15 july Nerves control prostate cancer What it is: Nerves have been found to play a critical role in the

development and spread of prostate tumours. It is quite common for nerves to be found around tumours, but their role in cancers was previously undefined. Scientists tested their function by injecting human prostate cancer cells into mice and disabling different parts of the mices nervous systems to observe what the effect was on the cancer cells. They found that the sympathetic nervous system (SNS gives us our fight or flight response) helps initiate the cancer process, whereas the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS controls activity when our body is at rest) contributes to the spread of cancer from its origin site (or metastasis). Lending further credibility to this observation was the fact that patients with more aggressive tumours had greater nerve density. Though this was proved only for prostate cancers, the researchers suspect that this could be common of other cancer types as well. Why it matters: Using this knowledge it could be possible to design a test to predict the aggressiveness of cancers. Moreover, it raises the possibility that drugs targeting the PNS and SNS could be developed to treat prostate cancer. See the invisible with terahertz vision What it is: Scientists from Caltech have created a small silicon chip that can emit and receive signals in the terahertz frequency. Terahertz frequency signals are not often used to communicate between smartphones because it is very difficult to generate as well as receive. Historically, the devices that can do this have been bulky and expensive. On July 8, electrical engineers from the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, announced that they were able to create a terahertz transmitter/receiver using a silicon chip the size of a one-rupee coin. The size is important because it is the first time such a device has any scope in the future to be handheld. Terahertz signals can easily go through skin, paper, fabrics, etc., but not through denser materials like bone or metal, so they bounce off making them excellent metaldetectors that can also double up as a detector for contraband goods. Since the transmitter/receiver is the size of a small silicon chip, this Superman-like X-ray vision technology can be operated out of a smartphone. Because smartphones come with a variety of programmable hardware, the scope of the silicon chips can be expanded. Why it matters: From inside a smartphone, a socially and economically viable plethora of applications are possible including non-invasive cancer screening, ultrafast data transmission, better motion-sensing, and gesture-recognition.

HTTP 2.0 will be a binary protocol What it is: The next generation of the principal system of digital rules (or protocols) that define the way communications work over the World Wide Web, HTTP 2.0, will include multiplexing. The latest working copy of HTTP 2.0 is out, released by members of the Internet Engineering Task Force, and it is already causing waves. Unlike previous versions of the HTTP protocol, this version will be a binary format, which was put in mainly to reduce the huge delay in web surfing. Binary protocols are protocols that were designed to have the advantage of terseness, which usually translates into speed of transmission, but they are also expected to be read by a machine rather than a human being. This is controversial because, while binary formats are very useful in saving space and conserving bandwidth, they also make life very painful during the debugging process as binary protocols aren't meant to be read by humans! However, the charter emphasizes that the protocol will be optional. While the document released is an alternative, it will not obsolete previous versions of the HTTP protocol. In practice, however, this may not work as one protocol will soon have to be adopted over the other. Why it matters: It is expected that HTTP 2.0 will substantially and measurably improve the sluggishness that some internet users feel while browsing. It will also improve the way browsers interact when they connect to servers on the World Wide Web, especially regarding congestion control. Thats faster internet for everybody! Superstrong fiber gets help from carbon nanotubes What it is: The strength of certain polymeric fibers can be increased by adding controlled quantities of carbon nanotubes. Of the various ways carbon atoms can bond with each other to create different materials, graphene and carbon nanotubes are garnering great attention from a variety of industries for their unique properties. While graphene is a one-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms, nanotubes are akin to a graphene sheet being rolled up to form a straight, slender cylinder. Now, a researcher from Northeastern University, Massachusetts, has exploited another strange property of carbon nanotubes to create superstrong fibers. A famous example of such a fiber is Kevlar, which is used in bulletproof vests. These fibers are continuous chains of certain molecules, like ethylene, whose bonds are so strong as to prevent tearing. The researcher, Marilyn Minus, has however found that adding small quantities of carbon nanotubes to ethylene chains and carefully heating the mixture results in something strange: the chains skate along the carbon nanotubes, as if they were guiding rails, and align themselves parallel to each other.

