Scarcely a week goes by in which we don’t hear about some new piece of science fictional gadgetry being added to the equipment of the world’s armed forces. What thos stories rarely bother to mention is what the soldiers themselves think of the new gadgets – and according to this article, US Army troops are distinctly underwhelmed by the ‘Land Warrior’ systems they’ve just been fitted out with. [SlashDot]

There I am, still smarting from the bitterly ironic revelation that George Orwell’s house has 32 CCTV cameras overlooking it, and then I read this: a new type of urban surveillance is being trialed in the UK, a flying drone that watches for ‘suspicious activity’ and then trails the potential perpetrator from 550 feet in the air, recording all the while. It may be time to commit to that often-considered move to Europe.

Ben Goertzel is the CEO of Novamente LLC, an artificial intelligence research company, and so he probably has a vested interest in claiming that a ‘Manhattan Project’-style effort could produce viable general AI in less than a decade. I’m no computer scientist (nor do I play one on television), so I’ll leave the plaudits or debunkings to the more qualified – but it’s interesting to read Goertzel citing his early interest in science fiction as an inspiration in his work. [AdvancedNanotechnology]

Here’s an interesting idea – using internet mapping applications plot the progress of infectious diseases like colds and flu. Looks like it’s still very much in its infancy, but some sort of geo-tagged sickness-wiki (a sicki?*) could have interesting applications for healthcare initiatives.

[*A brief trip to Google reveals that I may have just coined my first neologism. Yay me!]

One of the biggest challenges in future explorations of other planets is the processing and collating of the data gathered. A team at the University of Glasgow is looking at the problem well ahead of time, though, and have been running simulations of smart dust motes that could act as a distributed computer network as they spread across a planet’s surface on the wind. Elsewhere in the UK, the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory are also planning ahead, developing the principles of a magnetic plasma shield that could protect spacecraft (and their occupants) from cosmic radiation.