Space – big empty vacuum, nothing in it; a void, an absence of stuff. Right? Well, actually that’s wrong, there’s a very thin amount of gas everywhere. But weird things happen at the edge of the Earth’s magnetic field, where bubbles of superhot gas form and burst continuously, possibly due to the interaction of the solar wind and the magnetosphere.

No, not a flying saucer or black obelisk – think further away and much, much bigger. The Hubble telescope spotted what first appeared to be a supernova back in late February, but as time passed it kept getting brighter while emitting an unfamiliar spectrum of radiation. Cosmologists aren’t ruling out a supernova, but it doesn’t seem to fit the standards of the ones they’ve seen before. But just in case, may I be the first to welcome our new galactic overlords…

At long last, serious scientists are taking a proper hard look at ways to produce fuels without using mineral oil. Biodiesel is a popular choice, because the engines to use it in are well understood and widely available. A team at Iowa State University have a safe and efficient method that works in the lab, and are working to scale the process up to industrial levels.

Remember that story about the meteorite that struck Norway earlier this month, with ‘a force that rivalled the Hiroshima bomb’? Turns out that it maybe wasn’t quite that powerful at all; an astronomer got a little wrapped up in his own hyperbole. It was still a fairly big bang, though more like a ‘powerful conventional bomb’. What an anticlimax, eh?

‘Know your enemy’, Sun Tzu once said. And that goes for everyone, from emperors to executives – and now for sysops too. The University of Abertay in Dundee, Scotland, is starting the first Bachelor of Science Course in “Ethical Hacking and Countermeasures” at the beginning of the next academic year. Apparently they’ll use Home Office vetting procedures to ensure no nefarious villains sign up – I feel safer already.