This alignment makes the chains much stronger. At the moment, Ms. Minus is testing this method with other fibers, such as polyacrilonitrile (PAN). Why it matters: Such fibers are no longer confined to making bulletproof vests. They are also used as parts of aircraft wings, etc. So, making a stronger version could eliminate the need for heavier metals, and make future aircraft lighter and more fuel-efficient. Data storage that could outlast the human race What it is: Researchers have found a way to record and retrieve data onto a single disk of quartz glass that can withstand temperatures of up to 1000 C and should keep the data readable for up to a million years. As we create increasingly more data, the problem has always been about storing it in readable, retrievable forms. Digital data from floppy drives just fifteen years ago are now quite unreadable, not to mention the damage it will sustain over long periods of time. Scientists have now used nanostructured glass to experimentally demonstrate the recording and retrieval process of five dimensional digital data by femtosecond laser writing. Dubbed affectionately as the Superman memory crystal, as the glass memory has been compared to the memory crystals used in the Superman films, the data is finally recorded via self-assembled nanostructures created in fused quartz. Why five dimensional though? This is because the information encoding is realized in five different dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of the nanostructures. All that it remains is a method of being able to read the informationthis is usually done by a combination of an optical microscope and a polarizeras the self-assembled nanostructures change the way light travels through glass. Why it matters: This new technique appears to have the tremendous potential for low-cost, long-term, high-volume archiving of enormous databanks. Previous contenders such as CDs/DVDs/hard drives have not worked out so far. Sharks whip their tails to stun prey What it is: A species of shark was shown to have evolved a complex predatory mechanism involving their tails. Thresher sharks can grow up to 20 feet long and about 50 per cent of that is its tail length. No proof existed so far of what exactly the function of these sharks tails was, though biologists have toyed with the possibility that it may be used to enhance prey capture like those of dolphins and killer whales. A group of scientists dived into the waters off the coast of the Philippines to study precisely this, and found out that thresher sharks slap their prey to death.

To elaborate, the sharks swim towards schools of sardines, waving its tail madly (up to speeds of 80 mph!). In this process they not only break up the school, but also strike several of the fish dead and instantly consume them. This behaviour indicates that sharks are much more intelligent predators than thought. Why it matters: Sharks are endangered species, whose existence is further threatened by decreasing population of their prey in this case, sardines. If this tail lashing is indeed the chief hunting tactic used by thresher fish, then fisheries that reduce the population of schooling fish like sardines could soon pose a problem for them.

8 july
Antarctica: Lake Vostok teeming with life, study says What it is: A study has found that Lake Vostok, a massive lake 2 km into the Antarctic ice shelf, contains life. In February, 2012, a team of Russian and American scientists breached the surface of Lake Vostok, a 12,500-sq. km lake almost 3 km below the gigantic glaciers of Antarctica. Theyd used a drill to bore through the thick ice. In January, 2013, the team was able to obtain a core of water samples from the lake for analysis. On July 7, Scott Rogers, the studys author, announced that they had found the DNA of a whopping 3,507 different organisms in the water. This find is awesome not only because of Lake Vostoks hostile conditions, bereft of direct sunlight and containing very little oxygen, but also because it has been isolated from the rest of the world for 15 million years. In all this time, as the rest of the world underwent drastic geological, meteorological and biological changes, Lake Vostok was able to preserve exotic forms of life that could survive on sulphur compounds and the like. Why it matters: Conditions similar to those in Lake Vostok are thought to exist on Jupiters moon Europa, which contains large oceans of water beneath kilometers of ice. If Vostok harbours life, so could Europa, think astrobiologists. Wind Mines could become the savior that datacentres need What it is: Pumping pressurized gas into caverns deep underground could prove to be a method by which one could store wind energy (essentially saving the wind that generates the power) which could in turn be used to keep the power levels of huge datacenters steady. Datacentres are often cheekily referred to as power-hungry monsters. Indeed, this particular negative attribute as led several major IT firms to include wind and solar power farms as part of their datacenter construction plans. Unfortunately, wind and solar power are often unreliable-especially by the standards that datacenters need as a way to compensate for any unexpected surges or drops in power.

