Outside of mass-consumption commercial interests, advanced technologies can be relied upon to have prosaic names that tell you exactly what they are. Hence, no illusions over the nature of the European Southern Observatory’s proposed ‘European Extremely Large Telescope’ – it will be a European telescope of ridiculously prodigious size, whose final design stages have just been funded and authorised.

Ever wondered why it is that so much of the technology we consider to be ubiquitous is so prone to malfunction after a short life-span? Here’s someone sympathetic to my cynical belief that broken gadgets are the best way to sell new ones.

If you want to process digital logic in a liquid environment – within a biological cell, for instance – electronics just won’t work. What you need is something that does the same job in a different way – like logic gates that are based on the concentrations of chemicals rather than the accumulation of voltages.

What a great and stirring piece of news the NASA moonbase announcement was – it had (and still has) the whole world talking about it. Which means that it may be the perfect smokescreen for the incumbent US Administration yanking the funding rug out from under the hugely important climate and earth science research that NASA performs, as well as robotic explorations of other planets.

Eugenics is a term that comes with a lot of baggage, but in light of our increasing ability to affect our genes, and those of our children, the time is drawing near for the ethics to be re-examined. Is it be morally wrong to abort a foetus diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome, for example? How about the opposite – is it wrong for parents with genetic defects, such as dwarfism or deafness, to use IVF to select the genes that carry those defects so that their child would have the same ones?