Space.com is running a great interview with Scaled Composites’ head honcho Burt Rutan. The company are the creators of the prize winning SpaceShipOne, and are pushing hard to make commercial space tourism a reality. He talks about his long term visions and dreams for the company, plans to make SpaceShipTwo an enjoyable experience for customers by providing the room to enjoy zero gravity, and why he went with Richard Branson as an investor.

A team of computer scientists have written an article that calls for the establishing of a new field of study within and beyond their own discipline – they want to see a ‘science of the Web’ that will focus on the potentials and pitfalls of the platform, which has so far been largely been ignored by computer science academics. In the last fifteen years the Web has gone from an engineering curiosity to being a part of daily life for a large part of the world’s population – if that trend is to continue successfully, more research is called for.

In light of the recently foiled terrorist plot here in the UK, and the poorly thought-out implementation of precautions in response (they’re worried about liquids being mixed together as a weapon, but they’re pouring them all into big communal vats in the airports?), it’s both a relief and a frustration to find that there is already technology available that could detect the types of explosives alleged to be at the centre of the plot. A relief, because I don’t want to hear of more innocent people dying for the ideologies of others; a frustration, because the technology costs a fortune, takes a lot of time to use effectively, and throws up a lot of false positives.

The Japanese are making great strides in technologies to assist the disabled, and here is another example. The University of Electro-Communications has announced a prototype of an electric wheelchair whose motion can be controlled by the thought patterns of the user ‘with an 80% degree of accuracy’. If they could apply the same technology to shopping trolleys in supermarkets, the research funding would come flooding in.

Improbable though it may seem, there’s a real risk that we will someday discover a huge asteroid on a collision course with our planet. The obvious question here is also the important one, i.e. ‘what the hell could we do about it’? Ridiculous movie plots aside, a fair few ideas have been kicked around before, but there’s a new scientific paper just out that suggests the simplest and most effective way to stop a big lump of rock hitting the Earth would be to place another smaller rock in orbit to absorb the blow. Added bonus – we could mine it for all sorts of goodies useful for further space exploration, too.