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Inspired from Mother Nature: The body of the brittlestar Ophiocoma wendtii is studded with tiny crystalline lenses made of calcium carbonate. Microlenses like these are of great interest technologically, yet they have always been extremely expensive to produce

Inspired from Mother Nature: The body of the brittlestar Ophiocoma wendtii is studded with tiny crystalline lenses made of calcium carbonate. Microlenses like these are of great interest technologically, yet they have always been extremely expensive to produce. However, scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces and colleagues from other institutes took their cue from biology and came up with a relatively simple and inexpensive method of producing calcium carbonate lenses packed together in a regular arrangement.

In a booming app economy come apps made for helping you develop and test apps, just as apps get more important. Read on for hot app-on-app action! A firm called SOASTA, which dubs itself the "leader in cloud-based performance and functional testing" has some news today about a release of its CloudTest Platform--something that "for the first time" allows "functional test automation for continuous multi-touch, gesture-based mobile applications." Multitouch, gestures, apps, and the cloud all in one thing--it's a tech writer's heaven. Within the news, though, are a couple of important trends, connected to the development of smartphone and tablet technology