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We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.

  1. Tech

    Safety practices surveyed

    Nanotechnology companies and laboratories largely rely on the same safety practices that they use when working with conventional chemicals, an international survey reports.

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  2. Tech

    Ancients made nanotech hair dye

    A hair-darkening paste invented thousands of years ago forms lead-and-sulfur nanocrystals remarkably similar to those made in today's nanotechnology labs.

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  3. Tech

    Cleanup Speedup: Device improves oil-spill recovery

    By adding grooves to the surface of a common oil-skimming device, researchers recovered up to three times as much oil as they do with smooth-surfaced devices.

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  4. Tech

    Unstoppable Bot: Armed with self-scrutiny, a mangled robot moves on

    Roboticists have made a walking machine that carries on despite serious damage.

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  5. Tech

    The Little Chill: Tiny wind generator to cool microchip hot spots

    By generating a tiny cooling wind, a microscale silicon needle armed with a powerful electric field has demonstrated its potential as a new way to cool increasingly hot microchips.

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  6. Tech

    Teasing Apart Nanotubes: Fast-spun carbon fibers may feed an industry

    Researchers have devised a way to sort carbon nanotubes by size and electronic properties.

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  7. Tech

    Muscling up colors for electronic displays

    Researchers have found a way to provide the complete color palette for television and computer screens.

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  8. Tech

    Long-Sought Laser? Standard microchips may gain speedy optical connections

    Although not made exclusively of silicon, a new type of laser runs on electricity and could be mass manufactured in the same factories as silicon microchips are.

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  9. Tech

    Start your engines

    Mechanical engineers have developed a system that greatly decreases the amount of toxic hydrocarbons a car releases.

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  10. Tech

    A thin laser gets thinner

    Researchers have created a microchip laser that fires an extraordinarily thin beam of high-intensity light.

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  11. Tech

    Cyber attack depletes cell phone batteries

    In a new type of cyber attack, assailants using computers connected to the Internet can secretly induce distant cell phones to rapidly deplete their batteries.

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  12. Tech

    Size Matters: Biosensors behave oddly when very small

    There might be a limit to how small physicists should build tiny sensors that detect viruses and molecules.

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