Researchers at the Bonneville Power Administration and the U.S Department of Energys Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have used an old technique called compressed air energy storage (CAES) which involves storing compressed air in underground salt caverns hollowed out by solution mining. The energy then could be let out whenever demand spikes or wind drops or even when the above-ground facilities need help spinning enough turbines to keep power levels steady. The only catch, of course, is finding giant underground salt caverns, which as one could imagine, arent very common. The researchers have an answer for that-they believe that porous rocks deep in the Earth could store the winds intermittent power. For instance, volcanic rocks, found commonly as part of petroleum explorations, could store enough energy to power a total of about 85,000 homes per month. Why it matters: This method essentially means that by storing the winds intermittent power, it is possible to deploy renewable energy on command-without depending on the vagaries of nature. Hawkmoths zap bats with sonic blasts from their genitals What it is: A number of species of a tropical moth was shown to be able to beam ultrasound from their genitals at approaching bats. Bats are known to use high frequency sounds as an echolocation technique, enabling them to identify and locate the position of a prey. Moths are a common example. Hawkmoths species are some of the fastest flying insects. Scientists recently discovered that they respond to bat (their predator) sonar with their own sonic pulses produced from their genitals. While it was known that another variety of moth called the tiger moth uses ultrasound as a defense mechanism, they do so using a vibrating membrane in their thorax (between the head and the abdomen), not from their genitalia. Scientists understand that the hawkmoth probably evolved this mechanism as physical defense, to warn other moths, or to jam the bats echolocation. This is particularly fascinating for evolutionary biologists as it is an example of convergence -- the appearance of similar features in separate groups of animals. Why it matters: The more we learn about echolocation, the better we can design our ultrasound-based medical tools which are vital to observing the development of foetuses and tumour diagnosis. Optical transistor switches states by trapping a single photon What it is: Scientists have created a transistor that doesnt operate with electrons but with photons.

Transistors are integral to modern computing. They use electric signals to manipulate electrons paths inside a circuit, such that traveling down some paths represents one function, etc. The manipulation occurs mostly through what are called gates, which, depending on what the user wants, decide to block or let electrons through. However, since electrons have to flow through wires, the speed of computing is limited by the speed of electrons moving through the wires. It was long ago realised that using transistors operated by light would do the trick, but nobody knew how. On July 4, scientists from MIT announced a solution. Manipulating a cloud of ultracold atoms, they were able to pass some light through and block some light out using lasers. These atoms were of cesium, which has a cool property of two ground states. Each ground state represents the cesium atoms most stable, non-excited state. If a photon with a particular energy was beamed at them, its energy would be taken up by the atoms and theyd become excited to the energy level corresponding to one of the two ground states. When this happened, photons with the energy corresponding to the other ground state could pass through the gas; the rest would be blocked out. Why it matters: Optical transistors could speed up classical computers by orders of magnitude, not to mention also reduce energy losses like heat. Preserving a tortoise, and a legacy What it is: An unusual project, that of stuffing a celebrity animal Lonesome Georges preserved body, was announced by a New York City museum. George was the last known individual belonging to the Pinta island tortoise subspecies, gaining him the nickname Lonesome George. He died last year, aged more than a hundred, as a symbol of conservation efforts around the world. It was this iconic status that has prompted the American Museum of Natural History and the Galapagos Natural Park to decide to have Georges preserved remains stuffed by a taxidermist. The process involves incredible levels of meticulousness (even sculpting Georges wrinkles accurately!) and is expected to take about 6 months. The only unnatural part of the stuffed product will be the eyes. Notably, researchers last year found a group of tortoises carrying some Pinta genes indicating that there might yet be full-blooded Pintas living today. Why it matters: This move may not be of as much scientific value as symbolic value. Efforts sparked by Georges discovery to repopulate the Galapagos Island with tortoises are still on. Tortoises enriched the ecosystem by opening up the land and spreading seeds. Attempts to mate George may have failed (using females of related subspecies did not work), but conservationists are hopeful especially after last years discovery.

