This Week in the Future, April 4-8, 2011

Disclaimer: In the future, you will not have to worry about spills like this one, what with the superhydrophobic fabrics and all. But that technology is not widely available quite yet, so the t-shirt you could win simply by retweeting us on Twitter is susceptible to saturation by liquids of all sorts. This is regrettable, but we felt we should level with you. It’s still a pretty sweet shirt, though.

The rules: Follow us on Twitter (we’re @PopSci) and retweet our This Week in the Future tweet. One of those lucky retweeters will be chosen to receive a custom t-shirt with this week’s Baarbarian illustration on it, thus making the winner entirely too cool for their school, or place of business, or couch. (Those who would rather just buy the t-shirt can do that here.) The stories pictured therein:

• New Superhydrophobic Fabric Blocks Both Water and UV Rays
• Big Bang Recreated in a Metamaterial, Offers Evidence That Time Travel is Impossible
• Algae Live Inside Developing Salamanders’ Cells, Scientists Find
• Genetically Modified Cows Produce Milk Akin To Human Milk

And don’t forget to check out our other favorite stories of the week:

• Fermilab Physicists Have Detected A Possible New Particle or New Force
• Who Killed The Deep Space Climate Observatory?
• Two White Dwarfs Orbit Each Other At 1,000,000 MPH, Will Soon Merge to Create a New Star
• Video: Three Lifelike Humanoids Sit Down For a Chat With Their Human Counterparts
• Archive Gallery: Revisiting the Golden Age of Zeppelins
• Rinderpest, the Cattle-Killing Plague, to Become the Second Officially-Eradicated Scourge
• Sir Richard Branson Launches Virgin Oceanic, Will Explore the Deepest Depths of Every Ocean
• FYI: Can Scientists Measure Happiness?
• SpaceX Unveils its New ‘Falcon Heavy’ Rocket, a 22-Story Heavy-Lift Behemoth
• How It Works: A Smarter Crash-Test Dummy