The human stomach remains a medical mystery in many respects, which is a stumbling block for those who would develop ‘smart’ foods to improve health and wellbeing. So, what do you do when you have a system that you don’t fully understand? You build a model and run experiments on it, of course – which is exactly what a gang of UK biotech researchers have done. Their artificial stomach contains all the chemicals and enzymes to be found in the real thing, and mimics the contractions that occur during the digestion process. It can even simulate vomiting if required – which must be really popular with the lab support staff.

There are reports to the effect that Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin outfit performed a test launch at their spaceport in Texas yesterday, but that’s about all we know – the extent of the test and whether it was successful are still open questions that we’ll probably have to wait for some official statement to answer. One thing seems apparent, though – that the neighbours aren’t exactly enamoured of Bezos’ extremely tight-lipped approach to local relations. Apart from the ones who were bought out for undisclosed sums, of course …

The space elevator is a wonderful vision of a new route to space – but every road to low Earth orbit has its hazards. One such obstacle to overcome is the huge amounts of radiation that the climbers and their passengers would be exposed to while passing through the van Allen belts, but (unsurprisingly) the engineers working on beanstalk projects are already taking this into account in their speculative designs. Of course, it’s different for those who travel by rocket, as they spend a fraction of the time in the hot zone – which might explain why there’s been no shortage of applicants to the Russian space tourism program.

Who says politics can’t be fun? The suits in Whitehall obviously feel they’re behind the pack on the computer gaming front, and are having a model UK population developed for them to play with in a simulation program, much like the classic game SimCity. This anonymous synthetic populace will enable them to study the effects policy decisions will have on the demographics affected by them. I wonder if they’ll discover that the general contentment of the virtual citizens increases if they’re left alone for a few days in a row?

Gone are the days when a handkerchief draped over the handset was sufficient to disguise your voice on clandestine phone calls. The USAF certainly feels the need for a more advanced method of changing the voices of its airmen, and is investing in the development of technologies that will not just conceal the identity of a speaker, but make him or her sound like another person entirely. This will be used in ‘deception campaign[s] against enemy forces’ – which doubtless means more than just ordering unwanted pizza to be delivered to terrorist leaders. But the street finds its own use for things, and we may end up in a world where even our voices can’t be trusted to tell the truth about who we are. That will probably suit terrorists just fine.