1 july
MIT researchers can see through walls using Wi-Vi What it is: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a technology that uses Wi-Fi to track moving objects. MIT says it has invented Wi-Vi a technology that seems to triumph even Googles Glass. Wi-Vi basically works by sending Wi-Fi radio waves through a barrier and measuring the way it bounces back. Using some of the same principles behind the working of radar, Wi-Vi basically transmits two Wi-Fi signals, one of which is the inverse of the other. Because of the way researchers have coded the signals, they dont cancel each other out when they hit moving objects. In this fashion, the technology can make the reflection of a moving person behind a wall visible. To top it all off, MIT researchers also believe that this technology could be built into a smartphone or special handheld device that could be used in search-and-rescue missions or be helpful for law enforcement. Why it matters: Wi-Vi has some great benefits over the current ways of seeing through walls (radar, sonar), with the advantages being especially seen in cost, power and size. The fact that it can be built onto a handheld device also indicates a certain amount of portability that one cannot achieve with radar. Fewer chimpanzees will be used in US research What it is: The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that it will be retiring most of its research chimpanzees, leaving only 50 available for experiments. The NIH, the American governments biomedical research agency, this week agreed that in the light of newer scientific methods available today, chimpanzees (which share 99 per cent of DNA with humans) are no longer as crucial to research as they used to be. In the coming years they will be retiring almost all of their 350 chimpanzees, leaving only 50 for use - providing they surpass strict regulatory criteria, and use the specimen to study behaviour and genetics, not for invasive experiments. Though the NIH has agreed to most of the recommendations made to it, there is still a dispute over the amount of living space to be allotted to each chimp. The NIH feels that the recommended 1,000 sq. feet per animal may be an overestimation. This decision is especially important as the US Wildlife service recently proposed to upgrade the status of captive chimpanzees from threatened to endangered. Why it matters: All developed nations except the US have banned the use of great apes in research. Pressure has been mounting from animal rights as well as environmental groups to outlaw the outdated use of these endangered species.

Laser creates high-energy positron beam What it is: Scientists from Ireland, USA and Germany have created a tabletop laser that can produce jets of anti-electrons, a.k.a. positrons. At the Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva, protons are accelerated using large electric currents and heavy superconducting magnets through a 27-km long ring to energies of 7 million mega-electron-volts (about 7,000-times heavier, according to the mass-energy equivalence). In such a state, these protons can be smashed against each other to open them up, bombarded on secondary targets to distort them in specific ways, etc. The field itself is of great use to scientists because it opens up energy scales that existed in the early universe. Unfortunately, the equipment used to recreate such scales is extremely massive and costly. Scientists are constantly looking for cheaper alternatives to reduce the cost of conducting such important research. On June 20, scientists from Ireland, USA and Germany created a laser which, they claimed, exploited phenomena called plasma wakefield acceleration and pair-production to produce focused beams of positrons. What makes the invention more significant is that the positrons the scientists produced were at the highest energy ever produced in a lab: more than 100 mega-electron-volts; previous attempts barely managed 20. Why it matters: More efficient versions of such tabletop accelerators could speed up antimatter physics research. They could also replace gargantuan experiments like the upcoming 32-km long International Linear Collider, which will also accelerate positron beams for study. DNA buried 7,000 centuries is retrieved What it is: The genome of a 7,000 century-old horse has become the oldest genome to be sequenced. The DNA was sourced from a foot bone that was found preserved in permafrost (frozen soil) of the Canadian Arctic. It was known that genomes upto 70,000 years old could be sequenced, but in this case the exceptionally cold temperatures preserved the horse DNA and scientists were able to extract horse DNA from the ocean of contaminant DNA. In the study, the genome of this ancient horse was compared with that of a 43,000-year-old one, some modern breeds, a donkey and the last living breed of wild horse - the Przewalskis horse. Using this data they learnt that the Equus lineage (that evolved into horses, donkeys and zebras) arose about 2 million years earlier than once thought. They also gained insight into the highly endangered Przewalskis horse and found that they shared a common ancestor with the modern horse around 50,000 years ago.

