Marketers! Need a new location to place your adverts? Somewhere big? Somewhere watched by millions on television at certain times? Somewhere that associates your product with the cutting edge of science and technology? Maybe you’d be interested in buying ad space on Russian Soyuz rockets and their launch facilities – but don’t delay, there’s only so much surface to spare! A visit to the facility to check out what’s on offer will cost an additional $2000, though, so check your budget before making any serious plans.

How would you power electronic devices if you’re ‘off the grid’, like a soldier or aid worker? Batteries are cumbersome and wasteful, and solar panels aren’t very portable yet. Researchers at MIT believe the answer may be a tiny gas turbine engine, made from etched silicon wafers in the same manner as microchips. This is still conceptual vapourware at the moment, but MIT are nororious for building incredible projects, and the promised utility of this little device should ensure investment interest.

It’s pretty hard to spend any time on the web without stumbling across people mentioning open source software. Somewhat less frequent are mentions of open source hardware, but it may be that the Neuros OSD is one of the first of many. Neuros are selling ‘beta’ versions of their Linux-based digital media units, and offering cash bounties to the first people to successfully hack new features and utilities into them. The advocates would have us believe that this is how all hardware development will be done some day, but will the average consumer ever trust code and devices that have been made by ‘hobbyists and hackers’?

The ancient oriental board game Go is a thousand years older than chess, and is the focus of a number of artificial intellignece programmers for a number of reasons: it has an immense number of potential moves and outcomes; it is much harder to assess the outcome of a game from observing the state of the board halfway through; and a computer has never beaten a human master of the game. But they’re getting better all the time – especially a machine known as Crazy Stone that uses ‘Monte Carlo method’ algorithms to learn the most effective moves.

Sure, your country has civic CCTV systems to prevent crimes and help prosecute the people who commit them. But us lucky Brits, well, we’ve got one up on all of you for a change. You see, now we have CCTV systems that can shout at you when you are spotted commiting an act of disobedience. I feel safer already!