China's first manned electric aircraft, a two-seater plane powered by rechargeable lithium batteries, has been granted a license for production.

The RX1E is designed by Shenyang Aerospace University and Liaoning General Aviation Academy in northeastern Liaoning province, the People's Daily Online reports.

One 90-minute charge equals around 45-60 minutes of flight time.

Google has filed a patent for a "'needle-free blood draw" smartwatch: it could be wearable or hand-held, and may eventually replace blood glucose meters.

The device sends an "abrupt surge" of gas into a barrel that has a "micro-particle" that punctures the skin and takes a tiny amount of blood. When the droplet is formed, it is sucked into a negative pressure barrel.

"Such an application might be used to draw a small amount of blood, for example, for a glucose test," the patent reads.

Inking data collectors on your skin could become the next step in wearable technology, allowing them to obtain health and other biometric data from the body without a pause.

Researchers from Chaotic Moon Studios have devised a cutting-edge tattoo kit, which allows for the monitoring of one's own body activity without being intrusive.

Chaotic Moon's CEO, Ben Lamm, told Tech Crunch that he sees big potential for Tech Tatts, which is what they call their prototype. They envisage potential for its application in the military.

"We get to do a lot of cool stuff at Chaotic Moon but with this we think there's military applications for it, health applications for it and there are all kinds of opportunities around it."

Particles can be classified as bosons or fermions. A defining characteristic of a boson is its ability to pile into a single quantum state with other bosons. Fermions are not allowed to do this. One broad impact of fermionic anti-social behavior is that it allows for carbon-based life forms, like us, to exist. If the universe were solely made from bosons, life would certainly not look like it does. Recently, JQI theorists have proposed an elegant method for achieving transmutation—that is, making bosons act like fermions. This work was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

This transmutation is an example of emergent behavior, specifically what's known as quasiparticle excitations—one of the concepts that make condensed matter systems so interesting. Particles by themselves have mostly well-defined characteristics, but en masse, can work together such that completely distinctive, even exotic phenomena appear. Typically collective behaviors are difficult to study because the large numbers of real particles and all of their interactions are computationally challenging and in many cases prohibitive. JQI Fellow Victor Galitski explains, "The whole idea of emergent excitations is that the quasiparticles are fundamentally different from the actual individual particles. But this actually doesn't happen that often." In this case, it turns out that the boson-to-fermion transmutation leads to an interesting phase of matter. Galitski continues, " Here, the bosons don't condense—they instead form a state without long-range order. This is an example of a long sought after state of matter called a Bose liquid."

Will robots soon be able to teach themselves ... everything?

There's a robot in California teaching itself to walk. Its name is Darwin, and like a toddler, it teeters back and forth in a UC Berkeley lab, trying and falling, and then trying again before getting it right. But it's not actually Darwin doing all this. It's a neural network designed to mimic the human brain.

Darwin's baby steps speak to what many researchers believe will be the greatest leap in robotics — a kind of general machine learning that allows robots to adapt to new situations rather than respond to narrow programming.

Developed by Pieter Abbeel and his team at UC Berkeley's Robot Learning Lab, the neural network that allows Darwin to learn is not programmed to perform any specific functions, like walking or climbing stairs. The team is using what's called "reinforcement learning" to try and make the robots adapt to situations as a human child would.

Three billion miles away, Pluto's contrasting landscapes can now be seen as if they were half a city block away. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft captured the "sharpest" images of the dwarf planet in July, but it wasn't until Friday that they arrived.

Aboard the piano-sized New Horizons is the telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), which snapped shots of mountains, craters and other spellbinding scenes from about 10,000 miles (17,000 kilometers) above Pluto's surface that people won't get a glimpse of again for many years, if ever.

The long list of unanswered questions about black holes contains one particularly surprising item: How do they eat? Unlike many of the riddles that black holes pose, this one seems so simple: What do you mean we don't know how things fall into a black hole?

The question makes sense when you stop thinking about black holes as cosmic vacuum cleaners—which they are not—and start seeing them as astrophysical objects that (in many cases) play by the same orbital rules as stars and planets. The earth doesn't fall into the sun. Likewise, all things being equal, an object orbiting a black hole at a safe distance should keep sailing peacefully and indefinitely along its path. And yet we know stuff falls into black holes all the time because as it does, its gravitational energy is converted to electromagnetic radiation—light—and the black hole shines.

Here's another way to think of the problem. "Black holes have this intense gravity, but they're trying to squeeze everything into this small volume," says Shep Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a project to observe near the boundary, or "event horizon," of the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. "There are not very many ways to do that. You compress gas and it heats up. Take all this gas and it's streaming toward the event horizon and getting closer and closer together, it gets hotter and hotter and wants to fly away. Convincing all that gas to go through the event horizon is not a straightforward thing."

The astronomers of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) published results today in Science showing that magnetic fields are essential to this process. In observations conducted in 2013, the astronomers found ordered magnetic fields near the event horizon, or boundary, of a black hole called Sagittarius A*, the 4-million-solar-mass giant at the center of the Milky Way.

Are all scientists atheists? Do they believe religion and science can co-exist? These questions and others were addressed in the first worldwide survey of how scientists view religion, released today by researchers at Rice University.

"No one today can deny that there is a popular 'warfare' framing between science and religion," said the study's principal investigator, Elaine Howard Ecklund, founding director of Rice University's Religion and Public Life Program and the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences. "This is a war of words fueled by scientists, religious people and those in between."

The study's results challenge longstanding assumptions about the science-faith interface. While it is commonly assumed that most scientists are atheists, the global perspective resulting from the study shows that this is simply not the case.

"More than half of scientists in India, Italy, Taiwan and Turkey self-identify as religious," Ecklund said. "And it's striking that approximately twice as many 'convinced atheists' exist in the general population of Hong Kong, for example, (55 percent) compared with the scientific community in this region (26 percent)."

Researchers at Linköping University's Laboratory of Organic Electronics, Sweden, have developed power paper—a new material with an outstanding ability to store energy. The material consists of nanocellulose and a conductive polymer. The results have been published in Advanced Science.

One sheet, 15 centimetres in diameter and a few tenths of a millimetre thick can store as much as 1 F, which is similar to the supercapacitors currently on the market. The material can be recharged hundreds of times and each charge only takes a few seconds.

It's a dream product in a world where the increased use of renewable energy requires new methods for energy storage—from summer to winter, from a windy day to a calm one, from a sunny day to one with heavy cloud cover.

The Death Star would have cost £278,000,000,000,000,000,000

Building a Death Star would be almost unbelievably expensive - so much so that the Galactic Empire would have crumbled after the Rebels destroyed not one but two of the machines.

Using the prices of modern aircraft carriers as a guideline, Zachary Feinstein in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis worked out that the second Death Star would have cost £278 quintillion pounds.

That's £278,000,000,000,000,000,000- more money than there is on Earth.

The shock would have caused the entire Galactic financial system to collapse, Feinstein estimates - meaning that the Rebels might have had to bail out the ruined Empire.