More news from the nanoscale – electrical charges can travel along conductors made of chromophores faster than any recorded speed for organic semiconductors by a factor of three. Chromophores are the parts of molecules that give them a colour, and they react to electrons by releasing more light of a specific wavelength. All this heavy science means there is a working proof for electronic conductors that function at the 10 nanometer scale.

Ways of searching for life on Mars are ten a penny, but here’s the latest suggestion, based on studies performed on rocks in Earth deserts. These rocks are covered with ‘desert varnish’, a patina of silica and other elements deposited on the rocks over time by wind and weather, trapping fragments of organic DNA as the layers are laid down. If we can find Martian rocks with a similar coating, a vigorous scraping of samples could yield evidence of life in the Red Planet’s past.

More storage space, more! The call for capacity increases in digital media shows little sign of abating, and the manufacturers are answering by developing ways of squeezing more bytes than ever before into a single unit. Seagate enters the fray by patenting a hard-drive that has a lubricant sealed into it, enabling the drive head to move faster across the platter surfaces, which are heated to improve capacity.

Plastics from crude oil fractions? Not for much longer, at least not in a financially viable way. Help is at hand for our plastic-hungry civilisations, however – Wisconsin researchers have found more efficient ways of making the same polymers used as the start-points for plastics using fructose (fruit sugar) as their raw material. It’s always been theoretically possible, but it’s amazing what shrinking profit margins will do for research into efficiency.