JJ Nitro

5 October 2007, for National Geographic News

Sword swallowing is surprisingly safe, in turns out, as long as you don't hiccup or get distracted by a wily macaw on your shoulder.

The next generation of battlefield weapons might be bombs that make enemy soldiers fall in lust with each other.

3 October 2007, for New Scientist

A bacteria-powered cellphone charger could keep people in developing countries talking, even when they live far from the grid.

Cellphones are increasingly vital to everyday life, and the economy of many developing countries. But in some areas electricity to charge them can be hard to come by.

3 October 2007, for National Geographic News

A warm belt of dust around a young star is offering astronomers a glimpse of what Earth might have looked like when it was just beginning to take shape.

The star is part of a binary system known as HD 113766 that lies 424 light-years away.

9 September 2007, for New Scientist

Boxes that sense the weight of their contents and books that talk back when pages are turned could be developed using technology being tested by researchers at MIT in the US.

They are making paper with wires, sensors, and computer chips embedded, a technology dubbed 'Pulp-based' computing.

7 September 2007, in Science

Women have an evolved knack for remembering where to find edible plant matter, a new study argues.

Rafts of studies have shown that men trump women at many spatial skills, a spillover from our past, say evolutionary psychologists, when men were the hunters and women the gatherers. Studies have also shown that women beat out men in recalling objects' locations. But no one had tested this skill with foods.

7 September 2007, for National Geographic News

The seemingly spic-and-span rooms where NASA assembles its spacecraft aren't quite as clean as experts had thought, a new study suggests.

A surprising diversity of bacteria thrive in at least three of the space agency's so-called clean rooms, genetic testing has revealed.

6 September 2007, for National Geographic News

Imagine origami that can fold itself into the shape of a fish or a slug—and then swim or crawl around under its own power.

Researchers at Harvard University have created thin sheets of elastic film studded with rat heart muscle cells that are bringing that fantastic scenario closer to reality.

6 September 2007, for New Scientist

Thin sheets of polymer coated with living muscle could be used to test new drugs, repair damaged body parts, or even create life-like bio-machines, researchers say.

The Harvard University team created the "muscular thin films" by attaching muscle cells to elastic polymer sheets. By laying down striped patterns of proteins on these polymers, they were able to make the muscle cells arrange themselves into muscle fibres, similar to those in animals.

4 September 2007, for National Geographic News

Swirling eddies and chaotic vortices are crucial to the formation of new planets, suggests a counterintuitive new study.

Such turbulence is vital to helping planets go from "toddler" to "teenage" size by helping rocks and boulders stick together, the computer simulation hints.

27 August 2007, for National Geographic News

Bacteria can survive in deep freeze for hundreds of thousands of years by staying just alive enough to keep their DNA in good repair, a new study says.

In earlier work, researchers had found ancient bacteria in permafrost and in deep ice cores from Antarctica.