RFID is getting everywhere – it’s even in our hospitals. The VeriScan system enables medical staff to track medicines and patients’ medical records and other data through a palm-PC with an RFID reader incorporated. Which is good news, just like anything else that helps sick people get better, but the hackability of RFID means that it will probably be wide open to scams and flaws, just like any other system.

Distributed computing is helping to solve some of the more huge and intractable problems that modern science and technology throws up. If you need to do a huge amount of processing but don’t have access to a supercomputer with a lot of spare cycles, it’s ideal. So the brainwave of using distributed processing to produce and report software bug data is one of those ideas that probably has geeks and coders worldwide kicking themselves and saying ‘why didn’t *I* think of that?’

Just goes to show that we can still learn a lot from nature. Scientists in Santa Barbara have been making nanomaterials using a method they cribbed from a marine sponge. The sponge creates intricate lattices of glass as it grows. The versions that are being turned out in the labs are made of many different materials, and the semiconductor types could be a boon to solar cell technologies, where a big surface area in a small space is a definite bonus.

Planets form out of disks of dust and other matter that orbit stars, right? Well, yes, but not only like that, it appears. Research indicates that ‘planemos’ a hundredth of the size of the sun can form complete with disks of planet-matter orbiting them, allowing them to create miniature solar systems. Planemos are vagrant lumps of matter, sometimes failed stars, that drift around space unattached to a home system. Looks like they may have a little company after all.

The odds of finding habitable ‘exoplanets’ have been provisionally improved thanks to new research. It appears that Jupiter-sized planets may form much further out from their parent stars, and then migrate inwards to be stopped by a cushion or ‘dead zone’ of gas at closer ranges – which means that habitable planets are less likely to ‘crash and burn’ into their sun.