What is five times the tensile strength of steel and  the best currently available synthetic fibers?  If you read the title you already know. 

 Spider thread is a fascinating and often-studied material but no one has managed to produce it on an industrial scale. Scientists of the TU Muenchen (TUM) and the Universitaet Bayreuth (UBT) say they have now succeeded in discovering another secret of silk proteins and the mechanism that imparts spider silk with its strength.

How do spiders manage to first store the silk proteins in the silk gland and to then assemble them in the spinning passage in a split second to form threads with these extraordinary characteristics? And what exactly gives the threads their tremendous tensile strength?

In the modern world, even residents of London generate more intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) data than human operators can collate and that can severely limit the ability of an analyst to generate intelligence reports in operationally relevant time frames, like when ambassadors and looters are rioting and claiming it is for social justice.

Naval Research Laboratory may have the answer - a multi-user tracking capability which enables the system to manage collection of imagery without continuous monitoring by a ground or airborne operator, thus requiring fewer personnel and freeing up operational assets.

Studies....So Many Studies...

MSNBC reported on the latest set of new NASA prizes:

NASA today announced three new competitions offering a total of $5 million in prizes — and only one of them involves actually putting something in outer space.

I'm a huge fan of prizes.  Although I love NASA's work, I dream of a day where fully half of NASA's workload consists of evaluating prize entries by indy companies that are hitting specific get-us-to-space benchmarks.

Weakened immunity is a serious issue for older people. Because our immune systems become less effective as we age we suffer from more infections and these are often more severe. This is an important process that has probably evolved to prevent certain cancers, but as the proportion of inactive cells builds up over time our defenses become weakened. This takes a serious toll on health and quality of life. 

Research in the Journal of Immunology outlines a new mechanism controlling aging in white blood cells. The research opens up the possibility of temporarily reversing the effects of aging on immunity and could, in the future, allow for the short-term boosting of the immune systems of older people. 

We all remember the earthquake and ensuing tsunami that hit Japan (see figure 1) and caused major troubles in the Fukushima nuclear power plant, which was severely damaged. Problems with containing radiation followed, leading to the pumping of huge amounts of seawater into the reactor, in an attempt to cool it down.