We've seen plenty of ideas and even a patent related to the employment of human skin in the transport of data. We've also seen our fair share of bone conducting audio products come to market in the last few years. Now in a synthesis of the two, scientists at Rice University have developed a technique whereby rattles to the skeleton can transmit information to gadgets and medical devices strapped on (or inside of) your meat sack. Their approach has resulted in "amazingly few errors" even when using low-powered vibrations. Great, soon our handshakes will transfer both biological and software-related viruses? Oh boy.

[Thanks, Geetu]

While most folks get real excited over a cam like the Seitz 6x17 Digital that shoots at 160 megapixels, Rice University researchers have decided that less is, in fact, more. Scientists at the esteemed academic ivory tower in Houston, Texas have determined a way to build a single pixel camera that they claim will be cheaper way to take pictures in the future. Using one photodiode and one digital micromirror device (DMD) -- which is used primarily in digital TVs and projectors to convert digital information to light (and vice versa) via its thousands of tiny mirrors -- light is "shined onto the DMD and bounced from there though a second lens that focuses the light reflected by the DMD onto a single photodiode." Then, the DMD's mirrors shuffle at random for each new light sample, creating a new pixel value. The pair of lenses and the DMD thus compress data from a bigger image (left) into a smaller approximation (right). That said, don't expect this technology to make your consumer digicam any cheaper real soon, as the prototype requires five minutes for the engineers to take a picture using this technique, and even then, they can only shoot still objects.

You know, we were sitting in our editors' meeting the other day, and we all came to a very serious consensus about our reportage these days. There's been a serious dearth of vortices in our articles, and so we're going to do our darndest to bring you more coverage of these truly awesome swirling clouds. Fortunately for us, those egghead physicists down at Rice University know how to read our minds. A team over in Houston used a scanning ion microscope to create and measure "ultra-thin circular disks of soft magnetic cobalt" ranging in diameter from one micron to 38 microns. According to a press release issued by the university, the six micron wide (about the size of a red blood cell) magnetic vortex is "a cone-like structure that's created in the magnetic field at the disk when all the magnetic moments of the atoms in the disk align into uniform concentric circles." (Whatever that means.) Lead researcher Carl Rau, professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University, said that this new advance may lead to storage densities "in the range of terabits per square inch," and went on to say that "magnetic processors" and "high-speed magnetic RAM" may also be in the works. Now that we think about it, this is probably what would happen to the offspring of Storm and Magneto too.