Full Paper: Brown et al  "Universal robotic gripper based on the jamming of granular material". PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1003250107.
"The cells in a multicellular organism have nominally identical DNA sequences (and therefore the same genetic instruction sets), yet maintain different terminal phenotypes. This nongenetic cellular memory, which records developmental and environmental cues (and alternative cell states in unicellular organisms), is the basis of epi-(above)–genetics." Introduction to special issue of Science on Epigenetics.
Full paper: Allen et al  "Why the leopard got its spots: relating pattern development to ecology in felids". Proc. R. Soc. B doi:10.1098/rspb.2010.1734.
"One idea for biosensors and bioenergy is to combine living cells with inorganic materials. Researchers have taken a step towards this goal by engineering the bacterium Escherichia coli to transmit electrons to inorganic materials." From Nature.com.
"Are redundant copies of noncoding DNA sequences due to poor genomic housekeeping, or do they function to improve the organism’s chances of survival?". Full news article @ The Scientist.
Full article: N. Frankel et al., “Phenotypic robustness conferred by apparently redundant transcriptional enhancers,” Nature, 466:490-93, 201.
"The goal of this software package is to provide intuitive and accessible tools for simulating biological regulatory networks in a boolean formalism. Using this simulator biologist and bioinformaticians can specify their system in a simple textual language then explore various dynamic behaviors via a web interface or an application programming interface (API) each designed to facilitate scientific discovery, data collection and reporting.
The software is primarly distributed as Python source code and requires that Python 2.5 (or later) be installed on the target computer."
Interesting use of cellular automata to make music. And you can download them as ringtones for your cell! Wolfram has extended cellular automata to every conceivable area...If you want to read his book (I had it autographed :) let me know! Its huge, over 1K pages.
"Could there be a mathematical description that might capture and explain biology’s fallibility? The theory of evolution, as formulated by Darwin, stands in its remarkable simplicity as an example of a single set of rules applicable to all biological systems. This theory, in its original expression, was remarkably devoid of mathematics (although it has since been described with great success in mathematical models). But biology in general appears to be so subject to deviations, exceptions, and diversification, rather than convergences, that it is difficult to derive simple and general principles. Nonetheless, it was this possibility of convergence that drove me to biology in the first place.