Wired is currently running Bruce Sterling’s final column, in which he takes a last wide-angle look at the future of the internet, and concludes that its ubiquity will make it practically invisible – the future will be just like now, only more so, and futurism is a dead scene in a world where anyone can publish their prognostications. At the risk of sounding a little selfish, I’m hoping that less column writing might mean more books forthcoming from Captain Bruce …

A new research paper hypothesises that certain strains of radiation-resistant microbes here on Earth may have inherited the characteristic from Martian antecedents, carried from the Red Planet on meteorites – and that the exchange may have been two-way. What a blow for Mars colony advocates – to discover that bacteria may have beaten us to it!

Sometimes it’s worth simply facing facts and admitting that nature often has the most elegant solutions to engineering problems, especially at microscopic scales. Australian scientist James Friend certainly thinks so; he’s trying to design tiny robots that can travel through the human body, ‘Fantastic Vovage‘-style, which is why he has cribbed the idea for a micromotor from something that does the job very effectively already – the E. coli bacterium.

New nuclear research in Europe, looking at the so-called ‘4th generation’ reactor designs, seems to promise a ‘closed’ fuel cycle that recycles almost all of the heavy isotopes produced by the initial fission of uranium, leading to a more sustainable form of nuclear power station. The only problem is that the technology to actually build these reactors is still decades in the future, which is why it is heartening to learn that India is looking into using thorium reactors to solve its energy needs.