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A new robot with artificial whiskers could one day be used to locate survivors of natural disasters, or people trapped in burning buildings.

Developed by a team led by Tony Prescott from the University of Sheffield and Anthony Pipe from the University of Bristol, both in the UK, SCRATCHbot mimics the way a rat senses its environment.

Long plastic whiskers at the side of the robot's head move back and forth up to 5 times per second to detect nearby objects. If a whisker touches something, control software determines the location of the obstacle and orients the robot's head and body so that shorter bristles on its nose can make contact with it.

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Death is up there with sex on the euphemism scale. When someone breathes their last, they don't simply "die". They pass away, go to a better place, meet their maker, give up the ghost – and more colourfully, bite the dust, push up the daisies or, with a hangman's macabre wit, kick the bucket. Why do people have so much trouble mentioning that unmentionable state? It is, as the morbidly glib never tire of reminding us, as natural as life. In fact, considering that we spend more time dead than alive – we may live to be 100 but we are classified as "dead" forever after – it is perhaps a more natural state.

In addition to the grief and the sense of loss death conjures up, we, as a species, are scared to death of dying and so would rather not talk about it, in case that ancient superstition is true and we tempt fate and draw the unwanted attentions of Death. Well, fingers crossed and hearts crescented that the Grim Reaper or Azrael do not read the Guardian.

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Tel Aviv University researcher Prof. Noam Eliaz of the TAU School of Mechanical Engineering has developed an electrochemical process for coating metal implants which vastly improves their functionality, longevity and integration into the body.

The new process could vastly improve the lives of people who have undergone complicated total joint replacement surgeries so they can better walk, run and ultimately avoid rejection of the implant by their bodies.

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Attach a couple of cobalt molecules to a ring of carbon and you have the dream memory material.

There's a challenge facing electronics engineers attempting to build magnetic memory that can store data for more than 10 years or so. The density at which this data is stored depends on the size of the magnetic grains used for this process. Engineers have known for some time that they just can't continue to make these grains indefinitely smaller.

But today, Ruijuan Xiao at the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research, in Dresden, Germany, and a few buddies have worked out how to solve the problem. And get this: their fix doesn't just tweak the density of magnetic data storage. They reckon that they can get an improvement of three orders of magnitude.

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Dr John Pethica, chief scientific advisor at the UK's NPL writes about the promise, and pitfalls, of nanotech.

As someone who has commercialised new science in nanotechnology to build successful companies, I sometimes get asked what is the next "big thing" to look out for.

The way we think about nanoscience has only really been fully formulated in the last decade so it is still a bit early to see a lot of nano-related products. There are some fantastic concepts in nanoscience but many will be dashed on the rocks of reality before becoming working technologies.

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Futuristic-looking robots like Honda's sleek humanoid Asimo don't cut it for designer James Auger, at the Royal College of Art, London. Believing that they need to fit unobtrusively into the home, he has built robotic furniture. And, believing they need to be useful and entertaining, he has given the furniture an appetite for vermin, like mice and flies.

Auger worked with long time collaborator and fellow designer Jimmy Loizeau to build the five domestic robots. Each can sense its environment, has mechanical moving parts, and can perform basic services for its human hosts, such as telling the time or lighting a room.

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