No it's not. That's a design trend. The patent offices job is not to police trends. Otherwise, clothing fashions would be patent-able.

The layer of air refers to different velocity gradients in the air. I'm not sure what you were thinking it refers to, but by not having a separation layer, you're basically making it such that a relatively small number of molecules (as in 02, N2, etc.) ever even come to rest on the blade of the fan. Dust, no matter what it's made of, is many of orders of magnitude larger than these molecules, and as such will never come to rest on the blades except on manufacturing defects, and even then, it will only do so rarely. Sure, there will be a way for dust to build up, but this design will lead to an incredibly slow build up of dust compared to normal heatsinks.

Dust wont collect when spinning because the "blades" of the heatsink are oriented such that when they spin the layer of airflow that would normally form over them does not "separate" from the surface of the blades. This means the air on the blade is moving too quickly for the dust to get a good hold. I suspect this claim may be slight hyperbole, since dust will still build up on the blades immediately after it stops spinning, which will then diminish the separation layer effect and thus allow dust to start collecting on the blades while it starts moving. It will certainly at least build up dust much much more slowly though.

As you can see in the images in both articles and in the descriptions in both articles, there's non-spinning portion of the cooler that would sit on the heat spreader (since Intel and AMD would probably not quit using heat-spreaders if these became popular). The incredibly thin gap of air between the two pieces of metal means that the air gap is actually an incredible conductor of heat. The original article (2011) did a better job of explaining this.

Again, this doesn't spin on the heat-spreader, and also, the axial bearing is not an air bearing, so it would not have this problem. All they would have to do is make sure that the heatsink starts spinning with a gap between the two sections that is larger than the anticipated air gap and then change said gap using cheap electromagnets when the heatsink is up to speed.

As an aerospace engineering student and RC enthusiast I'd have to agree, this is just a cheap RC plane (notice the beer-can holder cockpit?). The only things that would seem to indicate otherwise are the fact that it's flying in Pakistan, has very thin wings for an RC plane (thin wings made of balsa just don't work), and the fact that it looks like there's some sort of foam injection in the body. The scotch-tape FMC's placed everywhere only confirm it's homemade, and the way the skin crumpled just screams MonoKote. There are chunks of balsa sticking out everywhere and the plastic control arms on the control surfaces are just like the ones I've used on every cheap RC plane I've built. On top of that, you have a fuselage with really poor aerodynamics, and the fact that it's just too big for a hand launch "disposable" UAV. And the four "apertures" on the bottom look like spots where they put washers to secure some sort of cheap landing gear. Also, the nose cone is a really common style used by RC enthusiast's because of how easily it hooks up to an electric starter. Maybe Al-Qaeda threw this together because they thought it looked like a bird? That wouldn't explain the writing in English, but would explain why it's a total piece of crap that I'd be way too ashamed to fly.