Lockheed Martin are the proud winners of a NASA contract to build their proposed new Orion crew capsules. The contract is to the tune of $4billion or so, and aims for a first manned flight for 2014 with a Lunar mission by no later than 2020 – which still seems a long way off, but will probably be upon us before we have time to think.

Software is getting better and better at doing things that were thought to be the province of conscious intelligence – crossword puzzles, for example. A program called WebCrow has just beaten a number of human participants in a bilingual crossword challenge against the clock. WebCrow works by searching the web using terms from the puzzle clues, and trying words of the right length from the results as answers. This isn’t true artificial intelligence, granted, but it is being hailed as part of “a trend to use the web as a shallow source of human knowledge for artificial intelligence.”

Inkjet printing technology is finding a lot more uses than its inventors originally conceived of. The latest move in the field is to use ink based on carbon nanotubes, which enables off-the-shelf hardware to print out images and patterns with electrically conductive properties. While still currently in its infancy, these developments could open the door to cheaper and more efficient production methods for flexible devices (display screens, for example) or electronics embedded in fabrics.

The armed forces are always keen to leverage technologies that can save them the risk of putting human operatives into the field, and the US Air Force is no exception. Hence their stated interest in developing ‘cyber craft’ – discreet electronic entities that could rove the networks of the world seeking out data, keeping field operatives up to date with split second intelligence on the enemy. Of course, there will be risks associated with releasing such agents into cyberspace, the most obvious one being what will happen to them once their job is done. ‘Fire and forget’ technologies have rarely lived up to their name in the past.

Mention wikis, and most folk think instantly of Wikipedia, the controversial but undeniably popular and successful online user-built encyclopedia. However, the wiki model has a great deal of potential for other smaller group-collaboration projects, enabling the group to edit an online document without needing web authoring skills (and without having to bother their sysadmin too often). It seems that the business world is starting to wake up to wikis as a way of emptying their email inboxes of tedious back-and-forth, and once the commercial sector gets a whiff of a time-saving technology you can expect big take-up and development to follow.