Flower-like liquid crystal lens grows like a pearl
Tiny lenses blossom around a silicon bead dropped into liquid crystal – they could one day be used in solar panels and surgical cameras
Ultrasound killed the surgical star
From brain to prostate, focused waves of sound can reach places a scalpel can't, putting us on the brink of a surgical shake-up, finds Helen Thomson
Dust factory seen in the heart of an exploding star
The expanding remnant of a supernova holds a vast core of dust, which could help explain how the universe got so dusty
Anybody out there? The how and what of alien life
Three new books bring us up to speed on extraterrestrial life, its prospects and possible forms – but it remains "queerer than we can suppose"
Renewable village offers lifeline to Fukushima farmers
Work has started on the Renewable Energy Village, a Japanese project that will grow crops beneath solar panels on land contaminated by fallout in 2011
Astrophile: Trio of dead stars could take on Einstein
The first example of a three-star system containing only stellar corpses could be used to probe the nature of gravity
Robots aren't yet ready to work alone in space
Twenty years after fixing the Hubble Space Telescope by hand, former NASA astronaut Tom Akers believes the trickiest jobs in space still need the human touch
Playing make-believe with history is a risky business
Heritage tourism is big business – but chasing dollars by mythologising the past can be costly for people in the present
Buoyant magma behind calamitous supervolcano eruptions
The force that resists as you push a beach ball underwater is responsible for Earth's largest volcanic eruptions. And they are more common than we thought
High-fibre diet may protect against allergic asthma
For the first time, work in mice shows that dietary fibre, found in fruit and vegetables, influences gut microbes in ways that affect how easily airways become inflamed
Stonehenge Man: not just a pretty face
Forensic analysis of a prehistoric skull gives the UK's most iconic monument a human face
Entangled spies: Why the NSA wants a quantum computer
If the NSA succeeds in building a quantum computer, what might the agency use it for and how could citizens preserve their privacy?
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