A couple of days ago, I was thinking of mankind’s efforts to make an invisible cloak: I’m not sure why I came up to that subject, but, at one time, I remember trying to explain someone what light is and the duality of matter and energy (I guess I should link to the double-slit experiment as well). Anyway, to stay on topic, I read that researchers are getting closer to making such a cloak, and this time it doesn’t require heavy use of metals: by manipulating the optical density of an object (the ‘amount of refraction of an object’) they were able to transform the path of light.
I also read that researches have drawn up a genetic map of Africa, which shows that continent (besides being the origin of humans) is more genetic diverse than initially expected. Additionally, the study seems to confirm the location of the origin of human migration, which is in south-west Africa.
A week ago (or so, according the news sources), astronomers watched the explosion of the oldest object (for now) in the universe. The best estimations are that it exploded 13 billion years ago, which makes the object approximately ‘only’ 600 million years old or so. The gamma ray burst, detected by SWIFT (which some news sources fail to mention), confirms what most astronomers already suspected: that stars can form within 600 million years.