Imagine the embarrassment – you step out onto the boardwalk at your nearest beach hangout, looking fly in your shorts and ironic-slogan T-shirt, only to realise that the colour of the lenses in your shades are so last month it’s painful, and everyone is having a good laugh at your major lack of cred. Now breathe in relief, as you discover that this may never be a problem in the future – even if these ‘smart sunglasses’ are being developed for more practical purposes.

I’ve mentioned before that the UK is the most watched-over nation in the world, with something like one camera for every fourteen people. So it comes as a refief to me to hear a voice of sanity from a group of researchers warning the UK government that the feeds from surveillance cameras need to made publicly accessible in order for us to avoid becoming the Britain that George Orwell warned us about. This is especially interesting in that it chimes with the basic premise of an intriguing non-fiction book called The Transparent Society by David Brin, a name that should be familiar to science fiction readers.

Ray Bradbury is a name well known to science fiction fans and readers of all other types as the writer of numerous well-loved books and short stories. SciFi Weekly has an interview with Bradbury, in which he not only repeats his claim that Fahrenheit 451 is the only work of science fiction he’s ever written, but that there are actually two Ray Bradburys inhabiting the one body …

We’re still a long way from a working space elevator, but the necessary components are being developed in a piecemeal fashion. For example, an ESA project called the second Young Engineer’s Satellite (YES2) is set to launch in May of this year, with part of its mission involving the deployment of a 30km tether – which will be the longest artificial construct ever deployed in space.

Extending the human lifespan is a long-held dream of science, but there have been few concrete methods for retarding the ageing process so far. The latest suggestion from Oxford University here in the UK is that food fortified with deuterium, the ‘heavy’ isotope of hydrogen, might strengthen the chemical bonds in the cells of our bodies and give us longer healthier lives in the process. Other scientists in the field are not so enthusiastic about the idea, so aspiring transhumanists may wish to wait for further research before changing their diet.