Why it matters: This study has proved that it is possible to gain access to many more extinct species (maybe even a million-year old human ancestors). Moreover, the study revealed that the Przewalskis horse is much more genetically diverse than was thought. This means that conservation efforts could indeed pay off. What the frack is up with drinking water and shale gas extraction What it is: A study has found that a technique used to extract shale gas can contaminate underground water reserves. Between layers of rock underground, there are fuels like shale gas that are of interest to humans. One technique to extract them is called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking: water is mixed with sand and some chemicals and injected into the ground at a high pressure to fracture the rocks with. This liberates the gases and oils which are then drawn up. Many environmentalists are demanding that fracking be called off because chemicals and gases involved in its use could contaminate the soil and groundwater. Where there have been attempts to settle such disputes, little evidence has emerged that fracking does or does not contaminate groundwater. On June 24, a study insisted that it was, indeed, harmful. Many celebrated the result, but also overlooked that the report had its limitations. It found that homes within a kilometre of the fracking site had 82 per cent more methane in their drinking water than normal. However, the report also stated that this was largely due to imperfections in the equipment, not the act of fracking itself. Why it matters: While fracking can sound dangerous, it is wrong to dismiss it with an emotional debate when, in fact, there can be a factual one. Without dismissing something because it was imperfectly conducted, we can be aware of the problems and solve them. Corkscrew light could turbocharge the Internet What it is: Differently shaped light beams have been found to have greater information storage capacity. From the time the Internet was set up, problems of speed and congestion have always occurred. Consequently, researchers perennially seek ways to squeeze ever more information into the fibre-optic cables that carry it. New research from Science tells us that twisty beams of light could boost the traffic-carrying capacity of the internet. How does this work? Scientists, of late, have been able to encode information in the form of light beams to ease congestion, using a property of light called orbital angular momentum. The current flow of Internet traffic through cables is done via straight beams of light. A new record has now been created: researchers have found a way to keep different light beam shapes separated for 1.1 kilometres. The breakthrough was prompted by using cables that had a varying index of refraction, allowing both twisty and straight beams of light to flow down the same cable.

Why it matters: The basic research that is coming out right now suggests that about ten different beam shapes can be used to convey information, each shape potentially acting as an entirely new level of Internet traffic. Think of how fast the Internet could truly be, eh?

24 june
Firefox advances do not track technology What it is: Mozilla is advancing plans to have the Firefox browser block, by default, many types of tracking used by numerous websites. In an era of Orwellian surveillance, there seems to be a breath of fresh air. Despite strong opposition from the advertising industry, Mozilla is fast-tracking its plans to introduce a technology that will block all third-party cookies and, thus, tracking of user data. At the moment, nearly 20 per cent of the worlds computers use Firefox. According to Brendan Eich, CTO, Mozilla, the technology, which is based off the kind that is used by Apples Safari browser, will go live in the next few months. Why is Mozilla doing this? Mr. Eich says it is to change the dynamic so that trackers behave better. The only problem here is that Internet advertisers use the type of cookies that will soon be blocked to track users across multiple websites. The main objective of this rollout, which has been plagued with legal issues over the last few years, is to let users have new privacy options. For instance, the type of cookies that will be blocked by Firefox will be determined by the Cookie Clearinghouse, a U.S-based think tank. Why it matters: The Cookie Clearinghouse will publish lists that web browser companies will choose to adopt, providing a greater number of privacy options for the end-user. New particle hints at four-quark matter What it is: Physicists have found a new form of matter containing four quarks, instead of the more conventional two or three quarks. The smallest, most fundamental particles in the universe are called quarks. They and their antimatter counterparts come together in different combinations to make up different kinds of matter. In twos, they are called mesons; in threes, baryons, such as protons and neutrons. In fours... well, there have been no fours until now. The set of scientific rules that describes quarks is called quantum chromodynamics (QCD), and it doesnt say anything about how many quarks can clump together. In some other part of the universe, quarks could be combining in strange conditions in the tens. However, that they do come in fours has been observed for the first time. These tetraquarks were spotted at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, Japan, and have been titled Z_c(3900). The c denotes charm, which is a kind of quark, two

