Ways of searching for life on Mars are ten a penny, but here’s the latest suggestion, based on studies performed on rocks in Earth deserts. These rocks are covered with ‘desert varnish’, a patina of silica and other elements deposited on the rocks over time by wind and weather, trapping fragments of organic DNA as the layers are laid down. If we can find Martian rocks with a similar coating, a vigorous scraping of samples could yield evidence of life in the Red Planet’s past.

More storage space, more! The call for capacity increases in digital media shows little sign of abating, and the manufacturers are answering by developing ways of squeezing more bytes than ever before into a single unit. Seagate enters the fray by patenting a hard-drive that has a lubricant sealed into it, enabling the drive head to move faster across the platter surfaces, which are heated to improve capacity.

Plastics from crude oil fractions? Not for much longer, at least not in a financially viable way. Help is at hand for our plastic-hungry civilisations, however – Wisconsin researchers have found more efficient ways of making the same polymers used as the start-points for plastics using fructose (fruit sugar) as their raw material. It’s always been theoretically possible, but it’s amazing what shrinking profit margins will do for research into efficiency.

Geeks, coders and open-source evangelists the world over are no doubt cracking open magnums of Mountain Dew over the news that SCO, the makers of UNIX, have had their case against IBM thrown out by the courts. SCO claimed that Linux used ‘millions of lines’ of code lifted directly from Unix, but their case wasn’t helped by their refusal to tell the court exactly which lines they meant.

While most of the world obsesses over the fate of twenty two men and a leather sack of air somewhere in Germany, the Google visionaries have scored a goal in their book-scanning game. German publishers WBG have dropped their case against the Google mob, having been told by the Courts that the digital library project does not conflict with local copyright law. This may turn out to be a landmark ruling for the future of content digitisation.