The Cassini probe had a lucky break recently, taking advantage of an occultation of the Sun by Saturn to take some detailed pictures of the giant planet’s rings. Here’s one that shows the little icy moon of Enceladus inside the E ring that it gives rise to, and here’s another that shows what Cassini sees when it takes a look back home.

Devices to assist the elderly or disabled are a definite growth industry, as we turn to technology to empower those less fortunate than ourselves. Japanese researchers are trying to overcome one of the consequences – the increased number of motorised wheelchairs has brought with it an increase of accidents and collisions. To this end, they have equipped a wheelchair with a camera system that has an uninterrupted 360 degree field of vision. This ‘all-seeing eye’ can not only avoid collisions, but keep watch on the chair user’s wellbeing too.

We’ve been hearing a lot about prosthetics design in the last week. Here’s a new spin on the field – open source design and development. Iraq war veteran Jonathan Kuniholm lost a limb to an IED, and was fitted with the standard issue replacement. Meanwhile, his engineering colleagues were working hard to develop a more advanced model. In a spirit of great altruism, they realised that the best thing they could do would be to share the designs with the rest of the world so that more people could benefit from them, and the Open Prosthetics Project was born.

The folk at Philips are nothing if not diverse in their outlook. Having decided that clothing with lights embedded in it is a great idea, and lauching textiles with light-up logos as an opening salvo, they’re now turning to the world of haute couture. The ‘SKIN’ fashion range is comprised of high fashion garments with lights or colour-morphing textiles that react to environmental stimulus and the emotions of the wearer. Which is a lovely idea, very futuristic. It’s just a shame it all looks a bit like the wardrobe department of the old Buck Rogers series.

How can you add a new edge to the retail park experience? And how can you get into the pockets of the richest people there are? From the sound of discussions at the Space 2006 conference, the answer is to leverage the public sector into the space industry and start getting retail outlets into orbit, so that bored space tourists have somewhere to get a good cup of joe. Should the delights of retail therapy start to pale, they might be able to shuttle over to the Moon, where another NASA boffin proposes we should build an immense library and book repository. All great ideas, of course, but I’d be more pleased to see concrete solutions to actually getting people and materials up into space in the first place.