of which have been found in the new particle. Z_c(3900) also has a charge. If anything, this particle and its properties stretch the bounds of QCD, and establish its dominion over more exotic subjects. Why it matters: QCD is also the theory that plays a significant role in describing what happened immediately after the Big Bang 13.82 billion years ago. And studying Z_c(3900) further could reveal more details of our universes birth, and the kind of strange matter that couldve existed then. Japan to relax ban on chimeric embryo experiments What it is: A Japanese stem cell scientist has succeeded in making his government reconsider its ban on creating human-animal hybrids. Hiromitsu Nakauchi wants to be allowed to implant human stem cells (cells that can develop into any kind of tissue) into genetically engineered pig embryos without breaking the law. Unlike most of America, Japan frowns upon experiments involving human-animal embryos (or chimeric embryos as they are called). The government allows their creation in lab conditions, but not in whole living organisms. But Nakauchi, one of the worlds leading stem cell scientists, has finally convinced the decision-makers to soften their stance. New guidelines are set to be formulated, though Nakauchi fears this might take another year or two - and even then, a positive outcome is not guaranteed. He has already successfully created mouse-rat hybrids and white pig-black pig hybrids (hybrids are simply organisms that carry DNA from more than one organism). To avoid delays, Nakauchi is considering moving his research to the U.S. Nakauchis objective is to grow human organs in animals. Human stem cells are put into a pig embryo that has been rendered incapable of developing a pancreas of its own. Why it matters: If things go as planned, we ultimately get a pig with a human pancreas, which can be transplanted into a person who needs it. Why pigs? Because their organs are of a similar size to ours. Whale of a win: Environmental victory protects whales from noise pollution What it is: Environmental activists have secured a deal with the US government and oil industry officials against the wanton use of airguns in the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf of Mexico is a bruised part of Earth. In 2010, it suffered the worst marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, affecting over 8,000 species of fishes, birds and molluscs, and creating vast oxygen-depleted zones because of the heavy methane discharge. Despite its treasured biodiversity, the Gulf of Mexico still draws the wrong kind of attention because it sits on oil deposits. Companies constantly prospect for larger pockets of oil and then set up mining rigs to draw the fossil fuel up. The method they adopt for prospecting is, importantly, differently harmful than an oil spill can be.

Prospectors use what are called airguns that blast the water with extremely loud noise - often approaching the deafening 120 decibels - that bounce off the ocean floor at different rates indicative of whats beneath it. These noises seriously disrupt communication among whales and dolphins, and can affect feeding and breeding patterns adversely in the long term. However, there could be worse consequences, too, simply because were not aware of what less overwhelming disasters than an oil spill are capable of. Why it matters: The victory that the activists have secured includes not only regulating the use of airguns, but also awakening the government to previously unconventional and unregulated threats. Pistil leads pollen in life-and-death dance What it is: Scientists have gained an idea of how the female and male gametes of flowering plants communicate with each other to ensure that fertilisation happens successfully. Sexual reproduction in flowering plants begins when a pollen grain (carrying sperm) is deposited on the tip of a flowers pistil, the female sex organ. The pollen grain grows tubes down the flowers style to reach the ovaries, where the pollen tubes promptly burst open letting loose two sperm cells which fertilise the egg cell in the ovaries. High school biology taught us this, but not how the pollen tubes know precisely when to stop growing, how out of the hundreds of pollen tubes only two sperm cells are released into the ovaries every time, and what signals the tubes to burst open at the right time. Scientists investigated, and discovered three transcription factors (proteins that regulate gene expression) that seemingly play a role in making these decisions. Without these three factors, they found that the pollen tubes kept growing, coiling up, and failed to release sperm. These factors were found to be necessary for the secretion of a protein that has been known to play a role in bursting open cells. This could be the protein driving the pollen tubes selfdestruction. Why it matters: Attempts to crossbreed crops like wheat and barley are often impeded by failure of the pollen tube burst-and-release step. Understanding the mechanics of this step can enable engineering of the cells to reproduce correctly. More data storage? Heres how to fit 1,000 terabytes on a DVD What it is: A development in optical data storage that allows storage of 10.6 years of HD video on a DVD. Data is stored in a DVD as bits - binary 0 and 1. When a DVD is 'written', a single laser beam 'burns' the data as dots of light, to denote 0s and 1s. In 1873, German physicist Ernst Abbe had said that the diameter of such a dot of visible light cannot be smaller than half its wavelength - about 500 nanometres. Because of Abbe's law, a DVD can only hold a limited number of dots, i.e. 4.7 GBs worth. Now, researchers from Australia have come up with a new technology that circumvents Abbe's law by using two beams: one the round-shaped writing beam and the other, a donut-

