You see this?

This is a robot designed to harvest human flesh. No, that's not an exaggeration. I wish it were, but it's not. I mean, for god's sake – I get so much flak for all my “unreasonable” and “frothingly paranoid” predictions of Robot Armageddon, and then it turns out that people are building machines whose actual, intended purpose is to drill holes in your head.

Well, okay, they're only supposed to be very small holes*. This robot is called ARTAS, and it's the world's most expensive baldness treatment. It punches holes in your scalp in order to harvest healthy hair follicles, which can then be transferred to areas where you're going a bit thin. Very simple and generally effective, but I'm sorry: if the price is humanity's tomorrows, that price is too high.

Biologists have successfully introduced a super-fast-spreading gene to a population of mosquitoes, and are speculating about using it to fight malaria. The gene has the special property of always turning up on both chromosomes in a mosquito that carries it, and the rate at which it moves through a population is suitably impressive: in the lab, it only needed 12 generations to go from being carried by 1% of the mosquitoes to over 60%. If it were to be used to disrupt the genes necessary for carrying malaria, and released into the wild, it would probably be very effective... but then there are quite a few ethical and logistical concerns with that course of action.

Researchers at MIT have been press-ganging viruses into helping them build solar cells. They'd been trying to improve the cells' efficiency by covering them with carbon nanotubes (yes, add yet another item to the ridiculously long list of Awesome Things Carbon Nanotubes Can Do), but there were a couple of problems – the tubes clumped together, for one thing, which made them much less efficient. But lay down a network of specially modified virus to direct and organise the tubes, and these problems vanish. (I wonder if being paranoid about viruses with labour unions would be more relaxing than the robot thing?)

And finally, various groups of researchers have been busy finding evidence that more aspects of your life have a genetic basis than you might expect – including whether you're born prematurely, how long you can expect to live and even how susceptible you are to following bad advice. Ah, Nature vs. Nurture. Now there's a debate that will never, ever stop being blown out of all reasonable proportion. By absolutely everyone on the Internet.

See you next week.

*But that could change.

This is an artist's impression of a flask that's been constructed by researchers at Arizona State University. Why an artist's impression? Because the flask itself is a little too small to photograph properly, since it's made out of DNA. It really is a working flask, with approximately the proportions depicted in the picture, and it has a capacity of 24000nm³. That's not even enough to hold one million molecules of water. Words cannot adequately express its tininess. It was made by stacking DNA rings of different sizes on top of one another, and the researchers who made it hope that their technique will gain wider acceptance as a way to make other, more useful structures (like drug capsules or artificial enzymes) on a similar scale.

Researchers of human congenital heart defects are accumulating evidence in favour of a very odd model animal: the sea squirt. It's an invertebrate that looks like a small leather sack with a mouth (and that's being generous), but it turns out to be uniquely suited to heart research because it only has one copy of each of the genes involved in heart development -- as opposed to the tangled mess of redundancies that vertebrate researchers have to deal with.

A revolutionary new cloth has been developed at Cornell University that incorporates Metal Organic Frameworks (special molecules that can be tailored to absorb specific kinds of gas)... and has promptly been turned into fashionwear. Apparently Cornell is a proper melting pot of a place, and interdisciplinary activity extends so far as fashion students getting their hands on material that we didn't even know how to make a year ago. Bet you that wasn't what the material scientists thought their brainchild's first application would be.

And finally, the reason for this week's title: a "potentially revolutionary discovery" has been made in physics. Yes, another one: naturally we have to treat these things with a very large amount of skepticism, but... who knows? Maybe this one is the rare, rare case that actually comes to something.* The story comes from the Tevatron particle collider in Chicago, where they think they've discovered a new subatomic particle (or maybe a whole new class of them) that exists for an incredibly short time, and has a mass 150 times greater than the proton. If this is true, the new particle and the nuclear interaction that creates it would neatly replace the Higg's Boson, and (you guessed it!) rewrite the Standard Model of physics.

*Optimism! The first step toward disappointment? Discuss.

Looks like it's another of those weeks where there's no actual need for a picture... so have one of the back half of a cow. I know, I'm so good to you.

Tangential relevance to the news: scientists in Beijing have succesfully bred cows that have lysozyme in their milk. It's a protein normally found in human milk that boosts babies' immune systems -- in other words, it's one of the reasons why human milk is better for us than cow's milk. There could be significant advantages to this: there are many babies out there who, for one reason or another, don't have access to human milk, and we don't exactly mass-produce and store it the way we do with cow's. But, of course, this is a genetically modified food, and public reaction to the idea so far has been predictably cool... not to mention the fact that human milk has many, many other useful chemicals in it that have yet to be synthesized.

