Bio-med engineers at Yale have created an implantable system that can form and stabilise a network of blood vessels. This could potentially revolutionise tissue and nerve reconstruction surgery, which is dependent on effective oxygen delivery through fine cappillaries for success.

Those guys up in the ISS have all the best laughs. Not content with throwing out an old spacesuit loaded with comms gear a little while ago, now there is a plan for one of them to go outside and whack a golf ball into orbit with a gold plated 6-iron some time later this year.

Seems that space is becoming a premium off-planet as well as on. Bill Ailor, director of the US Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies, wants space-faring nations to instigate some sort of air-traffic control system before a major collision incident occurs.

Good news for the nearsighted! Ophthalmologists in Dallas are to start fitting patients with a new type of implanted contact lens. These collamer lenses work in conjuction with the patient’s natural lens, bending light to compensate for the blurriness of myopia.

NASA’s ‘Messenger’ probe has made its major trajectory correction, one that will see it fly-by Venus on its way to Mercury.