(Image: Imperial College London)

This inner ear implant could one day help people with dizziness and balance disorders to regain stability.

Developed by from Imperial College London and colleagues, it senses linear and radial acceleration in three dimensions and transforms the information into a signal that the brain can interpret, restoring balance in a similar way to how a cochlear implant fixes hearing.

The chip, which measures 3 × 2 millimetres, is an example of how dramatically implants have shrunk. Early prototypes were bulky and hampered by poor battery life.

(Image: Imperial College London)

To save costs, many different types of implants can be integrated on a single silicon wafer. In the wafer pictured above, the chip in the top left corner, for example, is a prototype designed to connect the severed nerves of people with spinal injuries. The chip in the bottom left is being developed to sense the chemical activity in nerves. The wafer will later be chopped up into separate implants.

Both of these pictures are part of an celebrating the beauty of life-changing chips designed by the at Imperial College London.

(Image: ESA/XMM-Newton & Y.-H. Chu/R. A. Gruendl/M. A. Guerrero/N. Ruiz (X-ray); NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope & A. Hajian/B. Balick (optical))

When small and medium-sized stars die, they don’t explode. Instead, they peacefully expand, creating clouds while they shed their outer layers like a dandelion.

This image shows an example of one of these celestial remnants, named Jupiter’s Ghost because it takes up about the same amount of space in the sky as the planet Jupiter.

The jewel-like white dwarf star in the centre of the cloud is releasing super-strong stellar winds. They plough into the gas surrounding the star, heating it to over two-million degrees centigrade and causing it to emit X-rays, shown in blue. The green glow of the outer layers represents cooler gas that emits light visible to the human eye, while flame-shaped pockets of even cooler gas are shown in red.

The picture combines X-ray observations, collected by ESA’s XMM-Newton spacecraft in 2003, with images in the visible range captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

(Image: A project by Irene Cheng in collaboration with Dr Issam Hussain and Dr Francesco Proto)

This is what bone cancer looks like as it takes over the body – as interpreted by the artistic eye of , who studies architecture at the University of Lincoln, UK.

Cheng used current knowledge about how the cancer mutates bone structure over time, acquired in a collaboration with Issam Hussain of the university’s school of life sciences, to portray its extreme effects, as shown below in historical photos.

Cheng’s project explores how the human body’s adaptations to deformations could influence architecture. “It’s not about trying to say that cancer is a good thing,” she says. Rather, it’s about learning from how the structure of the human body can accommodate such fast-growing, extensive changes – and what that could mean for buildings inspired by imperfection, adds Francesco Proto, who is supervising the project.

The project will culminate in April 2015 with a design for a building.

Proto, Cheng and colleagues previously won an honorary mention for their . That building was inspired by another extreme example of biological development: a butterfly’s growth inside its cocoon.

(Image: Tom Fayle)

Designing your utopian ant farm? Be sure to stock it with different-sized beasties to help them get along.

Fern-dwelling ants can vary tremendously in size, as shown by the happy couple pictured: the huge (by ant standards), 3-millimetre-long Polyrhachis worker dwarfs the 0.7-millimetre Pheidole worker visible near its front left foot.

And size matters in the ant world. of Imperial College London and colleagues studied colonies living high up in the rainforest canopy in Borneo and found that ants of similar stature tended not to be seen together.

When the researchers orchestrated fern invasions by ants of different sizes in the lab, they found that the resident ants tended to repulse interlopers of the same size as themselves, even throwing them off the edge of the fern. But markedly smaller or bigger ants were left to make themselves at home.

This is probably because ants of similar sizes compete for the same resources, such as food or nesting places.

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(Image: Fraser Macrae)

This is the surrealistic landscape within a blood clot, the leading cause of heart attacks and strokes. The extreme close-up, produced by Fraser Macrae from the University of Leeds, UK, using a scanning electron microscope, won the judges’ prize in the annual .

The grey background represents the clot itself. The coloured blobs, added later to the original black-and-white image, highlight details within the structure. Red blood cells appear in red, platelets in turquoise, and different types of white blood cells in purple, blue, green and yellow.

Although this photo won a prize for its beauty, zooming in on blood clots can help us understand why people with heart disease have unusual clot structures that make them harder to break down.

(Image: University of Exeter)

The space rock that struck Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula at the end of the Cretaceous period seems to have ultimately wiped out the dinosaurs. But did it ignite global firestorms that destroyed almost everything at unthinkable speed?

A bit of playing with fire shows that the reality may be more complicated than we thought.

