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If you're invested in the future of 3D printing, the London Science Museum was the place to be today, as the European Space Agency and its partners hosted a consortium to celebrate the launch of the AMAZE project. AMAZE, which stands for Additive Manufacturing Aiming Towards Zero Waste & Efficient Production of High-Tech Metal Products (we guess AMATZWEPHMP just didn't have the same ring to it), is a joint effort to take the next logical step in the evolution of 3D printing: manufacturing metal parts. At today's event, components made of tungsten alloy were a particular highlight, as the extremely high temperatures such material can withstand (up to 3,000 degrees Celsius) would make them ideal for use in spacecraft and nuclear fusion environments. The process of 3D printing metal would also allow engineers to design beyond the limits of traditional metal casting, as seen in the Airbus hinges above. If your consortium invitation got lost in the mail, fear not. The museum's exhibit will be open to the public until July of next year.

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The image of drone traffic clouding the skies is still an alarming one considering the use of unmanned aerial vehicles in military operations, but it may not be an alien one in the not-so-distant future. Australian startup Flirtey is pairing drone delivery with Zookal's book sale service to -- government approval pending -- deliver textbooks via UAV. According to AU newspaper The Age, deliveries via Flirtey can be tracked over users' Android phones while en route.

Of course, Flirtey and co. can't just take to the sky for commercial sales without Australian approval first; Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority still has to rule on an application from the startup. We imagine it'll mostly be questions about how Flirtey plans to handle bundles of books falling from the sky onto unknowing pedestrians. Following that approval, Flirtey's hoping to bring the project to the US -- what we'd call a much pricklier process, especially given the aforementioned military use for drones (specifically by US forces). To see the company's drones in action, head below the break for a video. Now if you'll excuse us, we'll be working out plans for weaponized textbooks.

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Biological brains are sometimes overrated, but they're still orders of magnitude quicker and more power-efficient than traditional computer chips. That's why Qualcomm has been quietly funneling some of its prodigious income into a project called "Zeroth," which it hopes will one day give it a radical advantage over other mobile chip companies. According to Qualcomm's Matt Grob, Zeroth is a "biologically-inspired" processor that is modeled on real-life neurons and is capable of learning from feedback in much the same way as a human or animal brain does. And unlike some other so-called artifical intelligences we've seen, this one appears to work. The video after the break shows a Zeroth-controlled robot exploring an environment and then naturally adjusting its behavior in response not to lines of code, but to someone telling it whether it's being "good" or "bad."

"Everything here is biologically realistic: spiking neurons implemented in hardware on that actual machine."

Zeroth is advanced enough that Qualcomm says it's ready to work with other companies who want to develop applications to run on it. One particular focus is on building neural networks that will fit into mobile devices and enable them to learn from users who, unlike coders, aren't able or willing to instruct devices in the usual tedious manner. Grob even claims that, when a general-purpose Zeroth neural network is trained to do something specific, such as recognizing and tracking an object, it can already accomplish that task better than an algorithm designed solely for that function. Check out the source link to see Grob's full talk and more demo videos -- especially if you want to confirm your long-held suspicion that dogs are scarily good at math.

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You may have heard of probabilistic computing, a concept that relies on "good enough" calculations to save processing power. You may not know just why and where we should use it, however; thankfully, ExtremeTech has just offered an explanation of the technology's merits. The site notes that it's getting difficult to maintain accuracy and power efficiency as processors get ever more complex. By reducing precision in areas where it's not as essential, such as browsing and media playback, chip designers can significantly improve battery life. The technology isn't in widespread use just yet, but it may become commonplace in the near future. NXP is already making limited use of imprecise computing to improve security, while Intel has investigated variable-precision floating-point math units that scale back for less intensive tasks. While accurate processors are here to stay, there's a real chance they'll be accompanied by probabilistic circuitry in future energy-efficient gadgets.

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Many have accused Azerbaijan's government of running a fake democracy, and the administration hasn't helped its image with its official election app for Android and iOS. Citizens who downloaded the client were surprised to get supposedly final election results a day before voting even began. As the results showed President Aliyev winning by a landslide, critics like Meydan TV were quick to cite the app as "proof" that the election was rigged; officials just revealed their ploy too quickly. There's no hard evidence to support the accusations, however. While few believe the developer's claims that it accidentally released 2008 data as part of a test (the candidates are from 2013), the software gives Aliyev a smaller lead than the official results show as of this writing. So, it appears that any ballot stuffing likely took place outside of the app, then. More than anything, the snafu underscores the importance of quality control -- in the wrong circumstances, a flawed app can result in more than just a few annoyed users.

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Disney has a knack for making the mundane magical, whether it's transforming a pumpkin into a carriage or a few sheets of paper into a generator. The team from Disney Research accomplished the latter by constructing a simple mechanism with a few low-cost items, like Teflon, conductive adhesives, wires and silver-coated polyester (though paper printed with conductive ink will also work). The negatively charged Teflon sheet functions as an electret, a material capable of holding a quasi-permanent electrical charge; by sandwiching it between either the polyester or conductive paper, you can produce enough voltage to light up a small LED array, create animations on e-paper displays, or trigger animations on connected computers. Using the generator is simple: all you have to do is rub or tap the paper, say, "Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo," and you're all set (the magic word is optional). To see it with your own two eyes, check out the video after the break.

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Sure, it may have been one of the easier Nobel prizes to call in recent years -- at least partly -- but that doesn't make it any less notable. This morning, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to Peter Higgs and Francois Englert "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles," or what's come to be known as the Higgs boson.

While the prize doesn't extend to the researchers at CERN who confirmed the existence of the Higgs particle last year, the Nobel committee did cite their work in the announcement, as did Peter Higgs himself, who said in a prepared statement that he "would also like to congratulate all those who have contributed to the discovery of this new particle." Professor Higgs isn't offering any more than that statement today, though -- one of his Edinburgh University colleagues tells the BBC that "he's gone on holiday without a phone."

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Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days.

Your Facebook status updates may seem like witty prose to you, but to a bunch of scientists they're nothing but typographical DNA, waiting to reveal everything about you. Less sinister sounding stories from the last seven days include hands-on tangible web-searching and a new spin on learning the piano. This is alt-week.

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