China imposed the death penalty on at least 1,700 prisoners in 2005, most by firing squad. To help smaller jurisdictions perform lethal injections instead, they use mobile execution chambers, basically RVs with sodium pentothol dispensers. Critics claim that China is pushing lethal injection because it makes organ harvesting easier.

Unperturbed by developments across the world aimed at producing petaflop computing, the IBM boffins have set a new performance record by running Blue Gene at a steady rate of over 200 Teraflops (trillions of floating-point operations per second). That’s powerful enough to run simulations of quantum behaviour at an atomic level, by the way – useful for checking the reliability of your nuclear stockpile.

It’s impressive stuff, DNA – after all, it manages to build one of the most complex machine systems there is (us) from nothing but a set of instructions and some basic raw materials. But there is interest in using DNA to build electronic and mechanical nano-devices as well, by exploiting the plug-and-play functions of the proteins to assemble non-biological structures, like transistors or miniature geartrains. It’s early days yet, but the field is growing, so we can expect more developments to come down the pipeline soon.

Neural networks made from actual brain cells (rather than simulations of them) could have all sorts of uses. But they’ve always been a bit tricky to make, so a team at Tel Aviv University in Israel have been using nanotubes on a quartz substrate to coax rat neurons into regular interconnected lattices of cell clusters. These networks survive much longer than unordered ones, so we’re inching towards biosensor technology.

There’s a problem with Hubble – one of its major instruments, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, has stopped working. It’s thought that it’s a glitch produced by a cosmic ray hitting a chip and scrambling it, or a small power supply component popping before its redundancy date – a reboot should unearth the issue.