Far from being a euphemism for some obscure act of violence, an ‘Edinburgh Duck’ is in fact a wave-power generator designed in the 1970s. The old design is being revamped as a self-powered desalination device which its inventor hopes will benefit countries that have to rely on power-hungry desalination plants for their fresh water supplies. Whether the Duck can compete against these large-scale projects while staying affordable remains to be seen.

Well, the blogosphere is heaving today – and mostly with relief, it seems (but that could just be my partisan reading habits coming into play). Whichever way you voted, though, congratulations; the US is the biggest democracy on the face of the planet, and it’s great to see that the system can work the way it is supposed to. Now, if you can just make it plain to the people who decide such things that e-voting is not a mature enough technology to handle such an important process, you’ll be doing the whole planet another big favour.

Medical science is still a fair distance away from being able to simply grow replacement organs for patients in need of transplants, notwithstanding recent hyperbolic headlines. What can be done is to use cells from donor kidneys to grow more of themselves for use in ‘renal assist devices’ – special filter tubes used in dialysis machines that extend the life expectancy of renal failure patients by mimicking the processes of a real kidney more closely. The only problem is scaling up the technology to meet the potential demand while staying within FDA regulations.

Lunar missions take a lot of planning – there are a lot of eventualities to take into consideration. One such complication is the fact that the mass (and therefore the gravitational field) of the Moon isn’t distributed evenly. Rather than being a uniform density all across, our nearest neighbour is loaded with mass concentrations (aka ‘mascons’) – big lumps of matter that are significantly heavier than their surroundings, whose distortions of the gravitational field mean that low orbiting satellites can easily be pulled to their doom.

While the open source business model is in many ways an admirable thing, it might be possible to become a little too enamoured of it. This may well be what has happened with the founder of OpenHuman, who suggests that we all go public with the source code of our lives and bodies – his argument is that, thanks to Google, social networking and everything else, trying to maintain your privacy is a futile struggle anyway. For those who recoil at the notion of baring their entire existence online, lest it be spotted by a prospective employer, the services of new start-up ReputationDefender may be just the ticket.