Real Italian pasta can take a lot of effort to knead, shape and cook until it is perfectly al dente. So it is unsurprising that Italian researchers were desperate to make it last longer before needing to be thrown away. A scientific team from Italy took months developing the perfect technique to make pasta last 30 days longer. The solution involves storing the pasta in the perfect atmosphere to prevent bacterial growth and adding probiotics to the flour. Flat-pack pasta which only takes on its iconic shape after cooking has been created by scientists.

As robots have steadily expanded their operations out of the controlled environments of research labs and into the chaos of real-world architectural infrastructure, getting from point A to point B has become a major challenge -- take stairs, for example. In response, roboticists have developed a number of solutions, from installing rotors so that the robot can helicopter over obstacles or, in Boston Dynamics case, execute backflips that would give Simone Biles pause. And then there's Daniele Pucci, head of the Artificial and Mechanical Intelligence lab at the Italian Institute of Technology, who has taken the audacious step of strapping a fully functional jetpack akin to what Richard Browning developed onto the back of an iRonCub synthetic humanoid with hopes of eventually blasting it into the sky. You'd think we'd have learned our lesson about the dangers of building aerial humanoid robots after our first time through Age of Ultron but Pucci's team believes that such systems could one day act as first responders to the roughly 300 natural disasters that kill around 90,000 people worldwide annually. We've seen a slew of disaster response bots -- some humanoid, some not so much -- emerge from labs for more than a decade, often with varying degrees of success.

This is the most advanced robotic hand ever created - with a design that will lower the price significantly - marking a breakthrough for the field of prosthetics. The so-called Hennes hand, developed by Italian researchers, has only one motor that controls all five fingers, making it lighter, cheaper and more able to adapt to the shape of objects. It weighs about the same as a human hand, and uniquely uses sensors that react to electrical signals from the brain to the muscles, which is much simpler than other'myoelectric prosthetics'. The simplicity will allow the team to price the device about 30 percent cheaper than other models on the market, at 10,000 euros ($11,900). All together, lead researcher Lorenzo De Michieli says there has never been such a natural and accessible option for amputees.

By tracking cursor movement, lie detection becomes a game of cat and mouse. Every year, millions of people have their identities stolen. There's no foolproof way to pinpoint fakers, but thanks to Italian researchers, investigators may soon have another tool at their disposal--a way to suss out frauds and other liars online with just a few clicks of a mouse. Traditional methods of lie detection include face-to-face interviews and polygraphs that measure heart rate and skin conductance. But they can't be done remotely, or with large numbers of people.