The best thing since aluminum and Teflon, “frozen smoke“. Aerogel will do everything from clean up oil spills to being the key to innovative space suits for Mars.

Speaking of Mars, a new look at the samples collected by Viking 30 years ago suggest that there may be microbes in the soil, possibly based on hydrogen peroxide.

What of life in space? Physicists have discovered inorganic space dust can organize and interact in ways that mimic biological molecules.

Scientists have extracted 8-million-year-old bacterium from the oldest known ice on earth and have succeeded in making it grow in the laboratory. [Just what I need, yet another reason to need to wash my hands every two hours.]

Frictionless nano-machines by reversing the Casmir force.

Four large galaxies have been spotted colliding, which will yield a single galaxy up to 10 times larger than our own.

Two German scientists claim they have made light travel, well . . . faster than the speed of light by using quantum tunneling. Not so fast, says ars technic, because in their analysis the claim is “silly”.

Speaking of growing things, we may be on a path to regenerate brain cells.

Want to avoid cancer? Get some sun! Researchers say just ten minutes per day of soaking in a few rays would give people enough Vitamin D to stop 30,000 cases of breast and colon cancer in Britain alone. [Makes sense to me. We didn't evolve in a cave, ya know.]

Women are from . . . the Pink Planet. Turns out that girls liking pink and boys liking blue may be genetic.

Brush your teeth with chocolate. Really. The white crystalline powder that is extracted from Cocoa, helps harden teeth enamel, making users less susceptible to tooth decay and may be more effective than fluoride. [Which is great, 'cause I never was comfortable with brushing my teeth with rat poison.]

Speaking of sweets, an Australian scientist has found that adding a plant sugar called inulin to flu vaccine makes them 50 to 100 times more effective. [If true, we can say bye-bye Birdie to the bird flu!]

Running water through windows on those big glass office towers reduces cooling costs up to 70%. [Who knows what vistas this could open up, maybe some green dye on St. Patrick's Day, red dye at Christmas? What happens if a window in one of those massive office towers springs a leak on Easter? The streets would be awash with bright blue water!]

A paper-thin, flexible, bio-degradable battery. Not only can it be wrapped around electronics and stuffed into weirdly-shaped spaces, there are very real medical applications.

Concrete that changes color when an electrical current is applied. [Cool pic of a digital clock embedded in a concrete wall.]

A cardboard bridge has been built in France. [Gee, you wouldn't think the French would be that clever. Oh wait . . . the architect is Shigeru Ban, the Japanese guy that built the paper church.]