Bodies moving in liquid experience a great deal of friction, something you know from experience if you’ve ever tried aqua aerobics. In fact, it’s physically impossible for a liquid not to create this resistance, no matter the liquid or the body in question. At least, that was true until some USC researchers found a molecule that, when properly stimulated, will actually force water away, allowing it to move without resistance.

As Geekpress points out, APOD’s time-lapse animation showing Earth and the asteroids that swarm around it looks like the old Asteroids video game. Only the consequence for not putting shields up in time is a lot scarier. (Caveat: the animation exaggerates the size of the Earth and asteroids — none in the animation made it inside the moon’s orbit.)

Cryptology is a big deal in the information age. Creating an uncrackable key is the holy grail of the field, and scientists at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Tokyo reckon that encoding data with the radio signals blasted out by quasars far away in space may be effective, due to the unpredictable nature of the signals in question.

Virginia Commonwealth University chemists have discovered a new method of synthesising nanoparticles that gives greater control over the dimensions and properties of the end product. The secret? Shove the reagents in a conventional microwave oven – this makes the reaction much faster, and all the little rods and wires arrange themselves into nice orderly arrays.

All sorts of suggestions have been made to explain the mysterious dips in biodiversity that have occured on Earth every 62 million years. And here is the latest one – our solar system’s motion through the galactic disc, an up-and-down bobbing course, could be exposing it to fluctuations in the amount of cosmic rays it receives.