Catherine de Lange, reporter

Cells moving deep inside the body can now be viewed on camera in real time. The new technology could replace biopsies in the diagnosis of cancer (see video above).

Read the full story here.

You might also like this video about a new way to instantly label different components of cells.

Sandrine Ceurstemont, video editor

Powerful storms capable of uprooting trees and hurling cars could become more common in Japan. To help mitigate the damage, a new simulator is testing how houses stand up to extreme weather (see video above). You can read the full story here.

For more about storms, you can watch a scientist chase tornadoes or see a device that can recreate tsunamis.

Sandrine Ceurstemont, video editor

Kinect, Microsoft's new system for playing video games by moving your body, has become an instant success with hackers. In the video above, we show you four original uses of the system's sophisticated depth-sensing camera and infrared scanner. You can read more about it here.

If you enjoyed this video, you may also like to see a game controller that can track motion and emotion or see how you could control a computer by wearing multi-coloured gloves.

Sandrine Ceurstemont, video editor

Just by clicking your tongue, you could now control a robotic arm (see video above). An earpiece containing a microphone picks up tongue sounds and sends them to a computer where each one is translated into a movement for the robot. You can read the full story here.

If you enjoyed this video, you might like to see another system that uses tongue control or watch an animatronic tongue that mimics human speech.

Kat Austen, Letters and comments editor

Yesterday, I discovered my place in the world as I watched dinosaurs roam the room in front of me. It may sound like I was under the influence of psychedelic drugs, but I was actually in the Attenborough Studio at London's Natural History Museum, watching the new interactive film Who do you think you really are?

The film, which launches today, is presented by David Attenborough and addresses the evolutionary journey of human beings by drilling down through the tree of life. It identifies physiological attributes that we share with other creatures, and our common ancestors - some of whom make a virtual appearance on the studio's floorspace. The secret to this augmented reality spectacle is the interactive touchpad provided to each audience member, which is also used to gather real-time results from the film's quizzes (see video above).

Catherine de Lange

It was an experiment first conducted by Michael Faraday in 1831. But now, almost 200 years later and with the help of modern technology, it's yielding some surprising new results.

Faraday found that vertically vibrating a receptacle at the surface of a liquid causes interesting wave patterns. In particular, he discovered that standing waves - waves that remain stationary rather than travelling forwards - occur as a result of two waves travelling in opposite directions interfering with each other.

Sandrine Ceurstemont, video editor

Video footage of a fluorescent jellyfish and psychedelic simulations might seem like they belong at a dance party. But new visualisations created by a team at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are actually revealing how jellyfish feed (see video above).

The team filmed the Cassiopea species because they typically lie still on the ocean floor and move their bodies and a network of arms to trap food. They injected fluorescent dyes in to the sand below the creatures, revealing the flow of fluid around them. Vortex rings appeared as the jellyfish retracted their arms, and then broke up into smaller structures as they passed over their tentacles. Currents mixed significantly above the arms, and pulsing helped drive flow down through them.

Catherine de Lange, reporter

Stand next to a wet dog when it shakes itself dry and you'll soon discover how efficient it is. Now it seems this natural process could help us find better ways to wash and dry our own coats, too.

"It's surprising, but we still do not understand why washing machines work so well," says Andrew Dickerson, from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, because the equations that govern the fluid motion inside them are too complicated to solve.

Instead, Dickerson's team turned to nature to answer the question. They used slow-motion and X-ray footage of animals (see video above) to see in detail how they shake themselves dry, and attached motion-trackers to their fur to monitor the speed at which their skin moved.

Wendy Zukerman, Asia Pacific reporter

What might your surroundings look like with a bionic eye? New simulations from Australia's National ICT Centre for Excellence (NICTA) are recreating what patients can expect to see with the next two generations of their device (see video above).

The microchip, being developed by Bionic Vision Australia in collaboration with the University of New South Wales and NICTA, will help restore sight to people with retinal dystrophy - a condition where photoreceptors, the light-sensitive cells in the retina, degenerate, leading to blindness. When implanted at the back of the eye, light bypasses the damaged photoreceptors and the device directly stimulates retinal ganglion cells. Images are then projected through the optic nerve, eventually reaching the visual cortex where they are interpreted.

Sandrine Ceurstemont, video editor

When a dragonfly lifts off, a complex vortex structure forms over its four wings. Now a team from Wright State University in Ohio have simulated this behaviour for the first time, by analysing the insect's full body motion (see video above).

They filmed dragonflies with high speed cameras and a computer tracked markers on their wings. The results were used to produce a mathematical model that precisely simulates the vortices and how they form.

The team plans to use the simulations to create micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) that mimic dragonfly flight. The tiny aircraft should be useful for search and rescue and monitoring public places.

If you enjoyed this video, you may also like to see how ants can mimic liquids and the rest of our Fluid Nature series coming up later this week.