Plus: $200 Million Space Dust, Auto-Lacing Sneakers and Water TETRIS.

$200 Million Space Particles
Following numerous technical failures, it remains unclear whether a Japanese space mission accomplished its goal of collecting samples from an asteroid, but Japanese scientists are hoping that a couple dust-like particles trapped in a capsule have made the $200 million mission worthwhile.

On June 13, Japan’s Hayabusa space probe returned to Earth after completing a seven-year, 4-billion-mile voyage that included landing on the Itokawa asteroid in 2005, the Associated Press reports. It was the first spacecraft ever to successfully land on an asteroid and then return home.

The mission was to collect surface samples from the asteroid, but after landing on Itokawa, the probe’s sample-capture mechanism broke down, according to the New York Times.

However, “Japanese space officials have found intriguing dust-like particles inside the sample capsule from the asteroid probe,” Space.com explains, “but whether they are actually pieces of an asteroid or contamination from Earth remains to be seen…”

If the two particles found in the capsule are actually from the asteroid, they could provide valuable mineral data and offer new insights into the composition and other characteristics of space rocks throughout the solar system. If not, they would probably constitute the most expensive dust in history.

Auto-Lacing Sneakers
Fans of Back to the Future Part II have long wanted to try some of the amazing gizmos Marty McFly used in the futuristic world of 2015; a hoverboard, for instance. But as we draw closer and closer to that year, we have yet to see most of these inventions. Fortunately, an enterprising DIYer has developed his own version of one of the movie’s coolest features: auto-lacing sneakers.

“There’s only one so far, but it’s got a force sensor which reads the pressure of your foot when you put it in the shoe, and that activates the two servos which tighten the laces,” Engadget reports. “There’s also a switch to reverse the servo and loosen the laces.”

Here’s a video of the futuristic footwear in action:

DARPA Mastering Biology, Superhero Style
Known for its unusual and sometimes terrifying high-tech projects, the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is now venturing into comic book territory with two new projects named after the world’s most famous fictional crime-fighting duo.

The new Biochronicity and Temporal Mechanisms Arising in Nature project, or BaTMAN for short, aims to “develop an understanding of the relationship between biological systems and the spatial-temporal universe through the application of advanced principles from the physical sciences.”

DARPA will also provide complementary research from the Robustness of Biologically-Inspired Networks initiative, or RoBIN, which would “explore more macro-scale characteristics of nature — group behaviors, complex adaptable networks and other principles of biological design — to inform the strategies used in complicated decision-making processes,” Popular Science reports.

BaTMAN and RoBIN will essentially be used to leverage biological principles into better military performance, with the long-term goal of transforming biology “from a descriptive to a predictive field of science.” Whether or not these initiatives succeed, at the very least they might result in some snazzy utility belts.

Water-Based TETRIS
Projectable, moving 3-D images have long been a hurdle in the process of creating a true virtual reality environment, but researchers at Carnegie Mellon University recently unveiled their novel approach to dealing with this challenge: projecting images onto water.

The new AquaLux 3D system relies on water droplets expelled from 50 stainless-steel needles to create 60 lines per second, according to New Scientist. A camera tracks their position and coordinates the data with a projector that casts pulses of light onto the surface, thus creating moving images on a floating screen.

Here’s a video highlighting the system’s capabilities, including a 3-D version of TETRIS played on a sheet of water:

Have a great weekend, folks.