Just imagine going through a magazine and looking at an ad for pizza. You wonder what it tastes like so you rip a page out and eat it.

Bruce Sterling: François Roche’s brainchildren is Dusty Relief, an edifice under construction in Bangkok which is surrounded by electrically charged wire that “grows fur” by statically attracting airborne filth.

The best time to ask someone for a favour is at least several weeks in advance, a new study suggests. The research finds that people consistently over-commit because they expect to have more time in the future than they do right now.

A hybrid optical microscope is being developed that could image and measure features smaller than the wavelength of visible light.

Neurology published an unsettling study of two brain-damaged men who are “minimally conscious”—able to breathe on their own but otherwise generally unresponsive. When neuroscientists scanned the patients’ brains as they played audiotapes of loved ones, the activity was strikingly normal.

It began 25 years ago in the warm coastal waters of Puerto Rico when a stranger swam over to Gilles Brassard and struck up a conversation about using quantum physics to make bank notes impossible to counterfeit.