Techfun

Rivas told physicsworld.com that his team’s long term goal is to turn this into a product but, for the next few years, they will continue to seek even lower reflection. “In theory we could get 99 per cent transmission; the difficulty is that our nanowires will need to get longer and thicker and then scattering come into play,” he said.

According to Rongjia Tao, chair of Temple’s Physics Department, the small device consists of an electrically charged tube that can be attached to the fuel line of a car’s engine near the fuel injector. With the use of a power supply from the vehicle’s battery, the device creates an electric field that thins fuel, or reduces its viscosity, so that smaller droplets are injected into the engine. That leads to more efficient and cleaner combustion than a standard fuel injector, he says.

Six months of road testing in a diesel-powered Mercedes-Benz automobile showed that the device increased highway fuel from 32 miles per gallon to 38 mpg, a 20 percent boost, and a 12-15 percent gain in city driving.

From PhysicsWorld.com

Physicists find new material for storing hydrogen
Physicists in the US may have found a promising new class of material that can absorb and store large amounts of hydrogen. Adam Phillips and Bellave Shivaram of the University of Virginia measured around 12% by weight of hydrogen uptake in the metal-based composites. This is significantly higher [...]

I came across this article in this week’s mailing from Physics World.  After listening to the Joy of Science from The Teaching Company I actually understood it too!  This stuff sounds pretty cool. 
Researchers create ’self-healing’ rubber
Rubbery materials can be easily stretched, but it is not easy to mend them when they break, as anyone who [...]

Light is stored as sound – physicsworld.com:

Physicists in the US have discovered a simple way to “store” light pulses in a material by converting them into sound waves. The technique, which involves just two lasers and a piece of standard optical fibre, could be used to create memory devices that could boost the performance of [...]