A new report suggests that teens who match more than a few hours of television a day are more likely to perform poorly in their education, at the same time that another study claims that babies and toddlers are watching far more TV than is good for them. Now, I’m no friend of television (and I’m proud to have gone nearly eight years without owning one), but I’m always a bit skeptical of the direct correlations that these types of research draw from their results. It’s a cause and effect issue – is it the watching of TV that causes poor performance, or are those with lower academic aptitude more prone to find succour in television? Or are both phenomena in fact caused by socioeconomic issues? We’ll probably never know for sure – not while there’s a convenient piece of technology to blame for people’s problems.

While it’s too late to do anything but think of clever ways to clean up all the crap we’ve left floating around in orbit, it’s good to know that NASA have redesigned some components of their satellites so that they will burn up entirely on re-entry, rather than crashing into homes or livestock on the surface of the planet. Meanwhile, the upper boost stages of the Voyager and Pioneer launch rockets are headed slowly into deep space – with a cargo of Terran bacteria aboard. Reverse panspermia, anyone? And talking of rockets, you should go and watch thevideo clip of a NASA contractor’s new prototype methane engine being testedd – more noise and lightshow than a Disaster Area gig, with the added bonus of knowing that methane is a cheaper and safer fuel than the current options.

Here’s this week’s dose of cheerful futurism, in the form of the “Next Five in Five” report from IBM, which lists five innovations that the Big Blue crew believe will occur within the next five years. You’ll need to click through for the details, but here are the hooks:

• We will be able to access healthcare remotely, from just about anywhere in the world
• Real-time speech translation-once a vision only in science fiction-will become the norm
• There will be a 3-D Internet
• Technologies the size of a few atoms will address areas of environmental importance
• Our mobile phones will come close to reading our minds

Not really all that implausible, are they? Things move fast these days, and five years is a long time in technological terms. We’ll just have to wait and see, though. [FutureWire]

Worldchanging reports that Seattle is leading the way in innovative US urban planning by proposing a modification to building codes to legislate for more green spaces in the city; think green roofs and rain gardens. It’s a fine idea – any city could be improved by having more plant life, and it’ll all be good for the environment. Over here in the UK, however, a local authority is using a rather different approach to environmental issues in urban areas by scanning neighbourhoods with thermal imaging cameras and publishing the resulting maps on the web in the hope of naming and shaming households with poor energy efficiency.

Wandering the metaverse is all well and good, but it’s not the healthiest of activities – sitting in your swivel chair or hunched over your laptop for hours on end does not equate to the regimen of exercise a healthy person is supposed to engage in. But there’s good news for those who want to get more exercise without sacrificing precious in-world time –a device called the String Walker, which is a kind of podium interface with a scrolling surface that enables you to walk around in a virtual world by actually, y’know, walkingg. It’ll probably be a pricey piece of kit when (if?) it hits the market, but that’s no problem – you can just pay for it with your World of Warcraft credit card and earn extra game time in the process!