Conventional motion capture for film, like Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and game production ("Mass Effect 3") involves multiple cameras and actors festooned with markers but the future of motion capture may look much different.

A new technique not only captures the 3D poses of actors, like with traditional motion capture systems, but derives "biped controllers", which are programs that incorporate the underlying physics of the motion. Bipedal controllers generate the poses by computing the forces acting on the body and integrating them over time.

It's American election season and that means it is time for psychologists to introduce racism again - not whether you are racist, but how much.

Well, only white people are, said a talk at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association. Even if they do not have any racist thoughts or lock their car door when they see a young, black man on the sidewalk and voted for Obama in 2008, white people still are; and their racial attitudes, both conscious and unconscious, may be a significant factor in this year's U.S. presidential election. A survey says so.

Scientists have combined the power of two kinds of microscope to produce a 3-dimensional movie of how cells ‘swallow’ nutrients and other molecules by engulfing them - the first to follow changes in the shape of the cell’s membrane and track proteins thought to influence those changes.

This ‘swallowing’, called endocytosis, is involved in a variety of crucial tasks. It is used by brain cells relaying information to each other and is also hijacked by many viruses, which use it to invade their host’s cells. When a cell is about to swallow some molecules, a dent appears in the cell’s membrane, and gradually expands inwards, pinching off to form a little pouch, or vesicle, that transports molecules into the cell.

Viscous materials do not follow standard laws - below a sub-melting point threshold, anyway. 

Glass-formers are a class of highly viscous liquid materials that have the consistency of honey and turn into brittle glass once cooled to sufficiently low temperatures. Researchers have examined the behavior of these materials as they are on the verge of turning into glass.  Although science does not yet thoroughly understand their behavior when approaching the glassy state, the new study relies on an additional type of dynamic measurements and clearly shows that they do not behave like more simple fluids, referred to as "activated" fluids. This is contrary to recent reports.

Banks and brokerage houses employ a lot of physicists - it was a big fad of the last decade because the industry discovered that physicists knew how to make models and economists did not.

But physicists don't understand economics and the behavior of people any more than economists do and it hasn't worked.  No rational model predicts that some trader will just go crazy and lose billions and automated schemes have been a disaster. Yet there is hope.

An experiment using single particles of light, photons, have produced and implemented them intoa quantum key distribution (QKD) link. The single photons were produced using two devices made of semiconductor nano-structures that emitted a photon each time they were excited by an electrical pulse. The two devices were made up of different semiconductor materials so they emitted photons with different colors.  

QKD is a process that enables two parties, ‘Alice’ and ‘Bob’, to share a secret key that can then be used to protect data they want to send to each other. The secret key is made up of a stream of photons that ‘spin’ in different directions – vertically, horizontally or diagonally – according to the sender’s preferences.