A recent paper claims that flies can smell the difference between hydrogen and deuterium (for the non-chemists: the difference between those two is precisely one neutron). That is a ridiculously sensitive ability, and it suggests that, rather than just sensing the shape of a molecule, smell also involves detecting and quantifying its vibrations. It's a little humbling to think how much of human history was spent developing technology to do what quadrillions of flies* (and maybe us) have been able to do all along.

We already know that human psychology is weird, but it seems that we've underestimated how deeply some illogical associations run. The height = power idea, for example: a recent study has shown that people who've just ridden an escalator upwards will be more generous than people who've just gone down. When I graduate and am forced to take up busking to pay rent (Humanities degree), I know exactly where I'll set up shop.

And finally, medical researchers trying to find treatments for restless leg syndrome (where your legs burn, itch and spasm while you're trying to sleep) have come up with an extremely unusual, and incredibly cost-effective, prescription: just have an orgasm. Apparently the dopamine rush that results (the greatest you can get without taking drugs) is enough to calm the symptoms. The researchers are careful to point out that the only link they've confirmed is between masturbation and symptom relief: the intermediate stage of dopamine is speculative, but seems pretty reasonable. While this may be good news for the average sufferer, the pharmaceutical companies have probably already dispatched the Placebo Ninjas to track down and destroy the researchers -- who have so unwisely demonstrated that dopamine pills are no longer necessary.

See you next week.

*Calculated estimate for worldwide fly population (courtesy Wikipedia my own extensive research): 17 quadrillion. (No, really.)

Slightly delayed because of technical issues (by which I mean "lack of access to the internet"), here's Pick of the Week! At least this means I get a wider range of stories to choose from than usual.

This is the first ever picture of Mercury taken from orbit. MESSENGER, the rather tenuously acronymed MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging probe, reached the Sun's innermost planet on March 17th, and at time of writing has already circled it 24 times. It's now getting ready to photograph and map the entire surface of the planet, beginning on April 4th.

Scientists at MIT have created the first practical artificial leaf, and recently presented it to the American Chemical Society. While man-made photosynthesis machines aren't news in themselves, previous efforts have been various combinations of highly unstable, extremely inefficient and desperately expensive to make. This latest cell, though, is made from widely available materials (like silicon, nickel and cobalt), can run for a minimum of 45 hours straight and produces enough electricity from one gallon of water (and sunlight, obviously) to power a small house for a day.

Biologists in Japan have grown viable sperm cells from scratch for the first time. They used mice, and it hasn't been confirmed whether the technique will also work in humans, but the prognosis looks good: it's hoped that we can now identify some of the causes behind human male infertility, and either fix it in the body or reverse it in vitro.

The third-ever example has been found of a virophage: a virus that preys on other viruses. But not only that ("third ever" would, after all, be a pretty weak story on its own, unless the next words were "alien race made of sentient chocolate"): the researcher who discovered it has found links between its makeup and that of the first documented virophage, leading to the speculation that there are many more virophages out there -- a continuous global population -- waiting to be identified.

And finally, even newborn chicks can tell that M.C. Escher's drawings just aren't right. Apparently the vertebrate brain is wired to make sense of 3D objects from birth, because when given a choice, a significant proportion of chicks who have literally never seen anything before will prefer a drawing of a normal cube to an "impossible" one. Imagine that being the first visual input you ever received. If those chickens develop the ability to fly in the fourth dimension, the researchers will have only themselves to blame.

It's the end of the Cambridge term, but that's no reason for Pick of the Week to stop! After all, the science news is still rolling out, complete with pretty pictures that I can steal and immediately repost.

With that in mind:

Biological anthropologists and archaeologists are fighting over how long ago man mastered fire. The orthodoxy is that we've been using it regularly for more than a million years, but the latest study says that it's only 400,000 years ago that evidence of fire-using societies starts to appear. An extra six hundred millennia of humans in Canada and Scandinavia braving winter without fire? We're a pretty tough/insane species, aren't we.

In Brazil, a piece of technology even simpler than fire is easily besting the most advanced solutions we have: it turns out minced banana peel is very good at extracting harmful metals from a body of water. It doesn't just compete with the traditional, more expensive methods like silica gel: it outperforms them twenty times over. Hopefully this'll mean cheaper purification plants beng set up before too long.

