Crumpled kitchen foil that lays flat for reuse. Bent bumpers that straighten overnight. Dents in car doors that disappear when heated with a hairdryer. These and other physical feats may become possible with a technique to make memory metals discovered by researchers at the University of Illinois.

Normally, when a piece of metal – such as a paperclip – is bent, the change in shape becomes permanent. But, when heat is added to bent metal films having the right microstructure, the researchers found, the films return to their original shapes. The higher the temperature, the sooner the metal films revert. "It’s as though the metal has a memory of where it came from," said Taher A.

Scientists from Cardiff University have revealed new clinical data showing that Cod Liver Oil really is effective in slowing the destruction of joint cartilage in patients with osteoarthritis.

The groundbreaking clinical study was led by Professor Bruce Caterson and Professor John Harwood of the School of Biosciences, and Professor Colin Dent, Orthopaedic Consultant, University of Wales College of Medicine.

For the first time, the clinical study provides unique human evidence (in vivo) of the effectiveness of Cod Liver Oil in the management of osteoarthritis.

Monday morning roles on by at the parent's house, sound asleep til seven AM, still waking up in the darkness of daylight savings time. I gather my personal belongings:

1) Laptop - Check!

2) CD ROM copy of slideshow - Check!

3) My one and only hemp suit - Check!

4) Pocket PC - Oops! Left it at my apartment back in B-Town. There goes one less bright idea to try out.

So there I am sitting at my computer desk Sunday morning, two days before I am supposed to present at the ACS, without a car in the world. 

My roommate had split town two days earlier to make glee with his shorty, (who by the way is not so short).  I open up my Skype phone list that I used to use before those hot shots with the pretty green logo started charging.  Maybe it will jog my memory of forgotten friends, I think to myself, pretending like I had that many friends to forget in the first place.  Sure, you claim you have lots of friends, on Facebook, on Myspace, on Skype, on Second Life, on WoW, on Counterstrike, on Everquest, on your favorite blog, but how many friends do you have that are friendly enough to give you a ride to Ch

Gamma ray bursts (GRBs), the brief flashes of light signalling distant, extremely energetic events, have been elusive targets for astronomical observation. (It's something like the fairground game of Whack-a-Mole:by the time you're aware of the GRB, it's vanished, and you have no way of knowing where the next one will appear.) An orbiting observatory that quickly alerts ground-based astronomers about GRBs has allowed a very quick response and an unprecedented look at the GRBs' aftermath.

Yesterday I presented my second talk, this time on the use of blogs and wikis to do laboratory research. This was under the Chemical Education symposium: Communicating Chemistry. Most of the talks were about teaching so it was perhaps not the best audience but that doesn't concern me as much since I started recording my talks at conferences. And if I hadn't presented there I would have missed meeting Thomas Poon, whose high quality organic chemistry pre-lectures I have used in my classes as an extra resource for a while.

The NPR interview on Open Science I discussed two weeks ago has aired and is now available. I think it was very well balanced. The positive aspects of not losing failed experiments was weighed against the difficulties in publishing in some journals and of deriving profit.

This post is about an article by Schacter et al (pdf) regarding how the constructiveness of memories may crucially be due to the need to simulate future scenarios. But before I go to the main course, I would like to touch upon a starter: Jeff Hawkins Heirarchical Temporla Memory (HTM) hypothesis.

I have been watching way too much CSI. For those who haven’t seen the popular American television show, it is about a team of highly skilled Crime Scene Investigators who use keen observational skills and high tech gadgetry to solve crimes each week in Las Vegas (The franchise also includes Miami and New York).

Scientists at the University of Illinois have fabricated the world’s smallest chain-mail fabric. Combined with existing processing techniques, the flexible, metallic fabric holds promise for fully engineered smart textiles.

"The miniature fabric is an important step toward creating textiles where structure and electronics can be designed, integrated and controlled from the ground up," said Chang Liu, a Willett Scholar and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Illinois.

Micrograph of released metallic fabric that is expanded to the maximum area. Photo courtesy Chang Liu