A study by the University of Melbourne has shown that the city could reduce CO2 emissions by over a million kilograms simply by painting the roofs of every building in the CBD white.

In 1999, professors Robert Twiggs of Stanford University and Jordi Puig-Suari of California Polytechnic State University began to standardise the satellite business. They designed a small orbital unit - a four-inch cube with little metal feet - that was wide enough for solar cells, basing their design on a plastic display box for Beanie Babies. Their "CubeSat" had enough room for a computer motherboard and a few other parts necessary to do limited experiments in space, such as monitoring weather or photographing Earth. The design would significantly lower the cost for students to conduct experiments in space. CubeSats could be launched at the same time and piggyback on larger, more expensive missions, mitigating the expense of getting satellites into orbit.

The search for the perfect invisibility cloak lumbers onward, but that lumbering is starting to pick up speed. We're hearing more and more these days about metamaterials, the possibilities of time cloaking, and other such future-stuff. And today, from deep in the heart of Texas, we get another tantalising finding: UT researchers have, for the first time, cloaked a three-dimensional object in free space. That is, no matter the angle of observation, the object was rendered invisible in 3D.

The New York Public Library has an archive of over 40,000 historical stereographs, many well over a hundred years old. Stereographs are regular photographs, except in pairs, with the perspective very slightly different. Essentially, stereographs are what you were looking at through your ViewMaster as a kid. And now the NYPL has created a pretty amazing tool they're calling the Stereogranimator that lets users create animated 3-D GIFs from the photos in the archive.

Proteins are like the workhorses of genetic biology, but they can be notoriously difficult to study. Their structure has everything to do with their function - and sometimes dysfunction - which has far-reaching implications in health and medicine. That's why it's such a big deal that a couple of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have more or less hacked their cryo-electron microscope to see at far greater resolutions than its manufacturer intended and produced the first 3D images of an individual protein with enough clarity to determine its structure.

At the sunset of Newt Gingrich's putative presidency, the moon would be the 51st state, colonised by permanent American settlers. Tourists would honeymoon in low-Earth orbit, space factories would manufacture goods in microgravity, and America would have a rocket powerful enough to send us to Mars.

Current optical communications schemes rely on a narrow 1.55 micron wavelength band of about 10 terahertz, a band in which optical signals can be well controlled and loss of signal/data is fairly low. But to open up optical networks to the high data load of the future, we need to open up the span of available wavelength. And using a novel quantum dot technology, researchers at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan have done exactly that, to the tune of a roughly tenfold increase.