A gang of researchers at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam have discovered a way to infect RFID tags with a worm-like computer virus.

Ooh, I want one of these Aerogardens for my kitchen. Nice industrial design in white or black to match your coffee maker, no messy dirt, “pre-seeded pods.” And it worries about watering the plants for you. Can’t beat that (he says, surveying the carnage that was once a balcony garden).

Computers do logical tasks really well, but more ‘human’ tasks like visual perception and value judgements aren’t their forte. So the people at Icosystem have developed software that produces mutations of its input and allows a human user to choose the one it likes best as the seed for the next iteration. Sounds complicated, but it should actually lead to easy and intuitive work with computers for everyone from graphic designers to pharmaceutical chemists.

Now that we’re doing a lot more data-intensive work out in space, we are starting to run into a need for a communications protocol that can handle the huge distances involved. Hence a NASA data-standards manager is looking into the practicalities of taking internet protocols interplanetary.