Well, look at that – a new byline on the Futurismic pages! Everyone say a nice warm hello to Jeremiah Tolbert, newly recruited to the Futurismic team as a blogger. Jeremiah’s credentials are impeccable, especially in comparison to my own. He’s a published genre fiction author and former co-editor of an online genre fiction magazine (The Fortean Bureau), an experienced blogger in his own right, and he also designed (as well as contributing stories to) the daily flash fiction site The Daily Cabal. I’m sure he’s going to be posting some great material, and he’ll do an admirable job of standing in for yours truly while I’m off at a course next week. Welcome aboard, Jeremiah!

Prosthetic extensions to replace or enhance damaged or aging human body parts are becoming not only more commonplace but far more advanced – even without the use of anything more complex than mechanics. Lisa Bufano’s dance routines are full of leaps and bounds thanks to her springy replacement feet, and if you can afford a set (and wait for him to make them) Dan Didrick’s X-Finger prosthesis provides the ability to grip to those who have lost their fingers – if you have $11m to spare, he’s in desperate need of investors, by the way. It turns out Futurismic even has a cyborg contributor – essayist and foresight consultant Jamais Cascio got BoingBoinged for this story about his new hi-tech hearing aids.

It turns out that little Enceladus isn’t the only moon around Saturn doing more than spinning quietly in its orbit. The Cassini probe reveals that Tethys and Dione are mimicking their brother and ejecting spumes of matter into space, which may be evidence of geological activity of some sort. Of course, we’ll not know for sure until we get a proper mission ot there to land on these bodies – so let’s hope Ad Astra’s new plasma rocket continues breaking records during testing procedures. For more local transport, though, Astrium’s new space tourism vehicle would be more suited – and the design looks pretty sexy, too.

Hands up who’d like a home that cut their utility bills by 90%? Yeah, me too – but being a low-earner in the UK, the chances of me ever owning my own home are next to nothing, unless I happen to stumble across a huge briefcase full of unmarked used bank-notes. Should that ever happen, though, I’ll be sure to drop the lot on buying something like Kingspan’s ecologically-sound ‘zero emission’ home, the first UK building to pass level 6 of the Code for Sustainable Homes. It actually looks pretty cool, too – though in a decade’s time it’ll probably be very dated indeed.