Giant solar powered plastic bubbles could soon bob gently over the London skyline if an art project shortlisted for a space in the 2012 Olympics goes ahead. The Cloud, as its designers call it would float above the Olympic park in east London with the giant bubbles capable of displaying data and pictures attached to 400 foot tall towers made of mesh.

The brain child of architects in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The Cloud would show information like weather stats, Olympic results and spectator numbers.
It would also serve as an observation deck and a park.

Ideally also films, music videos and that youtube clip of a squirrel, but i imagine that's not in their bid for the prize, judged by a committee set up by Boris Johnson. Other shortlistees include Anthony Gormely and Anish Kapoor.

The creators of the idea want to make The Cloud a reality whether they get the gig in London or not, and have set up a website - Raise the Cloud - asking for micro-donations to see if they can raise enough to create their mesh and bubble dream.

They have released several beautiful mock-up images of the project, browse through them in the gallery below.
Click on the image below to start the gallery.

This is the sort of idea that is a joke until someone actually goes and makes a digital interface that embeds under your skin, allows you to browse the internet on a screen on your arm and gets its power supply from the glucose in your blood.

Called a Digital Tattoo interface and made as a project for the Greener Design Competition, the device is permanently implanted between the skin and muscle in your arm. The interface is visible through the skin like dark marks from a tattoo. You can answer your phone through the device, and a video of your caller comes up, you can browse the internet or just download a picture to sit there, looking like a standard tattoo.

The Science experiment that people feared would end the world, is now available as a coffee-table book, and a damn fine one at that. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is the world's largest and most complex scientific experiment but thanks to a British scientist working on the project and Anton Radevsky, a "paper engineer" you can get a glimpse into its workings though a pop-up book.

Surely this is the ultimate geek hardback this Christmas.

Hurrah, an announcement from the department of the bleeding obvious. If it isn't an obesity crisis it's an anorexia scare story and now we have great people shouting that skinny women have more sex than their larger counterparts. Didn't they say the opposite last month?

Ah, well it's in the paper so it MUST be true. And apparently they have 'science' to back it up. A report taken by weight loss specialist Lighter Life (so no ulterior motive then?) says that 12 percent of people with a high BMI have gone at least a year without doing the dirty and six percent admit to six months without sex. So why is this?

Whoever said bad things come in threes was right. First Russell Brand leaves the BBC over *those* phone calls, then the lovable John Sergeant is pushed out of quits Strictly Come Dancing, and now my stint as Shiny Shiny's science guru has come to an end. But here's one final column to go out with a Big Bang (pun intended, sadly).

Science and technology go together hand-in-hand: scientific breakthroughs lead to new technologies and improved technology helps to further science. For example, it was a group of scientists working in a lab called CERN who first created the internet, and now the smart guys at NASA are using the internet to help with their space missions.

Last week I was invited to the press preview of the world's first National Geographic store on Regent Street in London (BTW - the Christmas lights on Regent Street look great). And I have decided to dedicate this week's column to the store. Why? Well, profits made from the deal with the franchise partner will help fund National Geographic's exploration, conservation, research and education programmes. So there. And just think, now you know exactly why you should bother to pop in.

On the ground floor of the store there is a lecture area that doubles as retail floor space. Basically, when a lecture is going to take place, the goods are quickly moved aside in the crates that they're displayed in. Lectures given by National Geographic's own group of Indiana Jones types will begin in January.

Even if you don't plan to buy one of the artefacts from around the world, it's nice to peruse the galleries of National Geographic images on every floor (look out for my favourite: the pic of the high-fiving frog).

Last week, scientists from around the world leapt up from their desks and shouted, "Eureka!" But why are scientists joining in the Obama love-in? I feel the urge to do a list...

1) He has been making all of the right noises for the scientific community, which is why 76 Nobel Laureates officially backed him during the US election race. This is the largest number of Nobel Prize winners ever to support a presidential candidate.

2) His space policy has won him his own science groupies called 'Obamanauts'. How cool is that?

3) Obama has said that he will appoint a science advisor ASAP and it is thought that he will raise this position to a cabinet-level job. He will also be the first President to appoint a Chief Technology Officer. However, the priority right now is to appoint the First Dog.

True Beatles aficionados will be hoping that MTV release a new peripheral for next year's Rock Band-esque Beatles game so that they can play A Hard Day's Night just like the Fabulous Four Five did.

The opening chord to the Beatles classic had been somewhat of a musical mystery for decades, until a cunning professor used a mathematical procedure (called Fourier transform) to split the sound into its original frequencies. Prof Jason Brown found that the Beatles producer lived up to his title of being the fifth member of the band, as the intro included a top-secret let's-baffle-our-fans piano chord played by George Martin himself.

