A friend of mine at secondary school had one of those not-quite paper-rounds, delivering one of those free rags that are ninety percent adverts to local homes. Suffice to say that, if his employers then had the technology and ruthlessness of this Australian leafleting outfit, he’d not have got away with his regular practice of delivering the twelve copies that were actually wanted and taking the rest to the local primary school for use in craft lessons.

The realities of the modern business world mean that there are folk who have to do almost everything on the road, and that’s been one of the driving forces behind the ballooning mobile technology industry. Here’s the newest addition to the itinerant executive’s tool-kit – a portable scanner that comes bundled with laptop software to allow content-keyword searching of scanned business cards, receipts, expense statements and pretty much any other document (real or virtual) that a business trip might produce. None of which is particularly new, but the integration of the features is a smart move that will probably pay off.

Biotech is showing the promise of solving a lot of problems that conventional technologies and methods struggle to deal with, especially in the field of medicine. A team of UK researchers are working on a method that uses a certain bacteria to ‘manufacture’ potential anti-cancer drugs that would be simply impossible to synthesise in a regular laboratory set-up. Why cook up new chemicals by hand, when you can get some little microbes to do the hard work for you?

NASA has announced the agenda for the forthcoming set of shuttle missions. Much like the vast majority of the space-geek blogosphere, I’m very pleased to hear that they are going to fix up the Hubble after all – to junk it would have been a tragedy (and probably a bad PR move to boot). And after all, they’re reusing the surviving part of the Deep Impact probe too. But you can’t please all the people all the time – Centauri Dreams is a bit put out by the absence of a launch for the New Worlds Imager project, which would use a ‘starshade’ to enable the detection of distant planetary systems down to planets the size of Earth.

Using the ocean to generate power is an old idea, but one that so far hasn’t spat out its ‘killer app’. Until now, perhaps – enter biomimetic ocean power. These are devices designed to react to ocean waves in the most effective and efficient way possible, by mimicking the form and motion of things that belong in that environment, like kelp and fish tails. Seriously – it sounds a little leftfield at first, but it looks like they’ve really thought this through.