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A soft "tissue paper" made from normally brittle germanium and silicon contains individual fibers as strong as bulletproof Kevlar. Woven into traditional fabric or embedded in hard plastics, the new nanowires could stop bullets, harvest solar energy, or perform dozens of other tasks, according to a recent report in Discovery.com's Discovery News.

Read more here.

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The Pentagon is launching projects BaTMAN and RoBIN to create super-soldiers

DARPA, the Department of Defense's R&D agency, has two new projects: BaTMAN (Biochronicity and Temporal Mechanisms Arising in Nature) and RoBIN (Robustness of Biologically-Inspired Networks). Their goals? To increase troop efficiency using quantum mechanics. They're making superheroes!

Well, not exactly. The purpose of BaTMAN and RoBIN is to explore ways in which quantum principles and the understanding of human interaction could improve troop efficacy. Sounds vague? Hey, it's top secret. Here's the official description of BaTMAN...

... and RoBIN.

What I like about these acronyms is that they fit the Dynamic Duo's modi operandi to a tee. Batman works like an unflinching automaton, micromanaging every aspect of crime-fighting with clockwork precision. Similarly, Robin's perpetual kidnappings caused crises Batman was forced to react to. Plus, inexplicable disasters on the set of Batman always kept Burt Ward on his toes.

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Some rightly feared what might happen if Doktor Archeville got a chance to study Protectron.

Their fears were not unfounded.

Developed by the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, part of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the fully functional anthropomorphic robot hand can withstand major collisions and even direct pounding with a hammer, baseball bat or metal pipe, making it an essential part of future indestructible humanoid robots.
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Tonight on Jeopardy!, the IBM Challenge will feature IBM's Watson (an AI designed to answer questions posed in natural language) facing off against two former Jeopardy! champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, in two matches to be played over three days (Feb 14th-16th). The winner of the competition will receive $1 million, while the second- and third-place contestants will receive $300,000 and $200,000, respectively. Jennings and Rutter have pledged to donate half their winnings to charity, while IBM will donate 100% of Watson's winnings to charity. This is the first ever man-vs.-machine competition in Jeopardy!'s history

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Wonder Woman as proof of abiogenesis?

A team of applied physicists at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Princeton, and Brandeis have demonstrated the formation of semipermeable vesicles from inorganic clay.

The research, published online in the journal Soft Matter, shows that clay vesicles provide an ideal container for the compartmentalization of complex organic molecules.

The authors say the discovery opens the possibility that primitive cells might have formed inside inorganic clay microcompartments.

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