Anyone who tells you that quitting is an easy option has obviously never been a smoker. Help is at hand, however, with a new product joining the serried ranks of patches, gums and New Age quackery. The eCigarette looks (vaguely) like the real thing, even down to producing a smoke-like vapour when you draw on it – but it only delivers nicotine, without all the nasty chemicals that tobacco includes as part of the deal. Only time will tell how effective (or indeed popular) it will become. But hey, while our governments are busily banning things that are bad for our lungs, perhaps it’s time for them to admit that depleted uranium causes cancer?

One of the many hazards of dwelling off the surface of the Earth is the threat of radiation exposure – it has a tendancy to make a person ill, to say the least. However, scientists are working on a drug that could prevent radiation damage from occuring in bodily tissues; its expressed purpose is to make radiation therapies and medical treatments safer, but as Colony Worlds points out, if the agent is effective it could open up the currently deadly wastes of space to human habitation.

The poor old Hubble telescope has had a long old run, and is starting to show the strain. But never fear – NASA is busy working on its replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is set to launch in 2013. Not only three times the size, the JWST is loaded with technologies that weren’t even possible when the Hubble was put into orbit – which means people like me who are suckers for awesome images of deep space won’t have to do without.

A number of science fiction writers (David Brin being probably the best known of them) have written about the idea of ‘uplift‘ – sub-sentient animals raised to human (or even higher) levels of cognition by scientific means; the transhumanist movement is quite fond of it as a conceptual meme too. Which means science fiction and transhumanism can have a day of feeling vindicated; via Peter Watts, a science fiction author whose science qualifications are more than impeccable, comes the news that a team of Chinese scientists have not only discovered the gene that triggers production of a chemical intrinsic to human cognition, but managed to splice it into chimpanzees and observe the protein in question being produced. Or, in layman’s terms, we may have found a way to create chimps with human intelligence, which may throw an interesting light on Hiasl’s human rights case.

If you’re a writer, you probably spend a lot of time trying to work out what sort of work is going to impress a publisher. For those of you who write genre fiction, Andrew Wheeler of the SFBC (with his tongue somewhat in his cheek) offers one answer to that question:

“If there’s a book out there that can be honestly sold by a cover of a mostly-naked woman riding a dragon while a spaceship explodes in the background, I’d love to see it. (I bet I could sell a whole lot of them.)”