shaped anti-recording beam. When overlapped, the donut cancels out parts of the writing beam except at a very small focal spot of just nine nanometres width. Its like filling a larger tank of water using two cups of specific volumes. You add some extra water with the bigger cup, and then subtract some by removing it with the smaller cup. You keep doing this until you have the perfect amount you need. Why it matters: Beside the implication that you can store 50,000 HD movies on a DVD, the new technique suggests that optical technology can still be refined to accommodate more data than thought possible. This is great at a time when information production is still accelerating. Google respins its hiring process for world class employees What it is: Internet search giant Google has decided to junk GPAs and test scores as criteria for evaluating potential employees after internal evaluation. It has also decided to do away with esoteric interview questions such as how many manholes are there in New York City?. Any computer engineer worth his or her salt has, at some point, wondered how it would be to work at Google. The only problem: Getting through their tough requirements and whacky interview questions! According to a recent interview published by The New York Times, however, SVP Laszlo Bock has admitted that an internal evaluation of the effectiveness of the companys interview process produced some sobering results. Apparently, an analysis of how well employees had done at answering those crazy interviews and how well they ultimately performed their job showed that there was zero relationship between both parameters. In addition to this, the search giant has also decided to do away with GPAs and test scores as they are pretty much useless for evaluating candidatesexcept in the case of fresh college graduates. Brainteasers and esoteric technical questions are out, says TechCrunch, indicating that the new version of interviews at the top tech. giants may soon be quite different. The move has also sparked a general debate throughout the Internet, with some declaring that the technical interview will soon be dead. Why it matters: It is time tech. giants found better, more pertinent ways to hire employees instead of just picking up those who stood out from the crowd.

17 june
Invisibility cloak hides cats and fish. What it is: An array of prisms around an object that can make the object invisible while its surroundings are clearly visible.

Remember the scene in the film Die Another Day, when Q introduces James Bond to the Aston Martin Vanquish? He makes the car invisible at the click of a button. This effect can be produced in reality using metamaterials. These are simply arrays of special electrical components stitched together that can manipulate light using electric signals in many ways. One of them is to make light flow around an object instead of bounce off, rendering it invisible. Unfortunately, these materials are very difficult to make. Instead, researchers from the Zheijiang University, China, have shown that an array of six or eight prisms around an object could have the same effect. They demonstrated their claim, by bending light around cats in a coop and fish in a tank, and sending it back to the observer. There are shortcomings, however. While metamaterials can themselves be invisible, the prisms cant. And while metamaterials can work at a range of frequencies, the prism-cloak can work only with visible light. But the benefits are the same, especially when it comes to security. Why it matters: The implications are important for security, surveillance and entertainment applications. The researchers have shown that objects can be hidden while in plain sight at affordable prices. Torrents websites Kat.PH domain seized by Philippine authorities What it is: Kat.PH, widely seen as a possible successor to popular torrent search engine The Pirate Bay, has been shut down temporarily. Users looking to log onto a torrent website on Friday were left a little surprised as it wasnt immediately accessible. A day later, it has been confirmed that the websites domain name was seized by Philippine authorities. Why was it shut down? Unfortunately, local music record labels and the Philippine Association of the Recording Industry has said that the torrent site was causing irreparable damages to the music industry. Following a formal complaint, authorities seized the main domain name. However, this hasnt appeared to stop the Kat.PH team as the website is operating as usual under a different domain name. While some do operate as a haven of piracy, what is not immediately clear to most authorities is that peer-to-peer torrent distribution is also a legitimate way of transferring data. Why it matters: Therefore, blanket bans such as the one applied by the Philippine Intellectual Property Office usually do affect freedom of speech! According to Parity News, US-based record labels may also be the ones applying the actual pressure in this case. First fluorescent protein identified in a vertebrate What it is: The Japanese freshwater eel has become the first vertebrate from which a fluorescent protein has been identified.

