Good news for ladies (and those of us who look like easy meat) who have to travel through the rougher neighbourhoods of the world – you can scrap that unfinished disposable camera hack. Why carry a crude and likely ineffective homemade taser when you can slip on a stylish waterproof jacket that will deliver 80,00 volts into anyone who touches you against your will? Personal security has never looked so fresh!

If you love science fiction or space exploration (or both), you’ve probably encountered the Fermi Paradox – to paraphrase crudely, if there’s alien life out there, why haven’t we met any yet? Paul Gilster of Centauri Dreams posts a newly proposed solution based on economics, and then rebutts it with a slightly more optimistic (if stunningly far-sighted) response of his own. Who’d have thought there could be an upside to your home star dying?

So many different levels of network! Internet, WAN, LAN … and now BAN, ‘Body Area Network’. That’s the idea behind a wearable PDA concept currently in development, designed to allow you to transfer files and data to compatible devices merely by touching them. The cyberpunk-chunky aesthetics may not be to everyone’s taste, but I rather like the look myself.

Researchers at Cornell University have created a robot that they claim is conscious, albeit in a very limited fashion. While it’s unlikely to turn Buddhist or torment itself with existentialism, it does ‘discover itself’ – rather than being programmed with a rigid model of its own function and of the world around it, it learns about its locomotive abilities and the terrain it is placed on with a trial-and-error approach that enables it to overcome new obstacles – and the amputation of one of its limbs. I, for one, welcome an old memetic catchphrase …

We’ve had our fair share of RFID passport hype over here in the UK – you know the stuff, how it’s safe, secure, necessary and so on. Well, we can scratch safe and secure off the list, just as predicted by any number of security tech experts. A journalist and his 1337 h4Xx0r contact managed to strip out all the personal data contained on a UK passport chip, in a mere 48 hours starting from scratch – time to stock up on tin foil.