It looks like Second Life, home of the weird, just got a little bit weirder. The PR agency Centric have just found their island build taken over by a rogue corporation from another timeline that has been trying to develop an alien world into a human colony. No one seems entirely sure what that means, but Winfinity, the temporally displaced company in question, is offering a bounty of L$100k to the person who goes in, scopes the scene and brings back the best report of what’s going on. So dress your avatar up in your best enviro-suit, and get investigating – that’s a hefty prize.

The solar sail isn’t a new idea, especially not to anyone well read in science fiction. But even old ideas can be improved upon – like this new twist on the solar sail concept by a group of Finnish engineers that will make them cheaper, more efficient, and faster. And if you think that it sounds too complex to work, bear in mind we’ve already got satellites that can repair themselves and others. Many things are just within our grasp, if only we’d bother to reach.

In a rare display of innovative thinking, a UK school has decided that rather than battle against kids who prefer gadgets to textbooks, they’re going to let the gadgets become the textbooks, by using Sony PSPs as text readers to allow the kids to access their lesson materials. Wait for the ‘things were different in my day’ backlash … [SmartMobs]

The cyborgisation of the human continues apace, with news of a patent for a bionic foot that mimics the mechanics of the real thing, and the announcement of a prosthetic hand that is strong enough to crush a drinks can. Still no news about my hardwired brain-computer interface, though. Meh.

The old consensus in astonomy used to be that we’d only find terrestrial planets around stars much like our own sun. But as is the way of consesus, especially in astronomy, that view is changing, with more researchers saying that binary star systems are just as likely to have planet systems as singletons. Let’s just hope the governments of the world decide to spend more money on researching and (maybe) exploring them – as opposed to filling LEO with weapon systems.