Autonomous flying surveillance is a minor holy grail at the moment, hence the interest in a novel new material. Electroactive paper (EAPap) can be made to bend and flex under the influence of an electrical field, thanks to the thin coating of gold on its surfaces and some ionic effects. Researchers hope this property could be exploited to produce ultralight surveillance ‘dragonflies’ that fly by flapping EAPap wings.

Everyone knows that you shouldn’t look straight at the sun. And why would you need to, given that TRACE – the ‘Transition Region and Coronal Explorer’ satellite has being do it on our behalf since 1998? So save your retinas, and check out the archives of solar images it has gathered over the years. As balls of fusion go, the sun is a beautiful thing.

We’re still (regrettably) far from full-on neural implants, but that’s not to say that people aren’t working towards the cyberpunk gadgets I’ve wanted for years. Boffins at NTT DoCoMo in Japan have built a ‘wearable headphone gaze tracker’ that can record the events of your day and what you spent the most attention on. As is always the case for early adopters, the first prototypes are more than a little cumbersome and clunky…

Semiconductor manufacturers are continuing their quest to make their circuits at smaller and smaller resolutions; late next year should see the first 45-nanometer architectures being made. But constantly shrinking the devices adds a number of challenges to the manufacturing process, which will have to be overcome to stay ahead and stay profitable in a fiercly competitive field.

Another week, another ‘killer app’ for carbon nanotubes. This time, it is suggested that those little cylinders could be used to make the desalination of sea-water more efficient, lowering the cost of clean drinking water to some of the dryest parts of the world. Who knows what will come of this idea, though – maybe we should take it with a pinch of salt?