Here’s this week’s dose of cheerful futurism, in the form of the “Next Five in Five” report from IBM, which lists five innovations that the Big Blue crew believe will occur within the next five years. You’ll need to click through for the details, but here are the hooks:

• We will be able to access healthcare remotely, from just about anywhere in the world
• Real-time speech translation-once a vision only in science fiction-will become the norm
• There will be a 3-D Internet
• Technologies the size of a few atoms will address areas of environmental importance
• Our mobile phones will come close to reading our minds

Not really all that implausible, are they? Things move fast these days, and five years is a long time in technological terms. We’ll just have to wait and see, though. [FutureWire]

Worldchanging reports that Seattle is leading the way in innovative US urban planning by proposing a modification to building codes to legislate for more green spaces in the city; think green roofs and rain gardens. It’s a fine idea – any city could be improved by having more plant life, and it’ll all be good for the environment. Over here in the UK, however, a local authority is using a rather different approach to environmental issues in urban areas by scanning neighbourhoods with thermal imaging cameras and publishing the resulting maps on the web in the hope of naming and shaming households with poor energy efficiency.

Wandering the metaverse is all well and good, but it’s not the healthiest of activities – sitting in your swivel chair or hunched over your laptop for hours on end does not equate to the regimen of exercise a healthy person is supposed to engage in. But there’s good news for those who want to get more exercise without sacrificing precious in-world time –a device called the String Walker, which is a kind of podium interface with a scrolling surface that enables you to walk around in a virtual world by actually, y’know, walkingg. It’ll probably be a pricey piece of kit when (if?) it hits the market, but that’s no problem – you can just pay for it with your World of Warcraft credit card and earn extra game time in the process!

Evidently undeterred by their potential susceptibility to being hacked, scientists the world over are working hard to create viable quantum computing platforms. A Japanese team claim to have made progress towards creating controllably coupled qubits (which is even harder to achieve than it is to say quickly); a European group are proposing a system based in the interaction of laser light with metallic structures in a ring shape; and an Australian crew have developed a theory that implies it would be possible to make photons of light that behave as solid particles, which could lead to the cracking of hitherto insoluble quantum problems. It’s good to know that progress is marching on, even if the details are way over your head.

Breaking news – the University of Portsmouth (which would be my ‘alma mater’, had I actually, you know, bothered to finish my course) has announced the founding of the first degree-level education program in Securities Technology – stuff like encryption techniques, retinal scanning systems and so on. Apparantly there’s a gap in the market for qualified professionals in this line of work – though I’d have thought that the regular trickle of headlines about successful self-taught hackers would have counted as a demonstration that a degree isn’t the only badge of competance around.