There’s a whole lot happening beyond the confines of this ball of rock we call home. Compared to us – even compared to our species – stars live a long time. But even stars die eventually, collapsing into pulsating red giants and shedding stellar mass before finally collapsing in on themselves. And if you zoom out another level, you find that galaxies like our own have acted as cannibals in the distant past, subsuming and assimilating huge swathes of other smaller galaxies and clusters. As above, so below, eh?

Via pretty much everywhere, even places that normally don’t mention science fiction, comes the news that the Department of Homeland Security have reformed ‘Sigma’, a conclave of well known science fiction writers (Bear, Niven, Pournelle, Andrews, Walker), to think up some brilliant new ideas to keep the US safe from terrorism. Um, OK. I love science fiction as much as anyone reading this blog, I’m sure, but I can’t see that having five authors thinking up neat ideas like a “brain-scanning skullcap that could tell agents what kind of explosive material a dog had picked up” is really the best answer to this particular problem.

The technological wings of the blogosphere are all of a flurry about the revealing of Microsoft’s new touch-based interface technology, known as ‘Surface’ – and from looking at the footage, it’s easy to see why. It looks a whole world more fun and friendly than mouse and keyboard. Futurismic essayist Jamais Cascio* believes that this sort of new interface will have it’s biggest impact not in the document-based applications that computers are used for, but in the ‘metaverse’ applications like augmented reality, where the more intuitive mechanism of hand gestures will enable greater control over large flows of data.

*Yeah, I know – we’ve not had an essay from Jamais or anyone else for a long time, thanks to ongoing technical issues. We’re still working hard on a new iteration of Futurismic which should be not just more enjoyable for you the reader, but easier for us to maintain and keep filled with quality content. Don’t think we’ve forgotten you – we’re just trying to fit it all in between our other commitments in the world outside the internet!

I think this is probably a front-runner for the “massive knee-jerk technophobic reaction by a major nation’s goverment” award for this week; there are reports that Russia has suspended the export of human tissue samples for fear that genetic material could be used to make biological weapons tuned specially to attack people with Russian DNA. Now, I’m not a genetic scientist (nor do I play one on television), but while it strikes me that such a thing is probably possible, it certainly doesn’t strike me as being very likely. But who knows? Maybe the new Mutually Assured Destruction scenarios will be based on biological weapons, not nuclear.

There’s a strange technological yin-yang to these two stories. First, scientists at Tel-Aviv University have discovered that artificial cultures of live neurons can be used to store data in the form of coordinated firing patterns in a similar manner to silicon chips. Second, an international team of boffins have started the Sensopac Project, a program intended to develop an ‘artificial cerebellum’, a device that will be installed in robots to enable them to move more like living creatures. Can anyone else spot a convergence of ideas happening here?