Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV

Improving your mathematical skills could now be as easy as playing a Kinect video game in a hat. In preliminary tests of the system, developed by Roi Cohen Kadosh and colleagues from the University of Oxford, participants were better with numbers after just two days of training.

Joanna Carver, reporter

If your soup splatters all over your stovetop, even though it's not boiling over, jets of liquid are probably to blame. Thomas Séon and colleagues from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris have captured the first detailed videos of the jets in action to investigate how they are produced.

Joanna Carver, reporter

Walking into a cyclone of sand may seem dangerous, but the dust devils shown in this video are no more powerful than the weakest tornadoes. On Mars, however, they are larger and stronger, so studying them on Earth could give insight into how they feed dust storms and create lightning on the Red Planet.

Joanna Carver, reporter

People who have lived in the dark from birth have now found they don't need their eyes to see. A new device developed by Amir Amedi from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and colleagues is giving congenitally blind adults the ability to interpret visual information from sound.

Joanna Carver, reporter

Wondering who will win the US presidential election tomorrow? Maybe you're more bothered about whether your weekend picnic is going to be rained on. Well, rest easy. Not only is it out of your control, it's also largely unpredictable.

This new animation by Henry Reich looks at whether more information could help us make more accurate predictions. If weather forecasters had a thousand times more data about the movement of clouds across the Earth, would they know for sure that it's going to rain? Similarly, would quantum mechanics still reveal only probabilities if its models were more informed?

Joanna Carver, reporter

We've shown you a beluga whale that mimics human speech and a dog with the vocabulary of a 3-year-old. A talking elephant was really only a matter of time.

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV

It looks like a creation from Frankenstein's lab: a robot with tentacles modelled on an octopus. Complete with waterproof skin and suckers, it's the world's first entirely soft robot.

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV

What happens to a dead body if it's dumped in the ocean? If large scavengers can't get at it, sea lice are likely to slowly devour it from the inside out. But if a carcass is left exposed, it will probably be ravaged by sharks, as shown in this dramatic video.

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV

Move over farmers: soon a swarm of robots could take over all the hard labour. A new robot developed by David Dorhout and colleagues from Dorhout R&D is designed to plant seeds in a field while coordinating with a gang of other robotic farmhands.

In this video, you can see the prototype in action. The robot can walk in any direction while avoiding obstacles, using a sensor underneath its body to detect where seeds have already been planted. Once it finds an untouched patch, it drills a hole in the ground and releases a seed, triggering an electronic eye that guides the planting.

Jacob Aron, reporter

It's not quite a freeze ray, but it's pretty close. A new technique can now "freeze" the structure of water droplets as they bounce, revealing unusual shapes.

Jeremy Marston and colleagues from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, discovered the phenomenon by dripping water onto a surface coated with an extremely water-repellent powder. Tiny particles fully covered drops on impact, preserving them in their deformed state. The video of the process above reveals water that looks like ice cream and a bowling pin.

The team found that the shape "froze" only when a smaller satellite drop was ejected along with the main one (see video). A minimum impact speed of 1.6 metres per second was also required for the effect to occur with water. Bizarre shapes were also observed when more viscous liquids were used, such as drops containing glycerol.

The research will be presented next month at the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics conference in San Diego, California.

If you enjoyed this post, watch hovering water droplets move like UFOs or see how drops can tap-dance to the beat.