observations, published online today in Current Biology, suggest that flies base their cruising altitude on horizontal edges and landmarks—such as table surfaces or tree tops—and not on how fast the ground is moving beneath them. The edge-tracking strategy may enable flies to keep tabs on possible landing spots.

This may be the general principle" for all flying insects, he says.

At the time of the big bang, our universe may not have had exactly three dimensions of space and one of time, according to some theorists. In the 6 August Physical Review Letters, a team proposes a way to observe the postulated transition to our current universe using so-called metamaterials, structures in which the propagation of light can be precisely controlled. Experiments on such structures, they say, could test predictions that a "big flash" of radiation would accompany changes in the structure of spacetime that may have occurred in the early universe.

Swarms of insects or schools of fish can suddenly switch direction, seemingly at random. A research team now believes they understand why. In the August Physical Review E they describe experiments with locusts and their mathematical model of the swarm. The model suggests that tiny alignment errors between neighboring individual locusts within the swarm, which normally cancel each other, can accumulate over long times and eventually cause the entire swarm to suddenly move in a new direction.