The UK Ministry of Defence is tired of wasting time and money on Freedom-of-Information requests from UFO enthisiastss so it’s taking a leaf from the French copybook, and releasing all of its previously secret files on UFO sightings into the public domain. Which is all well and good, but they’ll probably still be badgered by people who are convinced that they’ve only released this material as a smoke-screen to cover the really interesting stuff …

Take a moment to think about how much of your time – at work and at home – is tied up in arranging things. Organising a meal out with friends, for example – you have to agree on a time everyone can meet, choose a restaurant that has a suitable menu, book the table, book a cab home afterwards … a whole lot of tedious  and interdependent little tasks. Charles Petrie of the Stanford Computer Science Department thinks we will start using ‘wizards’ – quasi-autonomous web-service software – to start doing these sorts of task for us, by enabling machines to negotiate witrh each other on our behalf. Sounds great from where I’m sitting. But what will happen when those programs make mistakes? Who would be legally responsible for unwanted bookings made by software error?

With NASA planning missions to explore the next planet along, they need to make sure they’ve covered every eventuality. Not just the obvious things, like how much fuel they’ll need or how much radiation an astronaut can be exposed to, but those tricky issues that no one ever wants to be first to bring up – like, what do you do if someone dies or becomes mortally ill en route to Mars? Ethical questions are tricky at the best of times, but when you factor in the isolated and resource-short environment of an interplanetary spacecraft, NASA has a whole philosophical minefield to pick their way through.

A little while back, Google announced their intentions to go ‘corporate green’, and start supplying a large chunk of their power needs through solar panels. The project isn’t done yet – in fact, there’s a long way to go – but you can see “artist’s impression” drawings of the planned alterations to the Googleplex, which seems to consist of covering the roofs and car-parks with photovoltaics. Of course, Google being Google, you can also see the plans in 3D with the relevant Google Earth download. I wonder how much extra traffic this story would need to generate to cancel out the increased proportion of clean energy?

Biotechnology and bioengineering have huge potential, but the costs involved have prohibited progress. Up until now, that is – all that may change with the invention of a $10 device with no moving parts that generates multiple copies of a single DNA strand more accurately and more quickly than the current lab-grade equipment, which could have the same effect on biotech that miniaturisation had on computing. [FuturePundit]