The small-scale inferno pictured is created by four halogen lamps. The idea is to recreate the immense thermal energy that would have been released at the impact site.

of the University of Exeter, UK, and her colleagues placed the lamps around a basket of plant material, such as the pine tree needles shown here, to see how living and dead vegetation would be affected by this heat.

The researchers found that close to the Chicxulub impact site, even the most severe heat pulse predicted by computer simulations would have lasted less than a minute, which was too short to ignite live plants. However, less-intense heat would have been felt as far away as New Zealand and lasted about 7 minutes – long enough to start live vegetation burning.

“This flips our understanding of the effects of the impact on its head,” says Belcher. “Palaeontologists may need to look for new clues from fossils found a long way from the impact to better understand the mass extinction event.”

Earlier research that indicated that the impact set Earth to broil, not burn has fed the flame of the firestorm controversy.

Video: Four-finned robot swims like a cuttlefish

A ripples through the water, taking inspiration from the movement of cuttlefish.

Although the animal is better known for its powers of disguise and stunning communication skills, its undulating swimming motion is also noteworthy, allowing for efficient and agile motion.

Created by Pascal Buholzer and fellow students from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, the copycat robot, named Sepios, demonstrates that its finned design can be an environmentally friendly alternative to propellers. Underwater plants are likely to get tangled in spinning blades, but Sepios was filmed diving into a forest of seagrass and then effortlessly moving through it, even in stormy conditions. The symmetrical arrangement of its fins allows it to move easily in any direction while each fin can be steered individually for precise control. In a demonstration, it gracefully navigated its way through a metal frame (see video).

Propeller noise is also a threat to marine mammals: it stresses whales and misleads dolphins, and deflected sounds can cause injuries or death. In comparison, Sepios’s propulsion system is almost silent. Its resemblance to a marine animal could also make it ideal for filming underwater wildlife.

The robot recently wowed viewers at in Mumbai, India, alongside other creations like cubical soccer-playing robots. The team is now working on improving the coordination of its many sensors, for example pressure and humidity detectors and an on-board camera, laser and inertial measurement unit that help it avoid collisions.

(Image: Marine Biophysics Unit (Satoshi Mitarai))

On land, the havoc caused by typhoons is obvious. But now ethereal underwater creatures are revealing how these storms affect life in the ocean (see image above).

Mary Grossmann from the in Japan visited a unique underwater observatory set up by the institution to snap microscopic portraits. Using cameras at the site, located 20 metres below the waves off the Motobu peninsula, she photographed tiny droplets of ocean, capturing images four times per second. The first continuous view of the ocean’s smallest life forms riding out a storm began to emerge from sequences of pictures from three typhoons.

Grossman identified more than 50,000 plankton as well as small shrimp (labelled “k” in the image above), jellies (“h”), and fish (“l”). She found that drifting plankton like diatoms (“c”) and radiolarians (“d”) increase in number during typhoons. But underwater life that can swim, like jellyfish and isopods (“g”), flee the churning sand-filled water, possibly by heading upwards where conditions are clearer.

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Video: Cubical robots show off their football skills

Even though they don’t have legs, this team of robot soccer players makes light work of passing a ball. Last week, the tiny, cube-shaped bots made the task look effortless at in Mumbai, India (see video above).

Called , the robotic team from Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University in Mannheim, Germany, is completely autonomous. The robots use a combination of fine-tuned algorithms and a carefully designed kicking foot to play without human control. Wheels that can turn in any direction allow them to move freely on the pitch, regardless of their initial orientation. “It is not as easy as it looks to precisely kick a moving ball to a certain target,” says Nicolai Ommer, one of the project leaders, as human players would probably agree.

The group is hoping to qualify for the . To be held this year in Hefei, China, it’s an annual event that ultimately aims to field a humanoid robot team capable of beating the human World Cup title holders. Tigers Mannheim’s creators hope that ongoing improvements will give them a shot at winning, including AI that is better able to locate ideal spots on the field for scoring goals.

(Image: Brian D. Peer and Robert W. Motz)

No, this bird didn’t dye its feathers. The half-red, half-white plumage of this northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) is the result of gynandromorphy. In other words its sex chromosomes did not segregate properly after fertilisation, so the bird is half-male, half-female. Males are usually bright red all over while females are a more subdued white, but due to the developmental quirk, the bird’s colours are split down the middle.

Cardinals with such plumage are rare so from Western Illinois University in Macomb and colleague Robert Motz observed it for over a year. They found that although the bird never found a mate and never belted out its , at least other birds didn’t target it for its unusual looks.

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