With this technology, tiny structures on a nanometer scale can be fabricated. Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) have now made a major breakthrough in speeding up this printing technique: The high-precision-3D-printer at TU Vienna is orders of magnitude faster than similar devices (see video). This opens up completely new areas of application, such as in medicine.

City of Melbourne’s Giant Theremin is a super-sized musical instrument standing more than seven metres tall, controlled by movement rather than touch and can be played by up to eight people at once. The theremin’s unique warble will be accompanied by an array of distinctive sounds, making it impossible to resist running, dancing, jumping and forming unusual shapes in the activation zone to create a symphony of movement.

The Al Khufrah Oasis in southeastern Libya (near the Egyptian border) is one of Libya’s largest agricultural projects, and is an easy-to-recognize landmark for orbiting astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Because only about 2 percent of Libya’s land receives enough rainfall to be cultivated, this project uses fossil water from a large underground aquifer. The Libyan government also has a plan called the Great Man Made River to pump and transport these groundwater reserves to the coast to support Libya’s growing population and industrial development.

Washington, D.C.- The Smithsonian American Art Museum opened a new gallery dedicated to examining the history and the latest developments in the art of the moving image. This permanent-collection gallery, located on the museum’s third floor, allows for the presentation of the full range of media art practices. “Watch This! New Directions in the Art of the Moving Image”, the current exhibition in the gallery features key artworks from the history of video art and a new generation of artists on the cutting edge of media arts.

The nine artworks on display are: Cory Arcangel, "Video Painting" (2008); Jim Campbell, "Grand Central Station #2" (2009) and "Reconstruction #7" (2006); Peter Campus, "Three Transitions" (1973); Kota Ezawa, "LYAM 3D" (2008); Svetlana and Igor Kopystiansky, "Yellow Sound" (2005); Nam June Paik, "9/23/69: Experiments with David Atwood" (1969); Bill Viola, "Surrender" (2001); and Marina Zurkow, "Elixir II" (2009). The majority of the featured artworks are recent acquisitions, with five entering the museum’s collection in 2010. The works by Viola and Campbell’s Reconstruction #7 are on loan.

The dit­ties are too high-pitched for hu­man hear­ing, but sci­en­tists at Vi­en­na's Un­ivers­ity of Vet­er­i­nary Med­i­cine an­a­lyzed them and found they con­vey in­forma­t­ion about ident­ity and kin­ship. The find­ings are pub­lished in the jour­nal Phys­i­ol­o­gy & Be­hav­ior and in the Jour­nal of Ethol­o­gy. “It seems as though house mice might pro­vide a new mod­el or­gan­ism for the study of song in an­i­mals,” said Dus­tin Penn of the uni­vers­ity, one of the co-authors of the work. “Who would have thought that?”

Coordinated teams of hacktivists will wage war on Sony on Monday to punish the company for supporting the controversial US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

The Anonymous collective plans to hack Sony.com and load the homepage with BitTorrent files that allow users to download copyright-protected music and movies -- the very action SOPA is designed to prevent.

Hackers also plan to strike Sony Music's online store, reducing the cost of songs to zero.

Armchair activists now have a tool that can transport their SOPA protestations into the real world: Boycott SOPA, an Android app that scans barcodes and tells you whether an object’s manufacturer/publisher is a supporter of the much maligned Stop Online Piracy Act.

The ReacTable’s multitouch display lets users create a custom-made instrument on the fly—capable of, say, the low growl of a trumpet and the distorted whir of an electric guitar—by sliding or rotating blocks, called tangibles. The blocks’ surfaces are printed with patterns that the ReacTable is programmed to recognize as parts of a synthesizer, such as voltage-controlled and low-frequency oscillators. A video camera inside the table detects the presence of fingertips and tangibles and prompts the system to light up and generate the sounds suggested by the arrangement of the objects.

The notes and intervals of music speak directly to the chakra centers and causes them to vibrate in harmony to the vibration of a string or vocal chords, speakers moving through the air, or the sound of someone’s lips making a farting noise through a metal tube.

'Radioactive orchestra', a web-based musical interface resultant from a collaboration between sweden's royal institute of technology (KTH) and nuclear safety and training institute (KSU), is designed to render aurally the processes of atomic gamma decay. KTH professors arne johnson and bo cederwall and doctorate karin andgren envisioned and developed the project, which was formalized by electronic artist kristofer hagbard into an interactive web interface for data exploration and sound track generation.