You have noticed the way water flows around boulders in a fast-moving river, creating areas of stillness and intense motion.

It's possible to control the forces of fluid flow at the smallest levels by placing tiny pillars in microfluidic channels. By altering the speed of the fluid, and stacking many pillars, with different widths, placements and orientations, in the fluid's path, they showed that it is possible to create an impressive array of controlled flows.

Why does this matter?

Far more people are willing to donate their eyes to research than actually are registered to donate, according to a paper in
Current Eye Research.

While demand for tissue remains high, the number of human eyes donated for research declined 28 percent between 1997 and 2004, said Andrew Williams, a third-year Michigan State University College of Human Medicine student.

Of roughly 200 patients with eye diseases surveyed in the study, 90 percent said they were willing to donate their eyes.

Game theory is used today in a wide range of areas such as economics, social sciences, biology and philosophy, gives a mathematical framework for describing a situation of conflict or cooperation between intelligent rational players.  

The central goal is to predict the outcome of the process. In the early 1950s, John Nash showed that the strategies adopted by the players form an equilibrium point (so-called Nash equilibrium) for which none of the players has any incentive to change strategy.

The querelle on the device patented by Andrea Rossi, the E-CAT, which allegedly produces heat from nuclear fusion processes inside a small cylindrical reactor fueled with Hydrogen and Nickel powder, continues to draw the attention of the gullible as well as that of the knowledgeable. It is just entertaining to both!

Sociology might actually have an explanation for the odd popularity of Tori Amos songs - depressing music might evoke positive emotions, according to a new paper. Obviously depending on your age you can just insert Joy Division or The Smiths where it says Tori Amos and get the idea. Some music can be a real downer.

But some music always has been. There is a reason why funeral music uses minor keys - and movies have used it for similar emotional effect since their inception.

With increasing Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations, major patent expiries and generic competition cutting future potential revenue there is no saturation of drug development, there is instead the opposite - but one area shows potential growth: drug delivery systems.

Among the 15 drug delivery systems surveyed by Frost&Sullivan for their Drug Delivery Technology: End-User Preferences, Utilization and Perceptions analysis, physicians preferred topical delivery, either as a transdermal patch or topical gel/cream, and expressed willingness to switch their current mode of therapy to one available in these forms.

MicroAire has entered the Biologics market with the launch of the StromaCell mechanical cell-separation device, which is is designed to prepare an autologous nucleated cell concentrate from a sample of adipose tissue, or fat, at the patient's point of care.

The StromaCell's closed-system design uses centrifugation to concentrate a stromal-vascular fraction from adipose tissue, for which there are numerous applications.

A potential new pathway to treat cancer is actually called the Hippo pathway - and it's a key control in how our organs are perfectly suited to our bodies, despite differences in size. 

Using mice genetically lacking an enzyme called Set7, the results show that methylation of a protein called Yap is critical for the function of the Hippo pathway. Loss of the Set7 enzyme resulted in cell growth and larger organs.  

An international team that developed a new gene therapy approach to treatment of Wiskott-Aldrich Syndrome, a fatal inherited form of immunodeficiency has reported results.

Wiskott-Aldrich Syndrome is a disorder that weakens the body's immune system. It is caused by a mutation in a gene that encodes the protein WASP. The most often used therapy is a bone marrow or stem cell transplant from a matching donor, often a sibling or relative. It can be curative for some patients, mostly those who have a strongly matching donor.

In October of 2011, NASA's Operation IceBridge flights over the continent over Antarctica spotted a rift that soon became the focus of international scientific attention. Seeing the rift grow and eventually form a 280-square-mile ice island gave researchers an opportunity to gather data that promises to improve our understanding of how glaciers calve.