Bigelow Aerospace has some pretty nifty photos taken from the outside of their inflatable spacecraft showing the Earth far below.

Former PayPal founder Elon Musk announces that his Falcon 1 rocket launch is being delayed again. The launch window for the innovative rocket is going to be mid or late February as SpaceX checks over the rocket with a fine toothcomb.

Via one of the many online incarnations of John Scalzi comes news of a novel written entirely in mobile phone text messages. Part of me wants to shrug this off as a sure-to-flop gimmick; part of me wants lament the decline and cheapening of the written word. All of me wants to drink heavily.

In his excellent and fascinating book Synthetic Worlds, Edward Castronova talks a lot about the permeability of membranes between meatspace and virtual worlds. He was mostly talking from an economics point of view, but the analogy still stands for other forms of interchange. Especially when you hear that the membranes are now permeable both ways, with a proof-of-concept meatspace control panel that can control its virtual equivalent – and vice versa.

One company has developed a method for turning trash into ethanol without the pollution that is a side effect of trash incinerators. Assuming ethanol becomes a viable alternative to gasoline, this could be one of those benefits all around kind of ventures.