Yet another safety concern for the NASA mission planners – apparently the moon has seismic activity of inexplicable origin, manifesting as quakes that can last for up to ten minutes at a time. Better make those Fuller domes pretty strong and flexible.

Radar scans by Europe’s ‘Mars Express’ probe have detected what may be thin layers of water ice near to the polar cap deposits located previously.

The UK’s Bath University houses a project known as ‘RepRap’, short for ‘Replicating Rapid-Prototyper’. Basically, the idea is to produce a machine that can duplicate itself (and other industrial products) and then give away the resulting device under the GNU public licence – in other words create a von Neumann Universal Constructor.

DARPA is the branch of the Pentagon charged with keeping the US out in front of its competitors when it comes to technological superiority. They’ve come up with some pretty loopy ideas before, but the BBC are most unimpressed by their plans for insects implanted with micro-systems for control and surveillance.

It’s no news that technology and medicine are extending the average human life span. But it is astonishing to hear just how far some scientists think it could go; Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist from Cambridge University, believes the first person to live to 1,000 has already been born. I really must get a pension plan nailed down.