Half-biological and half-synthetic, an army of thousands of wrecking balls are contained within Dr. Metin Sitti's Carnegie Mellon laboratory.  Once incited, they keep moving to the death.  They run on sugar.  And they can all be taken down by penicillin. 

Sitti’s army is a cadre of Serratia marcensens bacteria-coated polystyrene microbeads, propelled by the bacteria’s innate restlessness.  To Sitti, recruiting bacteria to form the propulsion side of a microprojectile is more than a fun day in the lab.  These tiny living robots are the foundation for the future of biointegrated micromachines.

The latest news on napping would have you believe that it’s a harbinger of doom.  The Research Institute at the California Pacific Medical center studied communities of elderly women and linked napping and excess sleep in general to increased death from anything. By this logic, the entire nap-happy nation of Spain should watch out for falling pianos.

It’s been a while since Popeye taught us to eat our spinach; vegetables are due for a makeover.  “Whatever sparks their imagination seems to spark their appetite,” says Cornell researcher Colin Payne of a new study led by Brian Wansink of Cornell’s Food and Branding lab.  This research shows that children eat significantly more vegetables when their food has been excitingly renamed.

Internet phenomena has long been used by advertisers to gather data, form hypotheses, and test them in the form of ad serving—science is starting to get smart to the data-gathering possibilities spawned by voluntary internet activity. 

The most recent headline to this effect is Everquest 2 research at U of Minnesota. Jaideep Srivastava, et al are using Everquest chat logs for social network analysis, similar to the way community interactions among flesh-and-blood people. 

My grandfather had a special room in his cellar for the various presses and casks he used to make his notoriously mouth-wrenching red wine.  I have friends whose microbrew apparatus takes up the entire spare bedroom of their house, like a permanently boozy-smelling houseguest.  Accordingly, I thought that fermenting was best left to the hardcore hobbyists-- too complicated a pursuit for the average partly-stocked kitchen.  Turns out, it's pretty simple. I recently made ginger ale with only items I had laying around my kitchen.