The big debate over using nanotubes in the body hinges on one serious question – are they toxic to human cells or not? Research has provided conflicting results so far, with some tests showing them to be safe while others show them to be hazardous. It turns out that the methodology of the test itself may be behind these oppositional results – reproductions of the same experiments indicate that certain reactions may have produced what appeared to be a ‘toxic’ result without the nanotubes being to blame at all. Of course, there’s still no consensus on the toxicity issue, but at least they’re working towards it.

Occasionally, things that are deadly serious in the real world can sound more than a little silly on paper. An example, to my mind at least, are the proposed robotic urban combat drones being developed for the USAF. Why? Because apparently they will look like frisbees – armed and armoured frisbees, sure, but still remarkably like that thing your dog loves to grab out of the air. The drones will have pretty serious capabilities despite their comedy stylings, and will be tele-operated by soldiers on the ground as they hunt down insurgents.

We’ve created so many new words in the last few decades that we’ve had to invent a word to describe the invention of new words – neologism. The flux and change of language is a stumbling block for researchers trying to teach computers to understand human communication, so some of them wrote a piece of software that goes out and discovers the meaning of new words by itself. The program, aptly named ‘Zeitgeist’, crawls through Wikipedia looking for new words, and then examines the links to and from the page where the word is found to try and determine its meaning.

In the ongoing efforts to make the world a safer place, governments are turning to technology to replace fallible and inefficient human operatives. They’ll surely be interested in the efforts of Australian scientists to develop algorithms to detect “unusual behaviour in an open environment” in video surveillance footage. While the aim is basically laudable, one can’t help but wonder how error-prone these systems will be (given the poor success rates of facial recognition software here in the UK), and what misuse such technology might be put to by unscrupulous governments or corporations.