Our latest issue has an article about using light to effect movement in worms and flies. Well, it seems a group of international scientists are taking this a step further, and are using light to move individual molecules in living cells. Now that we can -- among other things -- force two proteins in the same cell to interact with each other when normally they wouldn't, we should start to find out a lot more about how cells actually work at the most basic level.

And finally, I'm going to join everyone else on the internet in linking you to Randall Munroe's comparative chart of radiation levels. Aren't infographics wonderful? And unfounded-fear-destroying?

See you next week.

Right, so first of all here's a thorough explanation and analysis of the earthquake/tsunami that hit Japan on Friday. It's essential reading if you want to get the actual facts of the story: the international news reports have been a little muddled so far. Also, at the bottom of the article there are links to a number of relief organisations. Please consider donating, if you haven't already.

In other news:

Scientists in the US and Germany are creating self-repairing plastics, modelled after the behaviour of the rubber tree (pictured). That white ooze is mainly latex, but also contains small amounts of hevein, a protein that is normally stored by the tree in sealed capsules. When the tree is damaged the capsules burst, the latex and hevein mix, and the resulting gluelike substance seals the wound. The German team's efforts seem to be going ahead splendidly, and now the American team is trying to one-up them (typical) with a self-healing bio-plastic, which if successful would have even more and better applications. Imagine, household products made of a recyclable plastic that's made from nothing nastier than vegetable oils!

Going back to Japan, plans are (presumably, still) underway to introduce vending machines that can charge your electric car. Japan has always been well ahead of the global curve in terms of vending machine innovation -- just as well they have so many better cultural boasts, isn't it? -- but this isn't just cool, it's a fantastic way to make electric cars a viable option for Japanese commuters, who were reportedly worried about the machines' short range.

Of course, if you do buy an electric car you'd better make sure no-one can hack into it with music. Yes, researchers in California and Washington have worked out a way to turn a music CD in your car's stereo into a Trojan horse, by adding extra lines of code to the song. Their experiments in car-hacking covered various methods of entry, including Bluetooth and reprogrammed repair tools, but that has got to be by far the cleverest. The message I'm taking away is: never let anyone near anything electronic you own, for any reason at any time, ever. I'm sure it will serve me well.

And finally, I'm going to stop with all those comments about scientist-builds-something-that-takes-us-closer-to-sci-fi, because it's happened. It's finally happened. One man, one beautiful genius of a man, somewhere out there, has constructed a fully functional laser pistol. Just look at that video. I do not even have words.* We now live in a world where a man can take apart something he bought in the supermarket and reassemble it into a weapon from the heart of speculative fiction, and I have never been so happy to be alive in the 2010s.

(Of course, another way the modern era rocks is in instant transfer of money. Again, please do consider donating to the Japanese relief effort. It is literally the greatest natural disaster in their history.)

See you next week!

*This is clearly untrue.

Take a look at this car. Doesn't look like much, does it? Oh, it probably isn't a bad car by any stretch of the imagination, but it's also nothing more than an average, decent-sized city vehicle. Not, if we're honest, the kind of thing to turn heads.

Except... what are those wires poking out of the grille, there? And what could be the purpose of those black boxes to which they're attached, all bolted to the front where the license plate usually is?

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the world's first proper look at Google's driverless car, the most awesome/terrifying piece of tech (depending on your point of view) that the megacorporation has come up with so far. There's an article about it in Issue 8 -- which is up on this very website, right now! -- and now Google have let people film it in action. Click that link and prepare to marvel.

In other news, last week's cystic fibrosis story has been pretty decisively one-upped by a team who've successfully demonstrated a way to make white blood cells immune to HIV. We've known for a long time that there are very rare people who don't have a copy of the gene that HIV exploits to invade your immune system, but this is the first time we've successfully knocked out that gene in new cells in a normal person. Like the cystic fibrosis story, this is not a ready-made cure -- but given time, it just might form part of one.

This week was a very bad time to be a free-willed insect (assuming insects have free will. Where's Weevil's resident philosopher when you need him?): not only has a group of American engineering students created a way to remote-control a cockroach, but we've also discovered four new species of fungus that can control the brains of ants, making them walk to places suitable for spreading fungus spores and then die. Evolution, my friends: equal parts amazing and completely merciless. (WARNING: Don't click those links if you can't deal with close-up pictures of many-legged things.)

