NASA’s Spirit rover has discovered levels of silica in the Martian soil that NASA claims is the best evidence so far that Mars once had liquid water on its surface. Don’t get me wrong – I’d love to think that Mars harboured life at one point, or at least had the potential to do so – but the ‘water on Mars’ meme seems to flip-flop every couple of months. Pretty soon, some boffin or another will explain away these silica levels. Then, a little further on, something new will crop up and it’ll be back to “OMG Mars had teh w3t!!!” Can’t we just get on with sending some sort of mission that will solve the debate conclusively, please?

A gang of Canadian physicists have created some reading material that could give you serious eyestrain. The tiny book, less than 0.1mm square, was made by etching letters onto 30 slices of polished silicon crystal using a focused ion beam. The book even has its own ISBN, and you can buy a limited signed edition for around $US 20,000 – but don’t forget to set some money aside for the electron microscope you’ll need to read it with.

You’ve probably heard before that a lot of the Western world’s technological waste, rather than being recycled, gets exported out to poorer countries where the laws are lax enough to allow it. What you may not know is that, thanks to the increasing scarcity of gold and copper, and the abundance of those metals in technology waste, there’s a boom of employment for residents of those countries willing to smash up the junk and pluck out the good parts, as this photo essay documents. The dark side to this recycling is that the unwanted stuff – toxic PCB substrate, for example – seeps into the water supplies. [SlashDot]

To say that self-esteem is worth having is a tautology, but new research indicates that people who are more confident as kids go on to make far better wages in their adult life than the less self-assured. Which bodes well for the teen CEO I mentioned yesterday, and probably explains why I earn about as much as the average burger flipper. Meh.

The membrane just got thinner. Virtual property mogul (and Second Life’s first Real Life millionaire) Anshe Chung has announced plans to open the first cross-platform financial exchange for virtual worlds, which will enable metaverse users to transfer their virtual finances between different synthetic economies. The inevitability of this announcement does nothing to derail the incredible implications – in a few short years we could have an economic ecosystem that deals entirely with the interchange of virtual goods, yet connected to the economy of meatspace. If that doesn’t tweak your science fiction jones, I dont know what does.