Science magazine shores up our infrastructure with a report on how a kid’s toy can save our streets:

…[U]ndergraduates at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland… devised the idea as part of an engineering contest sponsored by the French materials company Saint-Gobain — and took first prize last week. The objective was to use simple materials to create a novel [...]

New Scientist has a knack for bringing weird science to life. In this case, electronic germ-based computers:

Hard drives are usually made by “sputtering”, in which clouds of argon ions are fired at a sheet of magnetic material, knocking off particles which are deposited as a thin film on a disc. Groups of these particles, called grains, form the [...]

The Telegraph (yes, I know, but…) gives hope to the potentially millions of women fed up with the regular ritual of mammograms with news that a new blood test can detect cancer risk decades in advance:

Researchers have identified a ‘genetic switch’, carried by one in five women, that doubles their risk of developing breast cancer.

Experts described the breakthrough [...]

Wired takes a leap into the cephashionable world of cephalopod textiles to give a sneak peak at next season’s color-changing squid-muscle shirts:

“We have taken inspiration from nature’s designs and exploited the same methods to turn our artificial muscles into striking visual effects,” said lead author of the study Jonathan Rossiter [of the University of Bristol].

First up, Rossiter and [...]

No, McClatchy ain’t making this up. Members of SETI and NASA are using an airship to seek traces of meteorites – and, possibly, alien life:

On Thursday, the scientists flew over the Sierra Nevada foothill region in a chartered zeppelin, hoping to spot craters, burn marks or other signs of falling space particles.

The meteorite did not arrive quietly early [...]

Click to embiggen

In 1912, aeronautics was a sport.

And the athletes had to start their engines somehow… so Bosch, now known mostly for their spark plugs, made magnetos. And summoned pilot genies to keep those flying machines in the air.

This bit of science art nouveau was found on archive.org. The same issue has a wonderful

AFP goes even farther than that. A common pesticide actually changes the structure of kids’ brains:

The study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined New York City pregnant mothers who were tested for exposure to chlorpyrifos, or CPF, which is widely used for pest control in farms and public spaces.

The women in the study, which [...]

PhysOrg says that porn is safer than religion… at least when it comes to online viruses:

Websites with religious or ideological themes were found to have triple the average number of “threats” that those featuring adult content, according to Symantec.

“It is interesting to note that websites hosting adult/pornographic content are not in the top five, but ranked tenth,” Symantec [...]

New Scientist does its best to make nanomaterials sexy… like the new silicon stuff that’s stealing carbon’s limelight:

Patrick Vogt of Berlin’s Technical University in Germany, and colleagues at Aix-Marseille University in France created silicene by condensing silicon vapour onto a silver plate to form a single layer of atoms. They then measured the optical, chemical and electronic properties [...]