What’s the News: Scientists have already bent light to make invisibility cloaks and manipulated sound to hide underwater objects from sonar. Now, researchers have come up with a preliminary design for a mesh shield that would let submarines stealthily maneuver through the seas without leaving any wake, they report in a study published online last week.

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What’s the News: Keeping track of what’s happening inside the body often requires a great deal of equipment outside it: Just think of the tangle of sensors in any hospital room. Now, though, engineers have developed an ultra-thin electrical circuit that can be pasted onto the skin just like a temporary tattoo. Once it’s served its purpose, you can simply peel it off. These patches could be provide a simpler, less restrictive way to monitor a patient’s vital signs, or even let wearers command a computer with speech or other slight movements.

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What’s the News: Georgia Tech researchers have now created a glove that heightens your sense of touch. Presented in May at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, the glove—which applies high-frequency vibrations to the side of an exposed fingertip—can improve a wearer’s motor skills and tactile sensitivity. “This device may one day be used to assist individuals whose jobs require high-precision manual dexterity or those with medical conditions that reduce their sense of touch,” Georgia Tech assistant professor Jun Ueda said in a prepared statement.

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Each fluid reveals a different letter.

What’s the News: Scientists have developed a chip that can instantaneously identify fluids applied to it, just from their unique surface tension. In a handheld device, it could help toxic site remediators figure out what that ominous clear liquid is. And there’s a bonus for the kids-in-the-treehouse user demographic: different secret messages can appear on the chip depending on what fluid is applied.

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Richard Branson’s Virgin Oceanic sub is poised to be the first of this new fleet of commercial subs to start probing the depths—it should launch this year.

The deepest point in the ocean, the bottom of the Marianas Trench off the coast of Guam, is the scene of a new kind of space race: a deep-sea submarine race, undertaken by such private investors as director James Cameron, Virgin Group mogul Richard Branson, and Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt. Citing the excitement of exploration, all are involved in the construction of next-generation submersibles to plumb the trench and other deeps, taking advantage of price reductions in many components and the dearth of such innovation in the scientific community. Though designed to take the builders and other thrill-seekers to incredible depths, the ships are by and large not intended to be one-shot wonders, William J. Broad of the NYTimes reports:

“It’s not a publicity stunt,” [one builder] said of the planning effort. “We’re commercial vehicle builders. We want a product that can be used repeatedly without any difficulty — one that is very elegant, very safe and very competitive.”

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Is that an alpha or a beta?

Sometimes you need a little help from your friends. Taking a leaf from reCaptcha‘s book, archaeologists from the Egypt Exploration Society and Oxford University have taken a voluminous store of ancient Egyptian papyri online in a bid to have web users transcribe the fragments, which come from a lost city known to its inhabitants as the City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish.

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What’s the News: Computers are hot. Too hot, really, for their own good—not only can laptops burn users’ thighs, but big clusters of servers require constant air conditioning, leading cloud-computing companies to consider situating them in places like Iceland to save on costs.

On the other hand, for part of the year in a good chunk of the globe, humans are cold. Analysts at Microsoft Research wondered whether they couldn’t somehow make these two things match up.

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Whip out that red pen and make just a few…little…tweaks…

The physical world should feel a little more comfy now: Gravity is a little bit less than it was last Thursday. And the electromagnetic force? A smidge stronger.

Every four years, the National Institute of Standards and Technology posts internationally determined adjustments to the official values of such natural constants to reflect more accurate measurements made possible by advancing technology. This week, in the latest update, the radius of a proton, the speed of light, the Planck constant, and many, many others have received facelifts that will decrease uncertainty in physics measurements. But this update will also affect units much closer to home: In October, the General Conference on Weights and Measures will vote on a measure to base the definition of a kilogram on the values of such natural constants, instead of the 130-year-old slug of platinum and iridium that currently holds the title.

For the time being, the current upgrade will likely trickle down to we armchair physicists once Google Calculator, the search giant’s handy-dandy constant provider, starts using the new numbers. Judging from its current value for the Planck constant, it’s still working from the 2006 data.

