No matter how many times I’ve read about it in fiction, the willingness of people to accept artificial pets as substitutes for the real thing never ceases to astonish me. At least Gupi the artificial guinea pig is a step up from tamagotchi.

People are starting to get quite excited about extrasolar planets – no surprise among the science fiction community, perhaps, but an interesting sea-change in a general population that seemed quite cynical about space just a few years ago. The news just keeps coming, too – the first primitive ‘mapping’ of an exoplanet’s surface has just been performed.

One person who’s less than bothered by it all is transhumanist philosopher Michael Anissimov, who points out that if we become cyborg beings with accelerated relative brain speeds, the subjective distances involved in interstellar travel will render it even more implausible and unappealing than it is today. And if you think the notion of mind uploading is so implausible as to render his argument worthless, just remember that not so long ago we’d have treated the idea of travelling to other planets with just the same sort of dismissal.

If you’re still hungry for genre fiction short stories that you can read online, you could do far worse than click on over to Subterranean Press, who have just updated their online magazine with new content from two big names: a super-short riff on the demotion of Pluto from planet status by hard-touring John Scalzi, and a new story from hot property Joe Hill (yes, that Joe Hill, son of Stephen King) that ties in with his bestselling novel Heart-Shaped Box.

As a blogger, sometimes you find a headline for an article that is so striking and descriptive that you can’t bear the thought of changing it. And so, ladies and gents, I give you:

“Anti-superbug weapon developed from wallaby milk.”

Bonza.

While the PR boom of the new year may have tailed off somewhat, newsworthy things are still happening in Second Life. The Amazon Web Services team have just set up their own island, complete with super sexy modern architecture, and the Nasdaq people are contemplating the idea of setting up the first stock exchange in a virtual space. Meanwhile, still gung-ho for the 3D internet but obviously frustrated with SL’s bugginess, IBM have been cheerfully developing their own software platform to use as a working environment. And last but not least, lawyers are investigating a German SL user who has allegedly been distributing child porn and paying for sex with avatars that look like children – so it seems even virtual apples have worms.