Vote if you will by clicking the image below:

New Scientist senses the tiniest air currents by a synthetic whisker:

The design consists of an artificial hair deposited on a silicon substrate and connected to it by a flexible hinge. When a magnetic field is applied, the hinge bends, causing the hairs to stand up straight. For protection, the hairs can be embedded in a polymer skin.

Movement of a [...]

Wikipedia Commons user "Minutemen" took this polarization-microscope image of liquid crystal.

New Scientist is living in The Jetsons:

“If you want to interpret and understand everyday activities using vision data, it’s very complicated, error-prone, and resource intensive,” says Michael Beetz, who led the research. “If you do it with RFID tags, there is very little sensor information, but it’s highly correlated with the activities you are performing.”

As a result, the robot [...]

CNN, not normally an outlet for science news, covers the mysterious story of a brand new bug at London’s Natural History Museum:

The museum has more than 28 million insect species in its collection, but none is an exact match for this insect. Still, Barclay was cautious about calling it a new discovery.

“I don’t expect to find a new [...]

Science News reveals the latest success story in political prediction – from a guy using tools from baseball picking:

He creates his baseball predictions by matching current players with similar past players. Similarly, for each congressional district, he found another district that had already voted whose voters had similar education levels, income, racial mix, religious makeup, etc. Odds are, he [...]

Discovery News has a weird little story about a weird little vehicle coming up out of the swamp. I suppose you could call it a UFFO – a University of Florida Flying Object:

Subrata Roy, a scientist at the University of Florida, calls his aircraft a “wingless electromagnetic air vehicle,” or WEAV, and if it flies he says it could [...]

I can’t say anything more about SciAm’s interview on the science of Batman. The article speaks for itself:

What’s a realistic training regimen?
I didn’t give a training manual in my book, but he’d want to do specialized weight training to build up an ability to work at a really high rate for maybe 30 seconds to a minute (the maximum [...]

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Is it smiling at you?

From Louisa Howard at the Dartmouth Electron Microscope Facility.