The piano chord included an F note, which is impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar. So the new Beatles game clearly needs a piano peripheral. What can I say - I have to be true to my art.

Of course, the pianist in your band is going to have a small role to play. I'd give this instrument to one of the darling *ahem* little brats in your family when you are forced to let them have a go.

I was shocked when my nana rang me the other day to ask what I would like for Christmas, but she quickly pointed out that it is ONLY EIGHT WEEKS ON THURSDAY!!! Yikes.

If like me you would rather put that scary thought to the back of your mind and go off on a bit of a tangent, then here's an interesting discovery: scientists have found that X-rays are emitted when a roll of sticky tape is unwound in a vacuum.

Researchers at the University of California found that they could use this simple setup to take X-ray images of their fingers. Now that's something to think about as you wrap your Christmas pressies.

To watch a video of this experiment in action and to find out how you can test this for yourself at work, continue reading after the jump...

I understand that a lot of science news can underwhelm the masses, but some stories irritate me with their desperate cries for attention - the kind of stories that seem needier for press coverage than a Big Brother evictee.

Take for example the recent discovery of an area of land on the Arizona-Utah border with more than 1,000 dinosaur footprints. Exciting stuff if you happen to be called Dr Ross Geller. But what was the headline for the press release to get everyone else wetting themselves with excitement: 'Dinosaur Dance Floor'. Hmmm...

There has been more than the usual dose of health stories this week, so I've decided to do a recap of the biggest headlines. And continuing Susi's positive week, I'll give you the good news first.

Good times

Open wide, because white wine may be good for you. For years we've been hearing that drinking red wine is good for your heart, and now white wine has joined the party too. Good, because I hate suffering from red wine lips syndrome.

Phew! Just when we thought scientists were going to make us feel bad about our Starbucks addiction, a new study has shown there is no link between caffeine and breast cancer, as was previously suggested. But women with benign lumps may be at a higher risk if they drink four or more cups of coffee daily. (Is that tall or venti?)

New research has shown that men have another use: stem cells can be extracted from the testicles. While it sounds quite painful (*ouch*) the breakthrough could end the debate about the ethics of harvesting stem cells from embryos.

Welcome to the first Sarah's Shiny Science column. Every Wednesday I'll be bringing you the latest news from the weird and wonderful world of science. Right, with introductions over, let's get on with the column.

It's Nobel Prize time again and the worthy winners are being announced throughout the week. So far, three scientists have shared the prize for medicine for discovering the viruses that cause Aids and cervical cancer. And the prize for physics has gone to three researchers for their work on the building blocks of matter, called subatomic particles. The discovery of a protein that glows green, which is being used to study Alzheimer's disease and the spread of cancers, has netted the chemistry prize.

But before you start berating yourself for a lack of personal accomplishment this year, take a look at how some of the world's brainiest boffins have wasted their smarts after the jump...

Dear LHC,

Please don't kill us all. Please don't create a black hole, when you get going on the whole 'particles colliding at the speed of light' thing.

Things I've yet to do yet include find out about the new Apple products, work out exactly how the semantic web works and get picked to appear on My Super Sweet Sixteenth.

Trust me, no one wants to know about the origins of the universe that badly (although apparently they *do* want to know £2.4bn much).

Much love,

All those at Shiny Towers

This is a very strange concept to explain. On one hand it's incredibly simple, but on the other hand you have to see it to believe it. I've been lucky enough to experience it firsthand with a morning at London Aquarium testing manta-rays patience by dunking things in their pool. And what was I dunking? A mixture of tissue paper and cloth that had been coated with a unique treatment.

Hi-Tec have developed something called ion-mask technology which uses nanotechnology to enhance the surface of an object till it's completely water repellent,

Have you got a dog in the room with you whilst you're reading this? If so, watch out, because whilst it might look like the pooch is chewing on your new stilettos, he may actually be plotting to take over the world.

A new study, which only gets stranger the more your read of it, suggests that dogs have adapted through the ages to communicate with humans, and even goes as far as to suggest Fido has a moral compass.

A UK scientists has declared it would be 'crazy' for women to stop moisturising. Not because he lives in fear of living in a world where women look their age, but because it turns out that you can't extrapolate findings of a couple of mice you moisturised and generalise it to women worldwide. Shocker.

The background: A US study found that when they shaved mice and exposed them to UV light, 69% more of them got skin cancer compared to those who hadn't touched the Oil of Olay. However, as the UK scientist pointed out, shaved mice are hardly designed to be exposed to sunlight, unlike our own huuman-type skin.