You may have read about living lasers that were built out of proteins. Fun.
The cell stayed alive while being hired as a laser. :-) It's not necessarily the most handy thing in the world but it is kind of cool what people have managed to do. A similar recent news was about DNA-based calculators that can compute square roots! :-)
I just wanted to embed this video from NewsyScience because I can't believe that this pretty good new source of video information about scientific issues only has had two viewers so far. ;-)
Check the YouTube channel of Newsy Science that has so far uploaded 17 videos in the last three weeks.
Their general website is Newsy.com.