There’s plenty of licences floating around to facilitate the development of open source software, which is a relatively proven concept. The same doesn’t yet apply to hardware – but that could all change with the release of the TARS Open Hardware Licence, launched this week. Will this start to level the playing field of computer hardware, or is the open source idea not portable beyond the realms of code? [reBang]

Nanomachines – cutting edge ideas, right? Well, not really; Drexler was kicking the ideas around in the 70s, long before they were even vaguely practical. But the ancestry of nanotech concepts goes back further – 140 years, in fact, to a theoretical design for a molecular machine called Maxwell’s Demon, which has finally been built by a team at the University of Edinburgh. [gizmodo]

At least the industry is beginning to think so. We’re talking here diamonds that are fake only in that they’re manufactured rather than found: they’re the same substance as real diamond. And now they’re being graded using the same scale as found diamonds.

I know it’s not cool to admire Second Life any more, but this column from Warren Ellis illustrates so clearly what’s completely new and weird about a world infested by content freed from real-world constraints. [tomorrow elephant]

The Bacterial Orchestra is an art installation consisting of microphones, processors and speakers. The installation is divided up into cells, and each cell has a specific program for responding to sound picked up by its microphone and transforming it into sound it emits from its speakers. Cells that aren’t successful “die off” and are replaced by cells with a different program. Sounds really interesting: I’d particularly like to see what happens when you try to use it as an instrument. [wmmna]