William McDonough’s proposed green skyscraper deliberately emulates a tree: it, “makes oxygen, distills water, produces energy and changes with the seasons.” Nothing in this design is impossible, it’s “state of the shelf,” (in other words, the technology exists but might be too expensive for practicality).

The Technology Review reports that systems for concentrating and harnessing solar power are becoming cheaper. Fresnel lenses and mirrors allow a solar plant to take up less real estate, and more efficient silicon wafers turn more of the captured sunlight into power. [slashdot]

In the light of recent problems with electronic voting machines, you’d think that promoting the idea of voting over the internet would be the last thing on anyone’s mind. However, there is a small minority of political futurists who think that is exactly the way the democratic world should be heading – as they say, the technology is already in place (with computers and set-top boxes in almost every home) and has been tested successfully in a number of real-world situations. There are understandable objections from the security experts, and it would be madness to roll out such a system before you made it bullet-proof and verifiable. But as our world becomes increasingly wired, a digital implementation of the democratic process seems an eventual inevitability – reality TV is laying the foundations right now.

The human stomach remains a medical mystery in many respects, which is a stumbling block for those who would develop ‘smart’ foods to improve health and wellbeing. So, what do you do when you have a system that you don’t fully understand? You build a model and run experiments on it, of course – which is exactly what a gang of UK biotech researchers have done. Their artificial stomach contains all the chemicals and enzymes to be found in the real thing, and mimics the contractions that occur during the digestion process. It can even simulate vomiting if required – which must be really popular with the lab support staff.

There are reports to the effect that Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin outfit performed a test launch at their spaceport in Texas yesterday, but that’s about all we know – the extent of the test and whether it was successful are still open questions that we’ll probably have to wait for some official statement to answer. One thing seems apparent, though – that the neighbours aren’t exactly enamoured of Bezos’ extremely tight-lipped approach to local relations. Apart from the ones who were bought out for undisclosed sums, of course …