Never a group to pass over an interesting idea, no matter how costly or otherwise impractical, DARPA have been thinking about ways to keep a whole city and its environs under watch, 24/7. They rather like the idea of a huge robotic surveillance-panopticon blimp floating high above the target town – the trick will be making the entire hull of the airship work as a phased-array antenna. I’m not going to hold my breath.

Nowadays we cart around more digital data than ever before, and the consequences of it falling into the wrong hands are high. Hence the proliferation of security technologies like Nanoident’s fingerprint-locked smartcards, which rely on scanning the finger deeper than just the surface skin for a more accurate identification.

What if the visible universe was just a membrane embedded in a another universe, one that had an extra dimension? There would be thousands of tiny black holes, left over from the Big Bang, floating around in our solar system alone. It’s way beyond my education in science, but this ‘braneworld theory’, a counter to general relativity, is a serious idea being kicked around – serious enough that the Gamma-ray Large Space Telescope being launched next year will be used to look for evidence in support of it.

‘Stealth’ is becoming a popular word again, particularly in the military-tech world. Latest out of the R&D box is a radar system that can see through almost anything, yet that is virtually impossible to detect in action, thanks to some fancy shenanigans with bandwidths and so on. It will also be far better than conventional radar systems at spotting things that are either small or very nearby.

I often wish there was a way to let my computer know how angry I am without having to resort to physical assault. Soon, however, it may be able to detect my discontent from my furrowed brow and evil slitty eyes. A team of top techies are working on a computer system that can decode the emotions of a user by analysing facial expressions in much the same way as humans do instinctively. There may be certain computer-based pastimes where you feel the need to cover the camera, though.