THE Mars Global Surveyor, back in 2000, detected gullies that some scientists believed were created by liquid water flowing on the surface in the recent history of the planet (for ‘recent’, read ‘last million years’). Gwendolyn Bart, a graduate student in planetary sciences at the University of Arizona, thinks that they may in fact be due to landslides caused by wind and asteroid strikes, having found evidence that the thoroughly water-free Lunar landscape has similar features.

What would big cities be without all the screaming neon? (OK, some would argue ‘vastly more tasteful’, but bear with me.) But all that neon burns a pretty packet of power in the name of advertising. Mule Lighting’s ‘LED-Flex’ could replace traditional neons, providing a 70% decrease in power consumption and increased versatility of use…after all, you can’t tie a neon tube in a knot.

In a fitting tribute to the memory of the recently departed SF luminary Octavia Butler, a charitable organisation has been set up in her name to fund scholarships for SF writers of colour to attend the famous Clarion writing workshops that helped her own career.

A joint UK-US team of researchers claim to have created a new type of organic polymer which could supercede silicon compounds as the standard material for making certain types of electronic system. The major edge it has over silicon is that it can be manufactured at low temperatures with little waste. It could also be ‘printed’ as a fluid using conventional inkjet technologies, putting an end to expensive and error-prone lithography techniques and enabling it to be used on flexible substrates. Maybe ‘electronic paper’ won’t be vapourware forever.

Scientists from the UK’s Norwich University have taken a novel approach to building nano-scale objects. They are using a plant virus as a scaffold on which to assemble iron-rich compounds into an electronically active particle that acts like a tiny capacitor.