If you own any gadgets at all (and if you read Futurismic, I expect you probably do), you’ve probably suffered the ‘black screen of doom’ at least once, when your battery dies on you, leaving you stranded in a hi-tech world with a metaphorical limb missing. The good news is that scientists are looking at new ways to harvest energy for your tools while you’re on the move – using solar power, heat or motion to charge your batteries.

What should we do if we discover a 500m wide asteroid is on a collision course for Earth? That is the worst-case scenario that the new ‘Red Storm’ supercomputer is being used to solve, by simulating the effects of throwing nukes at the incoming boulder to try to destroy or deflect it. Bruce Willis was not available for comment.

There’s just too much carbon dioxide around at the moment. But we’ve just discovered something else it can do – CO2 subjected to extremely high pressures forms an amorphous glassy crystalline solid. It may be quite useful someday, but not until it can be made stable at normal conditions.

The space-geek blogosphere is abuzz with NASA’s release of this video of a meteoroid impacting the moon, back in early May this year. To be honest, the video isn’t that impressive…until you sit and think about scale and distance, realise how big an event it was, and how lucky we were to catch it.

Computer simulations have always held an inferior position to actual experimental results, as far as hardcore science is concerned. But this is no longer the case according to Eliot Fang, who, in a talk given to a US nuclear lab’s general meeting, denounced the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ dismissals of simulation, and claimed instead that simulation can show things that experiments miss.