Just to prove that us Brits aren’t behind the curve in the “giving it away for nothing” stakes, I’d like to direct you to T3A Space, the website of TTA Press (publishers of Interzone, the UK’s longest running science fiction magazine), where you will find Jack Mangan’s BFA-longlisted story, “The Unsolvable Deathtrap” available to read in full, for free – and there’ll be more like that in months to come, too.

Oh, you need more? Well, in that case I recommend you sign up for Hub Magazine, a weekly free genre fiction magazine that gets delivered as a PDF to your email inbox. The ultimate in easy access – you don’t even need to click through to a bookmark.

[Disclosure: I am Assistant Reviews Editor for Interzone, and have contributed non-fiction pieces to Hub – but I was a subscriber to both long before they started giving me work to do!]

Robotic hands have always had trouble with picking things up. Or to be more precise, picking things up without damaging them – what is natural and easy to most humans is pretty hard to reproduce mechanically. Japanese company Squse seem to have the right idea, though; their new design of robotic hand uses ‘air muscles’ that enable it to perform delicate tasks, like picking up an egg witrhout breaking it. Once this technology gets cheap enough, I can see the sex-toy industry plunging deep into the Uncanny Valley … [Engadget]

Foresight consultant and Futurismic contributor Jamais Cascio has been busy, along with other like-minded folk, working on a project that attempts to examine the implications of the information and media landscape of the near-future – it’s called The Metaverse Roadmap Overview, and it’s available now. Jamais describes it as “the first attempt to synthesize current and emerging social, economic and technological trends around virtual worlds, immersive networks, and ubiquitous information.” Kind of like coming at science fiction from the other direction, really.

Someone at the Independent is worried that SETI could be a risky business – what if looking for alien civilisations is an open invitation for them to wipe us out? George Dvorsky takes a more rational viewpoint, namely that if aliens wanted to destroy us, they would have done so already, ergo SETI is safe (if pointless).

At least we’re a little closer to dicovering the truth behind the Tunguska event, as an Italian team have discovered what they believe to be the impact crater of the asteroid that caused it – as opposed to the crashed flying saucer that has been posited by others. But who knows – maybe we really were visited, or even created, by an alien race – one that saw fit to scribble graffiti in our DNA?

NASA has laid out its plans for making the ISS available to governmental and commercial research, once the station is completed (hopefully) in 2010. The trouble is, no one is in a great rush to sign up – the incredible cost of getting equipment and researchers to orbit and back is acting as a serious deterrent. It’s a given that we could do with finding a way to make the weight-to-orbit cost of space missions come down – which is why it is to be hoped that Liftport manage to stay in business and start work on their dream of the space elevator. If you think that’s too science fictional to work, then the Mach-Lorentz Thruster will really flip you out – it could theoretically fly four round-trips to the Moon in a day, provided the theory it’s based on isn’t completely wrong. Maybe we’d be better off sticking to Armadillo Aerospace’s modular launch vehicles.