Evolutionary success is all about looking out for number one - or so most biologists would tell you. The genes that do the best job of passing themselves along to the next generation, whether by brute selfishness or canny cooperation, are the ones that flourish - a view most memorably championed by Richard Dawkins more than 30 years ago in his bestselling book The Selfish Gene.

This relentless focus on the gene may not tell the whole story, however. A small but growing coterie of evolutionary biologists argue that it leaves us blind to crucial evolutionary processes at higher scales - among groups, species and even whole ecosystem. If they are right, the popular view of evolution and the biological world needs a radical shake-up.

UNITX (united networks international transport exchange) is a project that intends to fundamentally change the way our economy
works today. UNITX is a system of corridors located underground in larger urban areas. In these corridors the pictured logibots
are traveling and transporting goods from house to house. The logibots are able to transport up to 4 boxes with dimensions of up to 60x60x45 cm. They can travel with a top speed of 50 km/h, not only able to move forward and backward, but also up and down in the corridors.
This way, sending and receiving merchandise or items in general becomes much easier. Deliveries will only take 20 minutes on average,
no packaging is required, special logibots could offer cooling or freezing services, X-Ray or bomb detection. The implementation of UNITX could
change the economy dramatically, the repairing and borrowing of goods will be much easier, and logistics and warehousing would undergo fundamental changes as well; also

Chemists at New York University and China's Nanjing University have developed a two-armed nanorobotic device that can manipulate molecules within a device built from DNA.

n nanoimprint lithography, a mold made of a hard material such as metal or silicon is pressed into a softer material, often molten silicon itself or a polymer. The molds can then be reused. But both metals and silicon have limitations as mold materials.

Schroers says that metallic-glass molds can be used millions of times to pattern materials, including polymers like those used to make DVDs. The Yale group has used the molds to create three-dimensional microparts such as gears and tweezers, as well as much finer structures. This week in the journal Nature, Schroers's group describes making molds with features as small as 13 nanometers.

What does uncovering the true authorship of plays attributed to Shakespeare have to do with identifying our genetic ancestors or classifying new life forms? All involve the comparative analysis of long sets of data and all will benefit from a unique new analytical tool developed by researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

development of a technique called "feature frequency profiles" (FFP), that makes it possible to compare, classify, index and catalog just about any type of linear information that can be electronically stored. The kinds of information that can be analyzed with the FFP technique include nucleotide base and amino acid sequences, books, documents and possibly images. It could even prove to be the ultimate music organizer.

The tech world has been buzzing for the past week over an MIT Media Lab student project which converts any surface - including the human body - into a touchpad that controls a mobile computer in your pocket. Using just $350 of off-the-shelf technology, Pranav Mistry created the device for the Fluid Interfaces group at the Media Lab.

The prototype was built from an ordinary webcam and a battery-powered 3M projector, with an attached mirror — all connected to an internet-enabled mobile phone. The setup, which costs less than $350, allows the user to project information from the phone onto any surface — walls, the body of another person or even your hand . . . The gestures can be as simple as using his fingers and thumbs to create a picture frame that tells the camera to snap a photo, which is saved to his mobile phone. When he gets back to an office, he projects the images onto a wall and begins to size them.

Researchers combined a mobile projector with a webcam and mobile phone to create a device that draws information from the environment. The wearer can also interact with the sixth sense device using touch gestures on nearly any surface.

The researchers showed off the sixth sense device at this year’s Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference. While the gadget is not being primed for mass release, it represents a forward-thinking way of blending technology with our environment.

The sixth sense gadget’s projector can turn anything into a touch screen and captures input via the webcam. The wearer can draw a circle on his or her wrist and the device will project a digital clock face.

The gadget can also take pictures of the wearer’s surrounding with very simple prompts. All the user has to do is frame out an area and the webcam will snap a frame.

Gallium nitride (GaN) LEDs have many advantages over compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and incandescent bulbs. They switch on instantly, with no gradual warm-up, and can burn for an average of 100,000 hours before they need replacing - 10 times as long as fluorescent lamps and some 130 times as long as an incandescent bulb. CFLs also contain small levels of mercury, which makes environmentally-friendly disposal of spent bulbs difficult.

A 15-centimetre silicon wafer costs just $15 and can accommodate 150,000 LEDs making the cost per unit tiny. That levels the playing field with CFLs, which many people only ever saw as a stopgap solution to the lighting problem.

The ones and zeroes that propel the digital world — the fording of electrons across a transistor, or hard drives reliant on electrons' intrinsic spin — are getting packed into smaller and smaller spaces. The limit was thought to be set: no more than one bit of information could be encoded on an atom or electron.

1 Super-vision
2 Disappearing act
3 Hands-free healing
4 Spider vs gecko
5 You power
6 Jet packs
7 My other car is a spaceship
8 Breathe underwater
9 You speak, it translates
10 Smell-o-vision

Tests that show machines closing in on human abilities

* 07:00 22 January 2009 by Colin Barras
* For similar stories, visit the Robots and The Human Brain Topic Guides

Video: As new ways to test how well machines can match aspects of human intelligence are dreamt up, they are getting closer to beating them.

It may have been dreamt up in 1950, but the Turing test - a simple way to tell if a machine can think - still holds powerful sway over many researchers striving to produce a machine at least in some respects equal with a human.

Nowadays, although UK mathematician Alan Turing's test is still relevant, and unbeaten, new forms of it have evolved. In this online special, New Scientist discovers the different ways in which machines can be tested for human-like abilities - and how close they have come to passing as one of us.

Intel has made progress in a technology that could lead to the wireless recharging of gadgets and the end of the power-cord spaghetti behind electronic devices.

It says it has increased the efficiency of a technique for wirelessly powering consumer gadgets and computers, a development that could allow a person to simply place a device on a desktop or countertop to power it. It could bring the consumer electronics industry a step closer to a world without wires.

Babysitting robots, once the province of speculative fiction, are on the market. They make conversation, recognize faces and keep track of kids. They're not a replacement for TV or games, but for personal care — and some researchers worry that kids will be harmed.

"If you leave a small child in front of the TV, you have to keep popping in to make sure they're OK. But these are so safe that people will eventually leave their children in the care of robots," said Noel Sharkey, a University of Sheffield roboticist.

A Japanese research team has revealed it had created a technology that could eventually display on a computer screen what people have on their minds, such as dreams. While the team for now has managed to reproduce only simple images from the brain, they said the technology could eventually be used to figure out dreams and other secrets inside people's minds.