And finally, the physicists of the world continue to bring us closer to living in a sci-fi movie by proposing how to make an actual tractor beam. The basic idea is that, if you shine a Bessel beam (a special kind of laser with unusally low diffraction rates) at something, its molecules will absorb and reradiate some of the light forward, thereby pushing the object backward towards the beam. The paper is still in peer review, but I for one am confident that, within the decade, we'll be seeing attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

Good grief, is it Tuesday already? Well, no, obviously it's not: I am not typing this on Tuesday, you can see that plainly enough from the timestamp up there, just below the stars. Clearly I was just engaging in some lighthearted banter under the pretense that... you know what? Here's the news.

As that picture might subtly have hinted, this week saw the last ever launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery. The historic craft (yes, historic. Space flight is that new) has carried hundreds of people into space, and put the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit. Its final mission is a rendezvous with the International Space Station, with a delivery of hardware, experiments, storage modules... and Robonaut 2, the first ever "dextrous" humanoid robot in space. So Robonaut 1 was a total butterfingers, presumably.

Microsoft's Kinect, a quite breathtakingly awesome piece of motion-sensing hardware for the Xbox 360, continues to be hacked and used for purposes other than playing computer games, much to Microsoft's chagrin. This time, though, it's not a lone hacker who wants to run motion capture tech in Linux. It's a team effort that combines Kinect's full-body scan with a 3D printer, to create a 3D print... of you. This is big: 3D printing is a wonderful technology, with a huge number of applications, but large-scale stuff has so far been restricted by lack of a cost-effective scanning device. With 8 million Kinects sold (and rising), Microsoft may have provided us with one.

A new drug has been developed for treating cystic fibrosis, and for the first time, it looks like it's actually going after the cause of the disease and not just the symptoms. Those who took it had their lungs' function significantly increased and also saw improvement with regard to the "secondary" problems typical of the disease, such as poor weight gain. Not quite a complete cure, but (so the creaors hope) the first step towards one.

And finally, prepare to cling desperately to the brims of your hats (lest they be blown clean, clean off), because do you remember the scaremongering over mobile phones when they first became a big thing? Do you remember all those doctors worried that mobile phone radiation would give you brain cancer and all that kind of thing? (If you answered 'no', you're officially young enough to make me feel old. Curse you and your perfect, unblemished skin.) Well, it turns out that mobile phone radiation actually increases brain activity. No, we don't know whether that's a good or a bad thing yet (it's probably neither), but it's certainly intriguing. I wonder how long it'll take until we can understand the effect, and make brain-manipulation hardware with it?

Hello, Weevillers new and old, and welcome to the inaugural Pick of the Week! If the title isn't explanatory enough, this is where we post a weekly selection of peculiar science news, to keep you going until the print issue comes out. After all, fabulous as Weevil is, you don't want to wait a whole term for more of it.

In the news this week:

Scientists at Yale University provide further evidence that there is no ridiculous sci-fi term we can't eventually turn into reality, by revealing the anti-laser. It's a device that uses two laser beams and a silicon chamber to trap almost 95% of light on a given wavelength, making it more than capable of neutralising an incoming conventional laser. Its creators are talking about applications in optical computing, which means they've somehow failed to recognise just how much money either Bill Gates or Steve Jobs will pay you not to give anti-laser technology to his opponent.

The American gameshow Jeopardy! was recently beaten by an Artifical Intelligence. The computer, known only as Watson, went up against two human opponents and defeated them roundly; now, its analytic powers are going to be one half of a new master plan to partially automate healthcare. Combine that with the robot nurse that Japan developed a while ago, and you have a very strange picture of what a mid-21st-century hospital might look like.

Demonstrating how much of an edge Nature still has over us in terms of the whole "building effective machines" thing, researchers at the Universities of Sydney and Leipzig have shown that Argentine ant colonies create networks more efficient and self-sustaining than anything humans have yet managed. Once again, humans will be stealing an animal's design to make the world a better place.

And finally, Japanese inventor Akinori Ito has made a machine for turning plastic bags into crude oil. A machine that's efficient, lightweight, portable and even affordable for the common consumer. Oh, except that last bit's a lie: it costs $10,000. But hey, as a first step toward ubiquitous plastic recycling, it's definitely something to celebrate. Maybe one day we can have a house with a disposal chute that pumps petrol into the garage? In the meantime, keep using your Bags for Life, and do expect Mr Ito to win many, many environmental prizes.