David Beaty spent 10 years surveying remote parts of Earth for precious metals and another 12 years hunting for oil. Now he’s working for NASA, telling them what they’ll need to do to exploit the Moon. Apparently, “they’ll have to learn to live off the land, using local resources to meet their needs.”

They talk a good game, those Google people – even to the point of promising the currently unattainable. The top dogs have been addressing the European Zeitgeist conference in London, and Larry Page has come out and said that they want to use AI for search purposes, and that it could be only a few years away. I’d love this to be true – so much so that if I was an industry investor, I’d have my cheque-book out right now.

It’s important to keep an eye on your cholestorol, your heart rate, and pretty much everything else these days. That could become a lot easier when they roll out these subdermal nanobot-controlled medical displays, which the article admits are ‘a theoretical idea based on fact’. They’d probably get a lot more investment for the development stages if they pitched the idea of putting a TV in your wrist, though.

You don’t need a huge dish in a South American mountain range to discover new planets. Peter McCullough and his team have been using consumer-grade technology and distributed computing to watch distant stars, and they’ve lucked out by spotting an extrasolar planet of similar size to Jupiter without the use of any big observatories.

The dream of fusion power has been a long-held one, but it may be a step closer to becoming a reality. Researchers at General Atomics, a company based in San Diego, California, have discovered a way to make the magnetic containment fields used to hold the plasma in place less susceptible to rupture, which means that critical components will have to be replaced less often, making the financial overhgeads much smaller. There are hopes to install this new system in the prototype International Tokamak Experimental Reactor being built in France.