Mechanics of knots

Pluto up close

Goodbye (Mr) Chips

Super beetroot

Keep it snappy?

Wear your OLEDs

Fold it like Samsung

Test your science

Try the Pew Research science knowledge test. Of the original 3278 people tested the average score was 8 out of 12 correct.

Researchers at Aalto University and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland have succeeded in developing a method which helps to improve the relative uncertainty in measuring the luminous efficacy of LEDs.

In Brief

Massachusetts Institute of Technology has retained the top spot in the QS World University Rankings with Harvard University coming second. However Stanford is top of the Reuters Top 100 World’s Most Innovative Universities Rankings.

Cool it

An interesting but simple piece of work at Stanford University is aimed at improving the efficiency of solar cells. The hotter they get, the less efficient they become at converting photons into electricity. The Stanford solution is to shunt away the heat. The concept is based on a thin, patterned silica material laid on top of a traditional solar cell. The material is transparent to the visible sunlight but absorbs and emits thermal radiation.

Molecular Beam Epitaxy, A short history

By John Orton and Tom Foxon, former colleagues of RTA Instruments' Jeff Harris when at one of the leading UK commercial laboratories in the early days of MBE.

Noble bees and chickens

This year’s Ig Nobel Prize list once again highlighted the magnificent diversity of scientific research. The Physiology and Entomology Prize goes jointly to J. Schmidt for creating the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which rates the relative pain people feel when stung by insects; and to M. Smith arranging for honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body to learn which locations are the least painful (the skull) and which are the most painful (the nostril). The Biology Prize rightly went to a Chilean team for observing (and videoing) that when you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken then walks in a manner similar to that in which dinosaurs are thought to have walked.

From smartphones and coffee machines to aeroplanes and medical diagnostics we daily embrace and rely on science and technology. However. despite it being quicker and more accurate, 72 percent of US drivers would not trust self-parking vehicle technology. This might be a reaction to a perceived slight on our self-esteem of being capable drivers, with the passage of time leading to increased adoption and acceptance. Yet on the wider topic, there is concern about machines and artificial intelligence taking over the world from mere humans. Perhaps like with driving we just fear someone or something else doing a better job than we ever could? Hopefully as the late Terry Pratchett wrote in Good Omens: The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.