If you’re still hungry for genre fiction short stories that you can read online, you could do far worse than click on over to Subterranean Press, who have just updated their online magazine with new content from two big names: a super-short riff on the demotion of Pluto from planet status by hard-touring John Scalzi, and a new story from hot property Joe Hill (yes, that Joe Hill, son of Stephen King) that ties in with his bestselling novel Heart-Shaped Box.

As a blogger, sometimes you find a headline for an article that is so striking and descriptive that you can’t bear the thought of changing it. And so, ladies and gents, I give you:

“Anti-superbug weapon developed from wallaby milk.”

Bonza.

While the PR boom of the new year may have tailed off somewhat, newsworthy things are still happening in Second Life. The Amazon Web Services team have just set up their own island, complete with super sexy modern architecture, and the Nasdaq people are contemplating the idea of setting up the first stock exchange in a virtual space. Meanwhile, still gung-ho for the 3D internet but obviously frustrated with SL’s bugginess, IBM have been cheerfully developing their own software platform to use as a working environment. And last but not least, lawyers are investigating a German SL user who has allegedly been distributing child porn and paying for sex with avatars that look like children – so it seems even virtual apples have worms.

A new report suggests that teens who match more than a few hours of television a day are more likely to perform poorly in their education, at the same time that another study claims that babies and toddlers are watching far more TV than is good for them. Now, I’m no friend of television (and I’m proud to have gone nearly eight years without owning one), but I’m always a bit skeptical of the direct correlations that these types of research draw from their results. It’s a cause and effect issue – is it the watching of TV that causes poor performance, or are those with lower academic aptitude more prone to find succour in television? Or are both phenomena in fact caused by socioeconomic issues? We’ll probably never know for sure – not while there’s a convenient piece of technology to blame for people’s problems.

While it’s too late to do anything but think of clever ways to clean up all the crap we’ve left floating around in orbit, it’s good to know that NASA have redesigned some components of their satellites so that they will burn up entirely on re-entry, rather than crashing into homes or livestock on the surface of the planet. Meanwhile, the upper boost stages of the Voyager and Pioneer launch rockets are headed slowly into deep space – with a cargo of Terran bacteria aboard. Reverse panspermia, anyone? And talking of rockets, you should go and watch thevideo clip of a NASA contractor’s new prototype methane engine being testedd – more noise and lightshow than a Disaster Area gig, with the added bonus of knowing that methane is a cheaper and safer fuel than the current options.