A nice slice of technophobia here – a journalist from the UK’s ‘News of the World’ paper has been saying that the internet could produce a society that works on mythology, sound-bites and symbolism. So, finishing the job his tawdry organ has been doing for years, then. [PhysOrg.com]

It’s groovy that this newspaper is allowing its web readers to influence the way it puts its print edition together, but it still doesn’t solve the inherent problem of all newspapers in our age, that their news will always be hours, if not days, old. While it is heartening to see traditional journalists abandoning some of their infamous hubris and trying to adapt, their print newspapers are still doomed to be read only by elderly owners of pet birds.

Yet another bizarre object will begin orbiting the Earth – the crew of the International Space Station are planning to throw an old Soviet spacesuit rigged up with extra batteries into orbit. It will broadcast a simple looped signal that can be picked up from Earth with a radio scanner or ham rig, and there are prizes up for grabs for those who succeed in recieving and deciphering the message correctly. [BoingBoing]

Astronomer Charles Lada thinks that stars may form in isolation more often than previous scientific models have suggested. As many of these are red dwarfs, stable over a much longer period than a star like our Sun, this finding appears to shorten the odds of life developing elsewhere in the universe. [NewScientistSpace]