But now it's time for video to expand throughout our great science coverage. You'll soon be seeing more video than ever on our breaking news stories and on our in-depth long-form features.
To allow us to do that, we will no longer be updating the New Scientist TV blog. We'd like to thank everyone who followed our videos here. We're working hard on a new home for video here on newscientist.com, where all of our clips and multimedia stories will be more easily browsable, shareable and searchable, so stay tuned!
A new super-slippery material is no one-trick pony. Not only capable of repelling just about any liquid, it can just as easily make a sliding drop stop in its tracks. For an encore, it can change colour.
A stellar corpse has been caught masquerading as a giant planet, bending the light of its orbital companion during a fly-by. NASA's Kepler space telescope spotted a signal that seemed to indicate a Jupiter-sized exoplanet passing in front of a red dwarf star. But astronomers can now tell that the culprit is actually a tiny white dwarf.
3D printers are now playing Frankenstein: a specially designed system has built up an artificial membrane that mimics living tissue.
Developed by Hagan Bayley from the University of Oxford and colleagues, droplets of water wrapped in oil are ejected in layers to form a rubbery material. The tiny beads behave like cells: they can communicate with each other through membrane proteins, transmitting electric signals across the material. This video shows how osmosis can drive a flower pattern to spontaneously fold up into a different shape, mimicking muscle movement. The hollow sphere it produces would be difficult to print directly.
Robotic dragonflies could be the next explorers on Mars, and a new design is already buzzing around on Earth. Developed by Festo, the mechanical insect exploits the unique mechanics of four-winged flight, allowing it to fly in all directions, hover in mid-air and glide without beating its wings (see video above).
Each wing's motion can be fine-tuned by controlling its amplitude, flapping frequency and thrust - which is achieved by adjusting its tilt and twist. The team says a smartphone can act as a remote control to put the dragonfly almost anywhere in a given space.
Although it appears to be considerably larger than a real dragonfly, the robot is light thanks to a carbon-fibre frame and flexible polymer shell. That structure holds a microcontroller, mechanical components, sensors and wireless modules, showing how different functions can be integrated and miniaturised
Lobsters have to be really hungry to prey on sea hares. When provoked, the animals unleash an unusual weapon, squirting predators with purple ink and sticky goo that knocks out their sense of smell (see video above).
It looks like fireworks in a zebrafish brain: this video shows the first live images of 80 per cent of a living vertebrate's brain activity. The flashing display could help explain how different parts of the brain work together to control the animal's behaviour.
You might expect to see a colour change after combining two different hues. But a demo involving a banana shows that it's not always the case.
In this video, courtesy of Al Seckel from Eye Wonder Books, a banana image turns green when covered with a bluish filter that matches its shape. However when a larger filter of the same colour, which encompasses the whole piece of paper, is placed over the top, no colour change is perceived.
Do you know what causes the illusion? Let us know in the comments below and the first correct answer will win a New Scientist goodie bag.
You could soon see glowing objects in the sky: psychedelic planes are being developed. The aim is better aerodynamics, though, rather than messing with your mind.
Plasma, which makes neon lights glow, can also create jets of air to help propel small planes when generated over wings. In this video, captured by Berkant Goeksel and colleagues at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, the effect on the airflow is visible on a test wing as it extinguishes the flame from a lighter. Another clip, captured in a wind tunnel, shows how ionised gas can help regain lift. The wing is placed at a high angle of attack, a position in which it often experiences loss of lift. But the flow is excited when the plasma is turned on, allowing the wing to rise up again. The wing is loosely mounted in this demo to make the difference in lift visible.
It's a model train like no other: when it enters a tunnel, it seems to defy the properties of space and time. But of course, what you're seeing is just an illusion. Do you know what the trick involves?
