Giant Pacific octopus. Credit: © pr2is / Fotolia

A new type of user-interactive electronic skin, with a color change perceptible to the human eye, has been achieved with a much-reduced level of strain. This could have applications in robotics, prosthetics and wearable technology. The ability of some animals, including chameleons, octopus, and squid, to change their skin colour for camouflage, temperature control, or communication is well known.

While science has been able to replicate these abilities with artificial skin, the colour changes are often only visible to the naked eye when the material is put under huge mechanical strain...

The new device is smaller than a thumbnail with a size of 0.1 x 4mm, and could be integrated into everyday electronic devices like smartphones. Credit: CUDOS

Researchers develop new platform making next-generation electronic devices more advanced. Integrated circuits, ie chips, are used in everyday electronic equipment like mobile phones and computers. It is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece of semiconductor material, normally silicon. But this material has some limitations when it comes to processing data. To overcome this, researchers are developing optical circuits made of chalcogenide glass. This is used for ultrafast telecommunication networks, transferring information at the speed of light.

Integrating these glass optical circuits into silicon chips could lead to a...

A new study suggests that distant “long-period” comets — which take more than 200 years to orbit the sun — are more common than previously thought. This illustration shows how the researchers used data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft to determine the nucleus sizes of several of these distant comets. They subtracted a model of how dust and gas behave in comets in order to obtain the core size. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Comets that take more than 200 years to make one revolution around the sun are notoriously difficult to study. Because they spend most of their time far from our area of the solar system, many “long-period comets” will never approach the sun in a person’s lifetime...