Recent studies have demonstrated that applying a light current to sleepers’ brains can improve memory, although it sounds like the jury is still out on why that’s so.

A company called Draganfly Innovations has released a self-stabilizing remote control helicopter with on-board wirelessly streaming video camera for $2,500. That’s not spare change, but neither is it beyond the reach of the amateur paparazzi. [engadget]

The space elevator is a wonderful vision of a new route to space – but every road to low Earth orbit has its hazards. One such obstacle to overcome is the huge amounts of radiation that the climbers and their passengers would be exposed to while passing through the van Allen belts, but (unsurprisingly) the engineers working on beanstalk projects are already taking this into account in their speculative designs. Of course, it’s different for those who travel by rocket, as they spend a fraction of the time in the hot zone – which might explain why there’s been no shortage of applicants to the Russian space tourism program.

Who says politics can’t be fun? The suits in Whitehall obviously feel they’re behind the pack on the computer gaming front, and are having a model UK population developed for them to play with in a simulation program, much like the classic game SimCity. This anonymous synthetic populace will enable them to study the effects policy decisions will have on the demographics affected by them. I wonder if they’ll discover that the general contentment of the virtual citizens increases if they’re left alone for a few days in a row?

Gone are the days when a handkerchief draped over the handset was sufficient to disguise your voice on clandestine phone calls. The USAF certainly feels the need for a more advanced method of changing the voices of its airmen, and is investing in the development of technologies that will not just conceal the identity of a speaker, but make him or her sound like another person entirely. This will be used in ‘deception campaign[s] against enemy forces’ – which doubtless means more than just ordering unwanted pizza to be delivered to terrorist leaders. But the street finds its own use for things, and we may end up in a world where even our voices can’t be trusted to tell the truth about who we are. That will probably suit terrorists just fine.