Tech-heads and SF writers have been talking about human-machine interfaces for years. In a weird new twist on this idea, military researchers are developing just such a system – but one that uses the tongue to connect the brain to the external signals. This device is being used to allow deep sea divers a 360 degree field of view and sonar-like information about their environment, and there is work beginning on an infra-red version for soldiers.

What does the future hold for computing? Why we need only look at the present as viewed from the lens of the past. Easy, right? [waxy]

Join the fight. Ban the bulb. Bruce Sterling has been on this kick for a while now.

Bless those people at NASA – no matter how much of a kicking their budgets take, they keep on dreaming real big. And they’re science fiction fans, too. How else would they have entertained the idea of building an antimatter engine to propel a manned mission to Mars? Apparently it would cost $250 million to manufacture enough antimatter to power the thing, but balanced against the hidden costs of normal rocketry solutions, that’s a pretty good deal. (Hat-tip to False Positives.)

We have a fairly good idea of how life on Earth evolved, whatever the creationists think. But is that the only way it could have possibly worked? The rapidly growing field of synthetic biology is working hard at trying to answer that very question, and to push the envelope of a technology whose ‘only limits…in a sense, were established 3.8 billion years ago when the first one-celled life came into being’. We’re a long way off from creating life from scratch, but the theorists are busy looking at ways we might someday be able to.