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Who knew sand could look so damn colourful and interesting? Gary Greenberg, that’s who, whose incredible microphotography reveals each grain of sand to be a kaleidoscope of colour and texture that defies its rather bland reputation.

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Death is never popular, even in social media: the poor guy behind @death on Twitter has zero followers.

You might think your online fans will lose interest when you kick the bucket, but an upcoming app says it will let you keep tweeting from beyond the grave.

LivesOn will host Twitter accounts that continue to post updates when users shed this mortal coil.

Developers claim the app’s artificial-intelligence engine will analyze your Twitter feed, learn your likes and syntax, and then post tweets in a similar vein when you’re gone.

You’ll become an AI construct, a proverbial ghost in the machine.

The app will launch in March, according to Guardian News. People who sign up will be asked to appoint an executor who will have control of the account.

Similar postmortem Twitter apps, such as DeadSocial, have only used prepared tweets, not updates created by an AI.

“It offends some, and delights others,” Dave Bedwood, a partner at the ad agency behind LivesOn, was quoted as saying in the Guardian report.

“Imagine if people started to see it as a legitimate but small way to live on. Cryogenics costs a fortune; this is free and I’d bet it will work better than a frozen head.”

Scientists have used nanotechnology to create “selectively wet” materials that can be used to write long-lasting messages with water.

The concept, called “hydroglyphics,” was exhibited by scientists at Harvard who recently teamed up with a group of Merrimack, N.H., high school students and faculty to make an educational demo.

The demo, appropriately entitled “Hydroglyphics,” helps people visualize the difference between water repelling and wetting surfaces. The main principle behind hydroglyphics (a combination of the words “hydro” and “hieroglyphics”) is that by changing the properties of a surface, you can make your own special prints using water. All you need is some foam stickers, a modified Tesla coil and a Petri dish.

Each audience member takes a Petri dish and chooses a favorite sticker, tacking it onto the bottom of the dish. The demo performer then puts each dish under the Tesla coil, and zaps them. A purple spark appears accompanied by a loud noise. Once the sticker is removed, water is added to the dish. The water fills up everywhere except on the area where the sticker had been, creating an “engraving.” The message can last about one month.

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These crow kin from Australia and New Guinea are known for constructing elaborate edifices to woo mates. But males of one species, the great bowerbird (Ptilonorhynchus nuchalis), go a step further: They use a trick of architectural perspective to boost their allure, and will stick to their own scheme even if it falls short with the females.

While most bowerbirds embellish their “love nests” with bright, shiny baubles, the great bowerbird’s decor is comparatively bland: an avenue of sticks leading to a pair of courts garnished with mostly gray-to-white objects like pebbles, shells, and bones.

But a lack of color doesn’t mean a lack of style for these birds. Biologists John Endler and Laura Kelley of Australia’s Deakin University have found that male great bowerbirds carefully arrange their courts’ decorations in a specific pattern, with bigger items farther away from the bower avenue (where the female stands), creating the illusion of an evenly textured stage.

This effect—called “forced perspective”—may be visually pleasing to the female, or it may simply make the male, who waves colored objects during his mating dance, easier to see. Whatever the reason, the males who build the most geometric patterns also have the most success in winning mates.

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A Scottish skipper has set a new world record after finding a message in a bottle 98 years after it was released.

Andrew Leaper’s discovery beat the previous record for the longest time a bottle has been adrift at sea by more than five years.

And he found the bottle while skippering the same fishing boat which had set the previous record, the Shetland-based vessel Copious.

Mr Leaper said: “It was an amazing coincidence.”

The find has been confirmed as a new record by Guinness World Records.

The drift bottle – containing a postcard which promised a reward of six pence to the finder – was released in June 1914 by Captain CH Brown of the Glasgow School of Navigation.

It was in a batch of 1,890 scientific research bottles which were specially designed to sink to help map the currents of the seas around Scotland when they were returned. Only 315 of them have been found.

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Steady advancements in chemistry, light and optics culminated in 1826 with the creation of the first photograph. Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce pondered the possibility of using light-sensitive compounds to reproduce imagery as early as 1793, but it wasn’t until a summer’s day in 1827 that Niépce managed to permanently fix the first photograph. He coated a pewter plate with bitumen of Judaea and placed this sheet inside a camera obscura, then focused it on the scene outside his window—the courtyard and outbuildings of his family’s country home. The place was exposed to sunlight for eight hours, during which the bitumen subject to brightness became hardened and bleached. Niépce later washed the plate in lavender oil and white petroleum, dissolving the bitumen that wasn’t exposed and leaving only the hardened parts behind. The result was a lasting impression of the garden: a direct positive, because the dark parts are the metal plate and the light parts are the bleached bitumen. Basically, every image we have today—on TV and video games and the internet—all evolved from bitumen and lavender oil on a metal plate.