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Graphene, a two-dimensional array of carbon atoms, has shown great promise for a variety of applications, but for many suggested uses the material requires treatments that can be expensive and difficult to apply predictably. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and the University of California at Berkeley has found a simple, inexpensive treatment that may help to unleash the material’s potential.

(Phys.org) —The director of Nom Nom Games, a subsidiary of Trendy Entertainment, has converted the Monster Madness game to the Web using technologies pioneered by Mozilla. Jeremy Stieglitz, Development Director and CTO for Trendy Entertainment, made it quite clear in a video that he regards the move as significant, in that this is a brave new world of direct access to a plugin-free commercial game, using asm.js and Emscripten

In a study that compares the genomes of aquatic life forms, researchers have found evidence to shuffle the branches of the tree of life. For more than a century, scientists thought that complex cell types, like neurons and muscles, evolved only once, after simple animals that lack these cell types branched from the rest of animals on the evolutionary tree

A groundbreaking study by Harvard University’s Harvard Forest and the Smithsonian Institution reveals that, if left unchecked, recent trends in the loss of forests to development will undermine significant land conservation gains in Massachusetts, jeopardize water quality, and limit the natural landscape’s ability to protect against climate change.

The Turkestan cockroach, Blatta lateralis (Walker), has become an important invasive species throughout the southwestern United States and has been reported in the southern United States. It is rapidly replacing the oriental cockroach, Blatta orientalis (L.), in urban areas of the southwestern United States as the most important peri-domestic species.

(Phys.org) —Findings from Internet intelligence company Renesys sound an alert to a hijacking practice in the form of traffic misdirection on the Internet. A November 19 blog on the Renesys site has since caught the attention of a wider press: “Who is sending Internet traffic on long, strange trips?” asked a headline in The Christian Science Monitor earlier this month.

Small test strips made of silver or other metals, called “coupons,” are frequently used to assess and predict the speeds at which metals used in outdoor environments—pipelines, aircraft, bridges, as well as countless other types of infrastructure and machinery—will succumb to corrosion.

Recent studies from two research teams at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) demonstrate how underwater robots can be used to understand and influence the complex swimming behaviors of schooling fish. The teams, led by Maurizio Porfiri, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NYU-Poly, published two separate papers in the journal PLOS ONE.

(Phys.org) —Startup Play-i has created a crowd-sourcing campaign to gather funds for building and selling its pair of robots called Bo and Yana—both are part of an overall toy design to teach children as young as five years old, to program a computer. The idea, the team says, is to get children interested in programming by making it a part of storytelling.