* Astronomy

Perfectly timed for pantomime season, a team of scientists has come up with instructions for how to make a flying carpet.
The magical device may owe more to Walt Disney than to The Arabian Nights , but it is not pure fantasy, according to Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his co-workers. The researchers have studied1 the aerodynamics of a flexible, rippling sheet moving through a fluid, and find that it should be possible to make one that will stay aloft in air.

Read more