A large number of diseases that affect us involve an abnormal amount of a particular protein being produced in our body. This can usually be traced to a faulty gene since genes control the production of proteins. Tracking gene expression, therefore, is key to understanding diseases. Years ago, the discovery of green fluorescent protein (GFP) revolutionised medical research. GFP glows when illuminated, and obviously a glowing protein is a lot easier to track. However, GFP has only been isolated from non-vertebrates like microbes, jellyfish and corals. Only recently have scientists detected the presence of a fluorescent protein in a vertebrate, namely the Japanese freshwater eel. This week, scientists reported in Cell that they have confirmed the presence of this protein and identified the gene that codes it. They call this protein UnaG (after unagi which is Japanese for freshwater eel). UnaG was found to glow when it binds to a molecule called bilirubin. Bilirubin is a breakdown product of haemoglobin and is a crucial indicator of liver function (for diseases like jaundice). Why it matters: The UnaG gene can potentially be used to develop better diagnostic tests for bilirubin. Moreover, unlike GFP, UnaG glows even when oxygen levels are low. This makes it potentially more useful to track anaerobic areas like cancerous tissue. Volvos electric roads concept points to battery-free EV future What it is: Carmaker Volvo sees our future buses and long-haul trucks drawing the electricity they need from the road. The problem with electric vehicles has always been in the proof of the pudding. In this case, the question of how to come up with a quick charging technology that could be deployed on public roads was an important hurdle. After all, you could hardly expect electric car owners to only depend on home chargers. Volvo now sees trucks and buses being able to soon draw the juice they need from the road itself. The company envisages two power rails/lines that run across a road, one being a positive pole while the other is used to return the current. The lines will be sectioned such that a collector, which will be mounted at the rear of the truck, will collect the live current only if a particular signal is detected. For instance, if an electric truck passes a section of the road that has the proper encrypted signal, then the road will energize the segments that sense the vehicle. Why it matters: While at the moment intercity truck hauling is the low hanging fruit, the wide-spread usage of this technology could eventually cascade down to everybody. In 20-30 years, most cars could be using this type of technology. Speed test for wild cheetahs

What it is: Researchers have found that it is not just extreme speed that make cheetahs such efficient predators in the wild. Scientists from London used special solar-powered collars to track the movements of five cheetahs in Botswana. Their observations surprised much of the world because wild cheetahs, unlike their captive counterparts, rarely seem to hunt at maximum speed in the wild. The study discovered that for a successful kill, the fastest land animals rely less on their speed and acceleration rate, and more on their remarkable agility and deceleration rate! Their agility let them hunt successfully in all kinds of terrain; in fact their success rate was found to be higher in a dense cover. Their phenomenal deceleration capacity (up to 14.5 kmph in a single stride) is crucial in their hunts because making sharp turns at such high speeds would otherwise knock them unconscious. This is the first time a study has been done on the movement of cheetahs in the wild. But almost as important as the discoveries, in this case, are the methods used. The collar that the researchers used on the cheetahs were entirely solar-powered. It carried a GPS (for location data), an accelerometer (to measure acceleration) and a gyroscope (for navigation). The recorded data was was received by the researchers via radio in real time. Why it matters: These hi-tech collars could be the next big thing in the field of animal locomotion. Discovery of new material state counterintuitive to laws of physics What it is: A new material that becomes more porous when compressed, instead of less. When you squeeze a soft ball, atoms inside the ball get pushed closer to each other. When this happens, there will be more atoms per unit volume than before, increasing its density by decreasing its volume. As the space between atoms reduces, the whole ball becomes less porous. But none of this would happen if the ball is made of zinc cyanide. At the Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicago, scientists put the compound in a diamond container and compressed it to 9,000-18,000 times the atmospheric pressure at sea level. Different fluids were made to flow through the container during the compression, participating in the pressurization. The zinc cyanide that emerged displayed a unique property. When compressed, the compounds molecular bonds rearranged themselves such that the interatomic distances grew instead of shrinking when compressed. This made it more porous, less dense, and lighter. By controlling the amount of compression, the scientists were able to make it more or less porous. As the space between atoms opens up, its as if the molecule unclenches. If a smaller atom or molecule is lodged within, it could be released in the process. Similarly, because the porosity can be manipulated with pressure, the special zinc cyanide could be used as a filter to separate different substances continuously.

Why it matters: The new material could be used to release drugs into the human bloodstream according to the pressure acting on it.