There’s something fascinating and inherently futurismic about man made environments that subsume the ground on which they were once built. Valletta, Malta is a little like this, and Gunkanjima Island in Japan seems the archetype.

Israeli scientists have created a molecule that glows either blue or green given exposure to a specific sequence of chemicals and light. Moderately interesting, yes, although describing it as a lock seems a bit premature. [kurzweil]

The problem with Wikipedia, expressed diagramatically. This is an analysis I can’t disagree with. geekpress

I was pretty upset to hear that Hubble’s main imaging system is down again, possibly permanently – now where am I going to get fresh desktop wallpapers from? However, it seems that Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is shaping up well – Centauri Dreams explains how it uses microscopic shutters to milk far more from its 8 million pixels than that DSLR you got for Christmas can manage.

Second Life is going through a media blitz right now, drumming up public and media interest. Meanwhile, Google is quietly chugging along with the majority of tools and resources to create its own virtual world. The question is really whether or not Google is going to build it for us, or let the public develop its own toys on top of its base? [gamespy]