Several items - SpaceX, dark matter, Dyson spheres, Bell Labs, and some condensed matter articles

There are a number of interesting physicsy science stories out there right now:

• SpaceX came very very close to successfully landing and recovering the first stage of their Falcon 9 rocket yesterday.  It goes almost without saying that they are doing this because they want to reuse the booster and want to avoid ruining the engines by having them end up in salt water.  I've seen a number of well-intentioned people online ask, why don't they just use a parachute, or set up a big net to catch it if it falls sideways, etc.  To answer the first question:  The booster is designed to be mechanically happy in compression, when the weight of the rocket is pushing down on the lower parts as it sits on the pad, and when the acceleration due to the engines is pushing it along its long axis.  Adding structure to make the booster strong in tension as well (as when it gets yanked on from above by parachute drogue lines) would be a major redesign and would add mass (that takes away from payload).  For the second question:  The nearly empty booster is basically a thin-walled metal tube.  If it's supported unevenly from the side, it will buckle under accelerations (like hitting a net).  Good luck to them!
• It would appear that there is observational evidence that dark matter might interact with itself through forces that are not just gravitational.  That would be very interesting indeed.  Many "simple" ideas about dark matter (say photinos) are not charged, so real dark-dark interactions beyond gravity could limit the candidates to consider.  I'm sure there will be papers on the high energy part of the arXiv within days claiming that string theory predicts exactly this, regardless of what "this" is.
• A Penn State group did a study based on WISE data, and concluded after surveying 100000 distant galaxies that there are only about 50 that seem to emit "too much" in the infrared relative to expectations.   Why look for this?  Well, if there were galaxy-spanning civilizations capable of stellar-scale engineering projects, and if they decided to use that capability to build Dyson spheres to try to capture more than 10% of the star-radiated power in the galaxy, and if those civilizations liked temperature ranges near ours, then you would expect to see an excess of infrared.  So.  Seems like galaxy-spanning civilizations that like to do massive building of Dyson spheres and similar structures are very rare.  I can't say that I'm surprised, but I am glad that creative people are doing searches like this.
• Alcatel-Lucent, including Bell Labs, is being purchased by Nokia.  If anyone knows what this means for Bell Labs research at the combined company, please feel free to post below.  
• One interesting article I noticed in Nature Physics (sorry for the paywall) shows remarkably nice, clean fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) physics in ZnMgO/ZnO heterostructures.  The FQHE tends to be "fragile" - the 2d electron system has to be in a material environment so clean and perfect that not only can an electron make many cyclotron orbits before it scatters off any impurities or defects, but that kind of disorder has to be weak compared to some finicky electron-electron interactions that are at milliKelvin scales.   The new data shows FQHE signatures at "filling fractions" (ratios of magnetic field to electron density) that correspond to some comparatively exotic collective states.  Neat.
• There is a special issue of Physica C coming out in honor of the remarkable (and very nice guy) Ted Geballe, a pioneer in superconductivity research.  I really don't like Elsevier as a publisher, so I am not going to link to their journal.  However, I will link to the arXiv versions of all the articles I've found from that issue:  "What Tc Tells", "Unconventional superconductivity in electron-doped layered metal nitride halides", "Superconductivity of magnesium diboride", "Superconducting doped topological materials", "Hole-doped cuprate high temperature superconductors", "Superconductivity in the elements, alloys, and simple compounds", "Epilogue:  Superconducting materials, past, present, and future", and "Superconducting materials classes:  Introduction and overview".  Good stuff by some of the big names in the field.