If there’s not a band with that as their name, I think we can rest assured that there shortly will be. It’s well established that various species of fungus can consume things that other lifeforms cannot (plastic, aviation fuel and so forth), but now it appears that certain species of fungus can not only survive in but thrive on the heavy radiation in the graphite rods of the defunct Chernobyl power plant. I’m not too shocked, myself – if fungus can survive in a three-week old cup of coffee, a damaged nuclear plant must be a picnic. [BeyondTheBeyond]

Although it’s nowhere near the uncanny valley, the CB2 robot developed by engineers from Osaka University looks pretty scary to me. Sure, it may have been designed to simulate the behaviour of a human toddler and offer insight into developmental child psychology and the human learning process, and that’s a fine and worthy cause. But it still looks very weird.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to use social networking systems without being locked into one platform and bombarded with adverts? I sure think so – I might actually bother maintaining a social network profile in that situation, and get back all the friends I’ve lost through refusing to use MySpace. So I’m pinning some hopes on the success of the Appleseed Project, “an effort to create open source Social Networking software that is based on a distributed model.” [Warren Ellis, again]

Italian doctors have successfully created the world’s first biotech vagina. That is all. [Warren Ellis]

Over at Space.com, Stuart Atkinson is thinking about SETI, and wondering whether we’d actually recognise or understand a signal from an alien civilisation if we found one. After all, our concepts of meaning are pretty tied up in our own conception of the universe, and what is or isn’t possible – perhaps the lightshows of distant stellar and galactic events are themselves a form of communication.

George Dvorsky thinks we should keep looking, even though he’s skeptical of us ever detecting another sentient species. The trouble is that the Drake Equation doesn’t take into account all the factors that could derail a species before it makes the leap to interstellar civilisation – and the more we refine our hunt for ‘the others’, the more likely we are to realise how close we are to falling down before the first hurdle.