The world’s military are always at the forefront of technology adoption. DefenseTech reports on the latest piece of haptics kit the US Navy wants to equip their troops with – ‘cammos’ are: “(an) unobtrusive, real time, bi-directional communication system that can be embedded in the combat attire of the counter-terrorism dismount warfighter for the capture of individual location and action information with subsequent presentation to the unit commander and other team members via the tactile modality”. Which means (in English) a suit that allows two-way communication on the battlefield through the sense of touch.

It’s all happening up there in the International Space Station. NASA announces that they have a bunch of miniature ‘droid’ satellite designs roving the corridors, in an attempt for them to learn how to fly in formation. Though maybe they should have them search for the missing equipment first…

Every driver on the planet must at some point have wished that their car could drive itself, letting them get on with more important tasks like sleeping, eating breakfast or checking out foxy pedestrians. The dream is a step closer to reality thanks to a roboticist at the University of Southern California, who has modded a car with a navigation computer based on the hippocampus, a part of the human brain that performs similar tasks. Early results seem to be quite promising, but whether it can figure out all the crafty backroutes to avoid traffic is another question.

Sometimes you need to keep things smaller than a six-pack of beers at a low temperature. A pair of theoretical physicists have proposed a theoretical design for a nanoscale cooling device based on Brownian motion principles. It would take a lot of fancy molecular footwork to make a working model of it at the moment, but they’ve thrown down a guantlet for future experimenters.