Engineers have constructed a solar array smaller than a dime out f 20 solar cells, each cell tinier than a quarter of this lowercase "o."

A few UK scientists have done a smart thing; they’ve combined the proposals of G8 policymakers for combating climate change with actual data on the status of play in the carbon cycle. The resulting study (pdf) is interesting not only because of this highly useful approach but also because it focuses on atmospheric carbon dioxide and its impact on the environment in the far future.

Earth scientists are attempting to predict the future impacts of climate change by reconstructing the past behavior of Arctic climate and ocean circulation. In a November special issue of the journal Ecology, a group of scientists report that if current patterns of change in the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans continue, alterations of ocean circulation could occur on a global scale, with potentially dramatic implications for the world's climate and biosphere.

Humanoid robots have been used to show that that functional hierarchy in the brain is linked to time as well as space. Researchers from RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan, have created a new type of neural network model which adds to the previous literature that suggests neural activity is linked solely to spatial hierarchy within the animal brain. Details are published November 7 in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology.