What’s the News: Along with a whole passel of new Kindles, Amazon yesterday announced a new browser to accompany them, named Silk. And it’s got some unusual characteristics that have some crowing about the next big thing in mobile browsing and others wondering about privacy implications.

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If bacteria can’t grow in a Petri dish, sequencing them is difficult.

What’s the News: Want the genome of a bacterium you found in your belly button? Or, for that matter, of a bacterium producing a promising new antibiotic? Well, unless you can get it to thrive in a Petri dish and create a billion sister cells for analysis, you’re out of luck.

But sequencing the genomes of notoriously finicky bacteria, like those on skin, could be on the horizon with a new procedure that bypasses the Petri dish step. Pairing a new algorithm with an earlier technique, scientists from the Venter Institute and their collaborators can now get all that information from a single cell.

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Yesterday, the Senate subcommittee that funds the NSF, NASA, and research agencies in the Department of Commerce announced that they could see no way out of startlingly drastic budget cuts.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which develops and curates technical standards for science and industry, will see a 10% drop in its budget, and the National Science Foundation, responsible for 20% of the basic research funding in the nation, will lose $162 million, or 2.4% of its budget. Under the plan, which passed 15-1 in the subcommittee, other programs will be wiped completely, like the Technology Innovation Program, which funds high-risk, high-reward research. “We’ve gone beyond frugality and are into austerity. … We didn’t want to do this, but that’s the way the world is,” said an unhappy Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) (via ScienceNOW), who has frequently gone to bat for science funding and heads the subcommittee. Today, the whole Senate Appropriations Committee will vote on the plan—for more news as it develops, head over to Science NOW.

[Disclosure: DISCOVER Magazine is a media partner of the NSF, helping produce public-science programs like Changing Planet.]

What’s the News: A new thumbnail-sized microscope will give researchers a way to see what’s happening in the brain of a mouse as it moves around and goes about its business. The microscope, described earlier this week in Nature Methods, weighs less than 2 grams—little enough that it can be fitted atop a rodent’s head—and tracks the activity of up to 200 brain cells.

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Where is the cup? THERE IS NO CUP.

What’s the News: Ever since Alan Turing, the father of modern computers, proposed that sufficiently advanced computers could pass as human in a conversation, the classic Turing test has involved what’s essentially instant messaging. Computers designed to imitate human conversational patterns are often entered by their designers in competitions where they aim to fool people in front of a distant monitor into thinking they’re human—and they do a pretty good job, although some human mimics, like chatbots, sound like crazed children on their first spin in cyberspace (“I’m not a robot, I’m a unicorn!“).

But scientists have noticed that humans describe where objects are in space in a specific way, taking into account what spatial relationships would be most useful for a human listener. Artificial intelligences, even fairly sophisticated ones, talk about space differently, and the difference is large enough that it can form the basis of a new type of Turing test, British scientists reported at a conference in April. Now, New Scientist has developed an interactive version of the test, which lets you see for yourself what statements about space set off your silicon-lifeform alarms. So what’s behind it?

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The blood oxygen-monitoring chip, which is about 2 cm long and encased in plastic, is still in the
early stages of testing.

What’s the News: Scientists in Germany are developing a chip that keeps track of blood oxygen levels for implanting near tumors, reports Kate Baggot at Technology Review. When blood oxygen levels drop, signalling a burst of tumor growth, doctors would be alerted immediately, jump-starting the treatment process.

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Giant pixels pasted onto tanks can now sense the general pattern of infrared energy, or heat, distributed around a bucolic mountain meadow or windy desert and camouflage the vehicle accordingly, so heat-spying eyes will be none the wiser. (more…)

These spiral generators scavenge power when the beetle beats its wings.

What’s the News: Building tiny fly-like robots—for spying, search and rescue, and so on—has a long history in robotics. But some researchers, citing the challenge of building agile, dynamic machines at that scale, have turned to Mother Nature instead and made living beetles into cyborgs, controlling their flight via neural implants.

Finding a power source that’s light enough for these beetles to port around has been difficult, but now, a team of roboticists have found that harvesting power from their beating wings could be a way to make these ‘borgs go battery-less.

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Once the Egyptian government cut the Internet, the protests in Tahrir Square were joined by protests across the country.

What’s the News: Social networking has been a star of the Arab Spring revolutions. People can’t stop talking about how Twitter and Facebook helped protestors organize, and when Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak suddenly cut access to the Internet and cell phone service on January 28th, many wondered how the protestors would share information and keep momentum. But as it turned out, depriving people of information had an explosive effect—far from the epicenter at Tahrir Square in Cairo, so many grassroots protests sprung up that the military was brought in. Two weeks later, Mubarak resigned.

Using the Egyptian revolution as a case study, a new paper makes the case that theories of group dynamics explain why access to information can actually have a quenching effect on revolutions, and argues that regimes that shut information sources down are signing their own death warrants.

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Matternet’s design for a Medical Aid Quadcopter

What’s the News: Many of the unmanned aerial vehicles we hear about are flying off to war, laden with weapons or surveillance equipment. The tech start-up Matternet, however, is designing small quadcopter UAVs to carry peaceable payloads, delivering medical supplies and other necessities to areas dangerous or difficult to reach by road.

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What’s the News: We’ve all fantasized about a cell phone battery that won’t quit. Now scientists hoping to harness the power generated when you walk are developing a device that might eventually use your footfalls to power small electronics. But will it overcome the hurdles of efficiency and cost?

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One of IBM’s prototype cognitive computing chips

What’s the News: Researchers at IBM have developed a new “cognitive computing” microchip inspired by the brain’s computational tricks. These new chips, the researchers say, could make processors that are more powerful and more efficient than today’s computers—and better at the flexible learning and responses that are a struggle for current AI systems but a breeze for the human brain.

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What’s the News: For all the testing we do, drugs are still mysterious things—they can activate pathways we never connected with them or twiddle the dials in some far-off part of the body. To see if drugs already FDA-approved for certain diseases could be used to treat other conditions, scientists lined up two online databases and discovered two drugs that, when tested in mice, worked against diseases they’d never been meant for, suggesting that mining of such information could be a fertile strategy for finding new treatments.

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Clean-up teams at Fukushima struggled to control the melting fuel rods.

What’s the News: After the disastrous March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the world waited, mostly in vain, for details about the events that led to meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Since then, scientists across the Pacific in California have been watching the dials of instruments that detect radioactive molecules, to see what might come across on the winds.

This week, scientists at Scripps published their readings of radioactive sulfur collected in the atmosphere in San Diego after the meltdown. These allowed them to extrapolate backwards to learn roughly how many neutrons were shed by the melting cores as workers desperately doused them in sea water, helping scientists understand the damage undergone by the cores and demonstrating the kind of remote science that may be required to help understand the events that led to meltdown.

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