A scientist at Heriot-Watt University has invented a video camera that can discern 30 times as many colors as the human eye. Potential applications are as diverse as identifying camouflage, finding mines, detecting cancer and screening babies for vision problems.

A real life scientist says that Santa Claus can too deliver toys to everyone in the world in one night. He just needs a little help from some theoretically plausible but as yet unknown tech, like relativity clouds and nanotech assemblers. [fark]

Sometimes it’s worth simply facing facts and admitting that nature often has the most elegant solutions to engineering problems, especially at microscopic scales. Australian scientist James Friend certainly thinks so; he’s trying to design tiny robots that can travel through the human body, ‘Fantastic Vovage‘-style, which is why he has cribbed the idea for a micromotor from something that does the job very effectively already – the E. coli bacterium.

New nuclear research in Europe, looking at the so-called ‘4th generation’ reactor designs, seems to promise a ‘closed’ fuel cycle that recycles almost all of the heavy isotopes produced by the initial fission of uranium, leading to a more sustainable form of nuclear power station. The only problem is that the technology to actually build these reactors is still decades in the future, which is why it is heartening to learn that India is looking into using thorium reactors to solve its energy needs.

The New Atlantis has an exhaustive survey of the strengths, weaknesses and paradoxes of American military power. To boil it down to a sentence, despite it’s unparalleled technological advantages, “the combination of moral restraint and bureaucratic sluggishness that defines America’s military culture may leave the U.S. at a comparative disadvantage against nimble, networked, nihilistic enemies.” [geekpress]