Harvard University and a group of other institutions have announced the launch of an ambitious project that realises the dream of biologist E. O. Wilson. The Encyclopedia of Life is to be a freely accessible Wikipedia-style web resource aiming to catalogue evry single living species on the face of the planet. Planned to be built over the next decade, and moderated by experts in the relevant topics, Wilson hopes it will become “the key tool that we need to inspire preservation of Earth’s biodiversity.” I can’t argue with that. I can, however, wonder how dated the wiki format will look in a decade – I hope they’re building it on a non-proprietory database.

The advertising industry is getting pretty desperate to keep our attention; there’s a lot of evidence that we’re becoming increasingly resistant to ads (after all, when did you last click on an Adsense square?), and more cities may follow the lead of Sao Paulo and ban billboards entirely. Until then, it’s the same old frantic war for your eyeball attention, and the lastest weapon is the Eyebox2 – a device that can track the attention of a number of people from up to ten meters away, hence providing feedback on the effectiveness of individual ads, or perhaps changing their content when attention starts to wane. There’s never been a better time to start up a street stall selling cheap sunglasses. [SmartMobs]

No matter how many times I’ve read about it in fiction, the willingness of people to accept artificial pets as substitutes for the real thing never ceases to astonish me. At least Gupi the artificial guinea pig is a step up from tamagotchi.

People are starting to get quite excited about extrasolar planets – no surprise among the science fiction community, perhaps, but an interesting sea-change in a general population that seemed quite cynical about space just a few years ago. The news just keeps coming, too – the first primitive ‘mapping’ of an exoplanet’s surface has just been performed.

One person who’s less than bothered by it all is transhumanist philosopher Michael Anissimov, who points out that if we become cyborg beings with accelerated relative brain speeds, the subjective distances involved in interstellar travel will render it even more implausible and unappealing than it is today. And if you think the notion of mind uploading is so implausible as to render his argument worthless, just remember that not so long ago we’d have treated the idea of travelling to other planets with just the same sort of dismissal.