The odds of finding habitable ‘exoplanets’ have been provisionally improved thanks to new research. It appears that Jupiter-sized planets may form much further out from their parent stars, and then migrate inwards to be stopped by a cushion or ‘dead zone’ of gas at closer ranges – which means that habitable planets are less likely to ‘crash and burn’ into their sun.

Hot on the heels of the Google geeks talking about how much they want to get some AI action, the firm Novamente plans to achieve human-level AI within six years, provided they get adequate funding of course. In the next year or so they plan to have an ‘autonomous intelligent infant’ interacting with a virtual world. Sounds a bit blue-sky, but I’ve got my fingers crossed anyway.

Astronomers have been mapping the Milky Way in a more detailed manner than ever before, and some surprising results have cropped up. For instance, the arms of the spiral aren’t distributed evenly, and they stretch out far further than was previously thought.

It looks like government control of the airwaves is about to become a much harder prospect. The Universal Software Radio Peripheral, or USRP, is an open-source device that can do virtually anything that involves the reception and transmission of radio signals – which means not just radio like you have in the kitchen over breakfast, but all kinds of TV, cell-phone signal, radar…pretty much any broadcast technology at all. All thanks to the magic of general purpose computing and some hardware trickery.

Quantum dots are of great interest to those working on new medical and biological technologies. The trouble is that most of them so far have been made of potentially toxic materials. Carbon quantum dots, however, are much safer for the human body, and share all the other useful properties, like luminescence when exposed to light, that make them a potential boon for medical science.