Image credit: Mohr,Talbott/NIST

Modern microchip designers have numerous digital backup copies of their work. But in the early days of home computers, chip designs were drawn out by hand on sheaves of paper, many of which have since gone missing. In the last 30 years, we have already forgotten how the first chips that brought computers into our homes worked.

A team of enthusiasts calling themselves “digital archaeologists” have reconstructed the design of several key early chips, including the MOS 6502. The name might not be familiar, but if you’re of a certain age, you used it in such early computing gems at the Atari, the Commodore, the Apple I and II, and, of course, the Nintendo Entertainment System. (It also appears to have powered the Terminator—Nikhil Swaminathan at Archaeology Magazine, who has written a delightful feature on the project, notes that when the 1984 film switches to the killing machine’s point of view, 6502 code is running up the side of the screen.) By dissecting the chip with acid and photographing each layer of its workings, they’ve developed a map of its circuits that can be plugged into a programmable chip and used to play Atari games, as well as serve as a resource for understanding how early chips were designed.

Read the whole story at Archaeology Magazine, and check out the group’s site for beautiful, massive images of the chip architecture.

Image credit: Visual 6502 project

Georgia Tech researcher Manos Tentzeris holding
up one of his inkjet-printed antennas.

What’s the News: With all of the electronics cluttering our daily lives, the air is abuzz with ambient electromagnetic energy from sources like cell phone networks, radio and television transmitters, and satellite communications systems. Now, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have devised a simple, cheap way to harness that wasted energy: capturing it with inkjet-printed antennas and storing it in batteries.

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Screenshot of Civilization IV, a later version
of the game that MIT’s computer played.

What’s the News: Many video gamers scoff at the idea of actually reading the instruction manual for a game. But a manual can not only teach you how to play a game, it can also give you the basics of language—that is, if you’re a machine-learning computer. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab have now designed a computer system that can learn the meaning of certain words by playing complex games like Civilization II and comparing on-screen information to the game’s instruction manual.

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What’s the News: America’s intelligence agencies are in the business of predicting the future, using limited amounts of information to divine world events. But even expert analysts and sophisticated algorithms can make mistakes.

That’s why IARPA—which takes on high-risk, high-reward research projects (read: awesome longshots) in US intelligence—is turning to crowdsourcing, reports Adam Rawnsley at Wired.com’s Danger Room. Applied Research Associates will launch an IARPA-backed website this Friday to test whether those of us without security clearances can point the clandestine services in the right direction.

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The Toyota Prius is one of the cars targeted by the new regulations.

Late last week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that it will now begin assessing new regulations for green cars, whose quiet engines may pose a danger to unaware pedestrians. This is the agency’s first major step towards implementing the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act, which requires automobile manufactures to equip new electric and hybrid vehicles with sound systems that alert pedestrians of the approaching machines.

But the move has come under fire by some green car advocates, who stress a lack of studies showing that such warning systems would actually make the streets safer for pedestrians:

The difficulty is that there’s simply not enough data on actual pedestrian injuries and deaths attributable to quieter cars. Part of that reflects a lack of categories to reflect such a problem, and the low incidence of pedestrian injuries in general.

[A] 2009 NHTSA report highlighted its own weaknesses: It was based on data from only 12 states (the ones that record Vehicle Identification Numbers) and limited to injuries from 2000, when hybrids first entered the U.S. market. The result: a small, possibly non-representative sample set.

Read more at Green Car Reports. Listen to sample “noisemakers” at Scientific American.

Image: Flickr/M 93

Researchers sifted through a whole lot of AT&T mobile phone data to find out who’s talking to who—or, really, where’s talking to where. The Connected States of America, as the project is called, has produced some amazing maps showing clusters of communication, from the surprising—neighboring states like Oklahoma and Arkansas pair off, chatting mostly with each other—to the expected: the flood of continent-spanning calls between New York and San Francisco.

[MIT Senseable City Lab, via GigaOM and Gizmodo]

The recording’s grooves, seen through the microscope.

What’s the News: More than a century ago, Thomas Edison recorded a woman speaking the first verse of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on a metal cylinder for use in a talking doll. Now, scientists using microscopes to create 3D scans of the badly damaged cylinder have made it possible to hear her voice again, through the patina of years.

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