More good news for exoplanet fans – researchers have announced their confirmation that perturbations of the light from the star Epsilon Eridani are, as predicted, caused by a planet. The body in question is one and a half times as massive as our own Jupiter and orbits its parent star in a little less than seven (Earth) years. The extra-exciting bit for space buffs is that next year we have a good chance of getting a closer look at it, using a whole selection of telescopes including the (recently rebooted) Hubble.

Yet another dubious alternative power source – this has been a good year for them so far. The latest arrival is a variation on the old ‘splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen and using them for combustion’ idea, allegedly from a company called Xogen. My skepticism is somewhat enhanced by the fact the the link to their ‘corporate site’ actually leads to a domain that’s up for sale. Obviously I’d be overjoyed to be proved wrong, but I’m confident I won’t be, at least not this century.

Hey, the new US National Space policy is out! Oh, you hadn’t heard? Well, that’s no surprise, because the incumbent administration didn’t make much of a song and dance over it, choosing instead to slip it out quietly last Friday (October 6th). Analysis seems to suggest it is a fairly hawkish piece of work, which is unsurprising. The telling parts are the ones that lay out the classic “don’t tread on me” attitude – for example: “Proposed arms control agreements or restrictions must not impair the rights of the United States to conduce research, development, testing and operations or other activities in space for U.S. national interests.” Plenty of scope for ‘creative interpretation’ in there.

There’s been a fair few ‘mind-controlled computer’ stories in the last year or so. This latest one is unique in that it features the first teenaged test subject; the young epileptic has a hardwired grid of electrodes in his brain that gather data in realtime as his brain functions, in the hope of finding the area where his seizures were triggered from. Somewhat of bored for waiting for an opportune seizure for them to measure, they reprogrammed a computer to run simple Space Invaders-style computer games and got the kid to play them using just his thoughts for triggering the controls. Odds on, he’ll soon be clamouring for an upgrade to full World of Warcraft access…