One morning last March, engineers at General Electric’s Nela Park research lab in Cleveland, Ohio, opened a century-old time capsule hidden in a corner stone of Building 307. Inside the cavity and beneath a layer of sand was a standard 40-watt Mazda incandescent bulb made at the time of Thomas Edison.

The engineers brushed off the dirt, screwed the lamp into a socket, and slowly powered it on. The bulb’s soft yellow glow was like a faint echo from the Big Bang that set GE on course to become a global industrial powerhouse.

An assembly of thousands of nano-machines has produced a coordinated contraction movement - like that of muscle fibers, and it even extended to around ten micrometers, like the movements of muscular fibers.

The work provides an experimental validation of a biomimetic approach that has been conceptualized for years in nanoscience and the researchers believe this broadens applications in robotics, information storage and obviously artificial muscles themselves.

Dogs are susceptible to contagious yawning just like people, says an article in Animal Cognition, but only after they get older. Dogs, like humans, show a gradual development of susceptibility to contagious yawning and the new paper says dogs catch yawns from humans. But Only dogs above seven months of age catch these human yawns - younger dogs are immune to the contagion.

Contagious yawning has been researched in humans, adult chimpanzees, baboons and dogs, some speculate it can be used as a measure of empathy. Empathy, mimicking the emotional responses of others, is difficult to measure directly, but contagious yawning allows assessment of a behavioral empathetic response, the Swedish researchers say. 

A dynamic gel made of DNA mechanically responds to stimuli in much the same way that cells do. This DNA gel, at only 10 microns in width, is roughly the size of a eukaryotic cell, the type of cell of which humans are made. The miniscule gel contains within it stiff DNA nanotubes linked together by longer, flexible DNA strands that serve as the substrate for molecular motors.

We won't have artificial muscles and self-propelled goo just yet, but Omar Saleh and Deborah Fygenson of UC Santa Barbara feel like they have gotten a lot closer.

Blasting over two million lights years from the center of a distant galaxy, PKS 0637-752 is a 'supersonic jet' of material that looks a lot like the afterburner flow of a fighter jet - but in this case the jet engine is a supermassive black hole and the jet material is actually moving at closer to the speed of light.

This megaparsec, galaxy-scale jet has bright and dark regions, similar to the phenomenon in  afterburner exhaust called ‘shock diamonds.’ This new image of the previously studied jet reveals regularly spaced areas that are brighter than the rest of the jet in a pattern that echoes the way the afterburner from a jet engine has brighter diamond-shaped areas in its general glow.