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RMIT University researchers in Melbourne, Australia, have developed the world's first liquid metal enabled pump, a revolutionary new micro-scale device with no mechanical parts. The unique design will enable micro-fluidics and lab-on-a-chip technology to finally realise their potential, with applications ranging from biomedicine to biofuels.

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.

The 25 most relevant micro and nanotechnologies of 2007 according to Research & Development Magazine

We must get one of these. They had a goal of 50.000$ but got, instead more than 3,000,000$ !!

Really bad market analysis on their part...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/formlabs/form-1-an-affordable-professional-3d-printer?ref=live i think this is the one I was talking about the other day. ~3M$ from 100k$ target in 2012. I think I remembered it though cos they got sued for patent infringement and it was the first time kickstarter had been included in the lawsuit. I may even have posted the story on diigo...

is this the breaktrough that we were waiting for?

That depends on what application you are thinking of. For circuit board electronics this will allow integration of micro sized supercapacitors to provide operational power. They will have to be fed by external batteries still, but the close proximity allows for better tailored power demands. They also propose tapping into thermal/mechanical energy to charge the supercaps. In the end, they can provide significant specific power (W/kg) but you still need to upscale the production to cover large areas to also gain high specific energy (Wh/kg). This breakthough is for micro sized applications, not for replacement of large scale energy storage (electric vehicles, satellites) going up to kWh. That said, I know of several studies in supercaps at ESA, but they are still qualifying current relatively old commercial solutions.

Micro RNA produced in the leaves is able to travel to the roots to regulate symbiosis with some friendly bacteria.

Drones for microgravity.

Normally we associate levitation of objects to superconducting materials. Here a new technique is shown where levitation of a whole new range of materials is shown. "The large temperature gradient leads to a force that balances gravity and results in stable levitation," said Fung, the study's lead author. "We managed to quantify the thermophoretic force and found reasonable agreement with what is predicted by theory. This will allow us to explore the possibilities of levitating different types of objects." Paper at http://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4974489 New microgravity experiments possibility?

not really I fear .... "Typical sizes of the trapped particles are between 10 μm and 1 mm at a pressure between 1 and 10 Torr. The trapping stability is provided radially by the increasing temperature field and vertically by the transition from the free molecule to hydrodynamic behavior of thermophoresis as the particles ascend."

Might still be OK micro to mm sized experiments. The technique seems to be reliable and cheap enough to compete with other types of microgravity approaches - more research needed to define boundaries of course.

A nice quartz article about research in neuromorphic hardware in micro/nanotech out there and future vision of the field.

TU Delft researchers have developed the DelFly Explorer, the world's first Micro Air Vehicle with flapping wings that can avoid obstacles by itself. The uniqueness of this achievement lies in the DelFly Explorer's very low weight (20 grams, i.e. a few sheets of paper), and this opens up new possible applications for both smaller and larger MAVs.

I'm kinda curious what you used for processing power there. Is that a DSP?

UK researchers say they have achieved data transmission speeds of 10Gbit/s via "li-fi" - wireless internet connectivity using light. The researchers used a micro-LED light bulb to transmit 3.5Gbit/s via each of the three primary colours - red, green, blue - that make up white light. This means over 10Gbit/s is possible.

very nice paper ... 

Interesting article on ultra-fast stock market manipulation.

Quotes from the comments: "I know for a fact a few houses have been able to get micro-second trades, whereas the rest of the industry is still dealing in milli-second trades." For when the nano-second trades...!

Some pics and movies on insect-inspired Mirco Air Vehicles. Some of the stuff I have seen in Ascona. And we are also mentioned. But only with one sentence...