No shortage of space related material in the blogosphere today, that’s for sure. First, the news that the design of Hubble’s replacement, the James Webb Telescope, is being tweaked to allow it to be serviced by remote drones while in orbit – hence (hopefully) avoiding the technical issues that have plagued the Hubble for the last year or so.

Next, Centauri Dreams reports on the discovery of a multi-planet star system that could throw the established theories of planet formation out of the window.

And there’s masses more, thanks to Universe Today hosting the 4th Carnival of Space blog carnival. If you don’t know what a blog carnival is, it’s a blog post that links to a whole load of other specially-written posts in the same subject area. It’s also a great way to kill a few hours!

Obviously Hitachi are interested in more than just tagging everything on the planet – they want to watch how your brain works, too. Their new brain-scanner, based on their optical topography technology, examines blood flow in the brain tissue to determine where the activity is taking place in real time – which is quite impressive for a control box and headset that add up to just over a kilogram in mass. The potential uses are manifold – but we can guess that the neuromarketing vultures will be all over it like flies once it hits the market.

The British love affair with cameras as a tool of law and order continues, with the announcement that traffic wardens in the city of Manchester will be fitted with hat-mounted web-cams to prevent people arguing against their parking fines.

In more surveillance-related news, Microsoft is developing software that may be able to identify individuals by examining the breadcrumb trail of their web-browsing history. I’ve done nothing wrong, though, so I have nothing to fear …

Another marvel of miniaturisation – or another thing for conspiracy theorists to worry about, perhaps. Hitachi have been showing off their new microscopic RFID chips, which at 0.002 inches square are small enough to be embedded in a piece of paper. How long before we have active circuitry that size? [BeyondTheBeyond]

It’s literally impossible for a healthy person to understand what’s going on in the mind of a schizophrenic, but a new training device offers the opportunity to experience a simulation of the hallucinatory episodes that a person undergoing a schizophrenic episode can experience. Although initially designed with the purpose of encouraging greater empathy in professionals who work with the mentally ill, I can’t help but wonder how long it will be before this sort of hardware makes it to street-level and gets repurposed as a form of recreation.