“Ultra-lightweight space blankets have been around for decades. You see marathon runners wrapping themselves in them to prevent the loss of body heat after a race -- but the key drawback is that the material is static,” said Alon Gorodetsky of the University of California, Irvine (UCI). … Dr. Gorodetsky’s laboratory specializes in drawing inspiration from the animal kingdom. In this case they were influenced by the abilities of a certain species of squid, octopus and cuttlefish to camouflage themselves.

High school students saw their ideas hit the pavement Saturday morning at UC Irvine. The annual Vital Link Energy Invitational took place at a parking lot on campus, with 11 high school teams racing their self-built electric cars in four heats. Two different teams from Foothill High placed first and third in the contest, which judged cars based on their efficiency using the following formula: 10 million, divided by (watt hours times total seconds).

These issues can be a deal-breaker when biologists want to make hundreds or thousands of changes to an organism's genome, says Chang Liu, a synthetic biologist at the University of California, Irvine. … “Now, I can make a series of changes in one segment and then another and combine them together. That's a big deal,” Liu says. The new tools will bolster industrial biotechnology by making it easier to vary the levels of proteins that microbes make, Liu and others say.