No, not Cletus (warning: big Flash site, arbitrarily gratuitous pop culture reference) but the real deal. A substance called Belousov-Zhabotinsky gels, which undulate in the presence of the right kind of catalyst, have been modeled theoretically, making it easier to build devices built around the gels.

Improving the environment is best achieved by raising awareness. Here’s a campaign that is sure to raise more that just awareness, though – Japanese undergarment manufacturer Triumph Lingerie have unveiled the ‘No! Shopping Bag Bra’, which (as the name almost suggests) is a bra made from recycled plastic bottles that converts into a stylish shopping bag accessory. Designed to promote a new recycling law, one assumes that very few of these garments will actually be used for their designed purpose – although the thought of a long queue of pretty Japanese girls struggling to take of their bras before they reach the supermarket checkout probably has a lot of retail workers in ebullient pro-recycling frames of mind.

Far from being a euphemism for some obscure act of violence, an ‘Edinburgh Duck’ is in fact a wave-power generator designed in the 1970s. The old design is being revamped as a self-powered desalination device which its inventor hopes will benefit countries that have to rely on power-hungry desalination plants for their fresh water supplies. Whether the Duck can compete against these large-scale projects while staying affordable remains to be seen.

Well, the blogosphere is heaving today – and mostly with relief, it seems (but that could just be my partisan reading habits coming into play). Whichever way you voted, though, congratulations; the US is the biggest democracy on the face of the planet, and it’s great to see that the system can work the way it is supposed to. Now, if you can just make it plain to the people who decide such things that e-voting is not a mature enough technology to handle such an important process, you’ll be doing the whole planet another big favour.

Medical science is still a fair distance away from being able to simply grow replacement organs for patients in need of transplants, notwithstanding recent hyperbolic headlines. What can be done is to use cells from donor kidneys to grow more of themselves for use in ‘renal assist devices’ – special filter tubes used in dialysis machines that extend the life expectancy of renal failure patients by mimicking the processes of a real kidney more closely. The only problem is scaling up the technology to meet the potential demand while staying within FDA regulations.