Stenocara beetles live in the Namib Desert, one of the driest places on Earth, and have had to evolve effective methods of capturing water. A team of researchers have created a composite nanomaterial that collects airborne water from mist and fog based on the mechanism used by the beetle, which is much more effective than current mist-nets.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Europe is due to come online next year, but the physics boffins already know what they want to do with it well in advance. While colliding particles together at a fraction less than the speed of light, they hope to observe SuperWIMPS (Weakly Interactive Massive Particles), which are the latest hunting ground for that ‘dark matter’ stuff that they still haven’t pinned down yet.

Humans, as a race, are converging with our technologies at an ever faster pace. Science fiction has long discussed the fusion of man and machine, and the realisation of some of these pipedreams is approaching fast. Cnet news has a good overview article on these developments, which they’re dubbing ‘The Next Big Bang’. Well worth a visit.

Parachutes were an invention that revolutionised the delivery of troops into battle. But they’re inherently limited – beyond a small degree of control, it’s a case of just jumping out and floating down to where the wind takes you. A German company is trying to address this problem with the development of modular carbon-fibre wings for paratroops which will enable them to swoop, eagle-like, over distances of up to 200km before they reach the ground.

NASA’s Spitzer telescope has captured an unexpected anomaly. It seems that a stellar corpse of the type known as a neutron star is emitting continuous powerful streams of matter into space, in a manner only previously observed in black holes. That’s another few pages out of the cosmology rulebook.