In our efforts to understand the processes of life at cellular levels, we need to be able to observe how various materials move around inside living cells. A group of researchers have employed quantum dots – highly reflective nanoscale crystals – to make this possible, bonding them to a protein that regulates nerve tissue growth in rats. The dots are much brighter than the proteins, and so their movement can easily be tracked by microscope as they migrate around the interior of cells. This technique might be useful in the future for watching new drugs and medicines as they move inside the body.

The race is on to find new green ways of generating power, and methods of reducing the amount of rubbish we spread across the planet. A company called Geoplasma thinks it can do both at once, and is building a new power plant in Florida – one that vapourises landfill waste with plasma arcs to create a ‘rock-like material’ and methane gas. All the by-products have uses – the gas for power, the solid stuff for road-making, and the excess steam has been earmarked for a nearby juice processing plant. Which all sounds great, but the plant has its critics, who point to two similar setups that were forced to close down after failing emissions tests. We’ll have to wait and see.

A group from MIT’s Earth Sciences Laboratory have come up with a way to use ultrasound to search for fossil fuels, rather than the gender of unborn children. This technique will enable drilling to get at ‘tight gas’ and ‘tight oil’, which is inaccessible due to the type of fractured rock it is found in. This may not be really big news technology-wise, but the little I know about economics would seem to suggest that this sort of research wouldn’t be happening if the industry wasn’t starting to realise that supplies are running short.

Taxi drivers – a necessity of modern urban life, maybe, but also a source of great strife when in an unfamiliar city (as anyone who has travelled in Mexico will probably agree). Over here in Europe, there are plans afoot to eradicate the drivers from taxis, replacing them with robotic devices that will take us from A to B without overcharging or playing bad music at us. The ‘CityMobil’ project aims to “eliminate city drivers”, and the first test site for the technology will be at London’s Heathrow airport. The driverless car is an old idea that was promised us time and time again in the past – maybe climate change and peak oil will be the driving force that makes the dream a reality.

What would you do if an earthquake wrecked your hard drive? If you were Michael Stadler, you’d write an open-source program to make a peer-to-peer network of drives into a crude distributed earthquake monitoring system. The software has (unsurprisingly) proved very popular in Asia, and although the system doesn’t have the precise resolution of proper seismographs (and has missed or under-rated a few recent quakes) I imagine that, in the continuing absence of a working ‘official’ system, the inhabitants of Asia are working on the theory that anything is better than nothing.